This informative book cleaves somewhat narrowly to a handful of individuals and political activities in three very different, if generally authoritarian, regimes with restive online populations. As in Egypt in 2011, Parker stresses, online communities of “netizens” are hardly “virtual” if they translate into successful calls to public assembly, spur demands for reform, and produce a sense of common cause and action. She takes as her guides some leading bloggers: China’s dissident journalist “Michael Anti” Cuba’s Laritza Diversent, Reinaldo Escobar, and Yaremis Flores and Russia’s attorney-activist Alexey Navalny. This communication is having a decisive effect, Parker argues, on counteracting the misinformation, alienation, apathy, and self-censorship relied upon by authoritarian regimes. Despite the varied systems of censorship she details, there remain in each country ingenious avenues for shoring up the Internet’s free-flow of information. Parker, a former Wall Street Journal columnist and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, draws on interviews with dissident bloggers in China, Russia, and Cuba to measure the impact of the Internet on the growth of a public presence for democratic opposition.
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