Google's Orkut captivates Brazilians
By Seth Kugel The New York Times
MONDAY, APRIL 10, 2006
RIO DE JANEIRO Ask Internet users in the United States what they think of Orkut, the two-year-old social networking service owned by Google, and you may get a blank stare. But pronounce it "or-COO-tchie," as they do in Portuguese, and watch faces light up.
"We were just talking about it!" said Suellen Monteiro, approached by a reporter while she was chatting with friends at a bar here in Rio. The topic was the guy whom 18-year-old Aline Makray had met over the weekend at a Brazilian funk dance, who had since found her on Orkut and asked her to join his network.
Orkut, the invention of a Turkish- born Google software engineer named Orkut Buyukkokten, never really caught on in the United States, where MySpace and Friendster rule teenage cyberspace. But it is nothing short of a cultural phenomenon in Brazil.
About 11 million of Orkut's more than 15 million users are registered as living in Brazil - a remarkable figure, given that studies have estimated that only about 12 million Brazilians use the Internet from home.
Expect Brazilian Portuguese dictionaries to add "orkut" to future editions. O Globo, Rio's biggest daily newspaper, refers to it without further explanation. And the Brazilian media routinely measure the popularity of music groups and actors by the number of user communities dedicated to them on Orkut.
"Surto," a popular comedic play showing in Rio, is peppered with references to Orkut. And the site's jargon has entered the Brazilian lexicon, most notably the "scrap" (pronounced "SCRA- pee"), a note that one user leaves in another's virtual scrapbook for everyone - notably, jealous boyfriends and girlfriends and curious suitors - to see.
But the sheer popularity of Orkut, which people can join by invitation only, has had unexpected consequences. Almost as soon as Brazilians started taking over Orkut in 2004 - and long before April 2005, when Google made it available in Portuguese - English-speaking users formed virulently anti-Brazilian communities like "Too Many Brazilians on Orkut."
More darkly, Orkut's success has made it the most popular vehicle for child pornographers, pedophiles and racist groups, according to Brazilian prosecutors and nonprofit groups. Hatemongering on Orkut has been decried in the United States and elsewhere, but it is in Brazil that the biggest effort is under way to halt the problem and confront Google's seemingly tight- lipped attitude.
SaferNet Brasil, a nongovernment organization founded late last year, tracks instances of human rights violations on Orkut - many forms of racist speech are outlawed in Brazil- and has publicized illegal activity on the site.
The president of SaferNet, Thiago Nunes de Oliveira, a professor of cyberlaw at the Catholic University of Salvador, said the problem had exploded in the past few months. "In 45 days of work, we identified 5,000 people who were using the Internet, and principally Orkut, to distribute images of explicit sex with children," he said. And that was in addition to the racists, neo-Nazis and other hate groups the organization found.
In February, after several failed attempts to contact Google's Brazil office, Nunes de Oliveira said, SaferNet Brasil filed a complaint with federal prosecutors in São Paulo. Prosecutors summoned Google's Brazilian sales staff to a meeting on March 10 and asked them for help identifying users breaking Brazilian human rights laws.
Google declined a reporter's requests for a direct interview with Buyukkokten, but a spokeswoman forwarded some of Buyukkokten's responses by e- mail. The Brazilian office, he said, handles ad sales and does not even work with Orkut, which is not revenue-producing. "Orkut prohibits illegal activity (such as child pornography) as well as hate speech and advocating violence," he wrote. "We will remove such content from Orkut when we are notified."
But Nunes de Oliveira said removing the content was not what the group was asking for, decrying "the lack of cooperation by Google in identifying those users." He also worried that Google was not archiving evidence of crimes as it deleted offending pages.
Prosecutors have asked Brazilian judges to order Google to turn over information on users who commit crimes. Google has agreed to send a lawyer to Brazil for a meeting in mid-May.
Buyukkokten wrote in one e-mail message that Google would cooperate with the authorities, but he did not specify whether it would provide logs allowing users to be traced by their Internet address, as prosecutors have asked. A spokeswoman for Google, Debbie Frost, said by e-mail that in four to six weeks, Orkut would deploy a tool that would "better identify and remove content that violates our terms of use."
In general, though, Orkut's fans seem undisturbed by illegal activity on the site, with most of those interviewed saying they had never come across it. They were more interested, they said, in finding old classmates and friends, one of the site's most lauded abilities. Schools, workplaces, even residential streets have "communities" joined by people who have studied, worked or lived there.
And everyone has stories of romance foiled by a telltale posting. Ms. Makray once found the page of a man who had tried to pick her up in a club. "He hadn't told me that he had children or that he was married," she said. "I discovered it on Orkut."
Erika Laun, 23, said she checked Orkut every day from work to keep an eye on her boyfriend. "When we were first going out," she said, "a girl who liked him was always sending messages and making fun of the messages that I sent him." The rival's sister, whom he didn't even know, helped out, sending messages like "Hey big boy, love you, 1,000 kisses."
No one quite knows why Orkut caught on among Brazilians and not Americans, although the fact that it is an invitation-only network might explain why it exploded once it gained a foothold in Brazil. In an interview last year with the newspaper Folha de São Paulo, Buyukkokten theorized that it might be because Brazilians were "a friendly people," and perhaps because some of his own friends, among the first to join the network, had Brazilian friends.
Fernanda Leon, an architecture student eating at a Middle Eastern restaurant in Rio with her boyfriend, said she thought Brazil had latched on to Orkut because of the country's inherently social culture. "Brazilians really want to interact with other people, both old friends and new people," she said. |
