Mark Belinsky
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Mark Belinsky is Founder and President of Digital Democracy, a non-profit empowering marginalized groups through innovative technology solutions.

His family fled the Soviet Union as refugees and their experience informs and inspires his work training grassroots groups around the world to in protecting their human rights.

Mark has lectured at Harvard, Columbia, NYU and presented at conferences worldwide on the use of social media and technology to connect local voices and address crisis. He is also a founder of New Words Media, a strategic media firm based in New York and a founder, and board-member of Bem, a youth action center in Armenia that uses art and technology to support emerging civil society. He has produced media strategies and directed documentary films in the post-Soviet, USA and Asia.

Blog Entries by Mark Belinsky

This Can Get Mark Zuckerberg Arrested

6 Comments | Posted October 31, 2011 | 16:43:06 (EST)

Mark Zuckerberg faces 15 brutal years in a Thai prison.

According to the Computer Crimes Act of Thailand, a website owner is responsible for anything written on their site, not just the actual author of the content. So if anyone posts anything on Facebook that is considered illegal in...

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Getting Rid of my iPhone

Posted August 8, 2011 | 02:18:41 (EST)

When angry birds has access to my entire contact list, it's time to reconsider how great my iPhone is. Why does this extremely popular game have unprecedented access to my personal information? Well, I don't know. I never explicitly said it was ok, but in the current technology reality we...

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Killing Code Can Kill People

Posted July 11, 2011 | 16:25:29 (EST)

How do you effectively document human rights atrocities and not get caught? This is an extremely difficult problem, one that takes experience, ingenuity, and, often unfortunately, trial and error. The consequences can be devastating, but new technologies expand the options for creative people who are trying to make a difference...

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Your Kid's a Weiner

Posted July 3, 2011 | 21:01:11 (EST)

Watch where you point your finger. Your kid has probably sent or received a sext today.

The accusations that led to Anthony Weiner's resigning were upsetting insofar as this was a teachable moment. Instead it became a media circus. Why not have a larger discussion about the serious issues surrounding...

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France Tries to Conquer the Internet

Posted May 24, 2011 | 23:08:14 (EST)

My friend Jiew might go to jail for 70 years because of her website. She runs an online publication in Thailand. Unfortunately, someone made a comment on an article and it badmouthed their king, which is illegal there. Despite deleting it soon after, she was indicted under the new Internet...

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Disaster Preparation Meets Earth Hour

Posted March 28, 2011 | 16:15:49 (EST)

What if the government did Earth Hour and turned off all the lights for an hour? Millions of people all around the world made the commitment and turned off their lights at 8:30 on March 26. It's really an astonishing fact something that would have been much harder to do...

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Learning From Japan's Disaster

Posted March 21, 2011 | 16:13:15 (EST)

During the 2007 Virginia Tech campus shooting, students and witnesses desperately tried to send text messages to 911. Local dispatchers never received them because their systems only take voice calls. As technology rapidly changes, what lessons can be learned from tragic situations like the earthquake and tsunami that hit Japan,...

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Social Media to Prevent Hate Media

Posted January 17, 2011 | 16:12:58 (EST)

George Orwell wrote "history is written by the winners," and while this has been the case in many places, it has certainly not held true for Israel. After the war of independence established the state of Israel, it has continued to fight for legitimacy as a state.

Media has been...

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Horrified by Schools That Give Every Student an iPad

Posted January 5, 2011 | 12:32:20 (EST)

I've recently been traveling around the world with only an iPad instead of my MacBook Pro to see how it will hold up to an actual computer and whether I could do all of my normal crushing workload on it. It's been amazing how much I get done; after all,...

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