Le Monde fait d'Assange son “homme de l’année”

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Le Monde fait d'Assange son “homme de l’année”

Contrastant heureusement avec le choix de Time pour “l’homme de l’année”, le journal français Le Monde a choisi Julian Assange. Ce 24 décembre 2010, le quotidien français s’explique de son choix.

Le 15 décembre 2010, les lecteurs du Monde avait sélectionné Assange par 11.948 votes sur 21.245, contre 4.738 pour le Prixd Nobel Liu Xiaobo et 1.455 pour Zuckerberg, “l’homme de l’année” de Time.

L’occasion est bonne de rappeler quelques arguments contre le choix de Time, excellemment développés par Jillian York, pour Aljazzeera.com le 16 décembre 2010.

«There is certainly plenty of criticism to levy at TIME’s choice of Zuckerberg. For starters, and despite Facebook’s high numbers around the globe, Zuckerberg’s attitudes toward how people should be using Facebook are often Western-centric at best, dangerous for users at worst.

»Take, for example, the platform's policy that users must sign up with their real names, a policy that’s clearly a result of Zuckerberg’s idea that having more than one identity is “an example of a lack of integrity”.

»That policy might work fine for some users, but for others, particularly those living under authoritarian regimes, such "transparency," as Zuckerberg might call it, can be life-threatening. And yet, most of the world still wants to use Facebook: to connect with friends and loved ones, and increasingly, for activism.

»Still, some Zuckerberg-designed policies are especially threatening to activists. Just ask the moderators of an Egyptian anti-torture group hosted on Facebook: Two weeks ago, their 400,000-strong group was booted from the platform because its administrator was using a pseudonym.

»While Zuckerberg would undoubtedly defend the policy on the basis that said administrator “lacked integrity,”’ the truth is that he lacked a guarantee of safety if his real name was revealed.

»Other issues with the social networking site affect a larger swath of users, such as the October 2010 revelation that some of the site’s third-party applications were violating Facebook’s terms by sharing information with advertisers that could be used to identify individual users, or the brouhaha that happened earlier this year when Facebook changed users' default privacy settings.

»Of course, for many the surprise is not so much that Zuckerberg was given the award, but that runner-up Julian Assange was not.

»Assange is undoubtedly the man of the moment, and in a sense, the whole year; though WikiLeaks' latest release of Embassy cables has attracted a swarm of media attention, earlier releases of the Iraqi Collateral Murder video and the Afghan war logs made a huge public impact.

»Up until this week, Assange seemed like a shoe-in for the award. He received by far the most votes in TIME's user poll, coming in just over 382,026 (compared to Zuckerberg’s mere 18,353 votes).

»TIME, for its part, has been clear that the Person of the Year is less an award and more recognition of a person or persons who have "done the most to influence events of the year.”

»The magazine readily admits that their editors reserve the right to disagree with the user vote, but with the US and other governments hot on Julian Assange's tail, many are speculating that the decision was a political one.

»Though direct government pressure seems unlikely (but not impossible), the idea that TIME chose cuddly Zuckerberg over international man of mystery Assange in order to appease an increasingly belligerent US government is entirely feasible.

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