Social media for good or ill ; Web networking sites help uprisings spread but also empower regimes

SCOTT SHANE
International Herald Tribune
01-31-2011
Social media for good or ill ; Web networking sites help uprisings spread but also empower regimes
Byline: SCOTT SHANE
Section: NEWS ANALYSIS
Type: News

As revolutionaries are harnessing the power of the Internet to organize dissent, autocratic governments are using the same social networking tools to track their every move.

Fear is the dictator's traditional tool for keeping the people in check. But by cutting off Egypt's Internet and wireless service late last week in the face of huge street protests, President Hosni Mubarak betrayed his own fear -- that Facebook, Twitter, laptops and smartphones could empower his opponents, expose his weakness to the world and topple his regime.
There was reason for Mr. Mubarak to be shaken. By many accounts, the new arsenal of social networking helped accelerate Tunisia's revolution, driving the country's ruler of 23 years, Zine el- Abidine Ben Ali, into ignominious exile and igniting a conflagration that has spread across the Arab world at breathtaking speed. It was an apt symbol that a dissident blogger with thousands of followers on Twitter, Slim Amamou, was catapulted in a matter of days from the interrogation chambers of Mr. Ben Ali's regime to a new government post as minister for youth and sports. It was a marker of the uncertainty in Tunis that he had stepped down from the government by Thursday.

Tunisia's uprising offers the latest encouragement for a comforting notion: that the same Web tools that so many around the world use to keep up with college pals and post passing thoughts have a more noble role as well, as a scourge of despotism. It was just 18 months ago, after all, that the same technologies were hailed as a factor in Iran's Green Revolution, the stirring street protests that followed the disputed presidential election.

But since that revolt collapsed, Iran has become a cautionary tale. The Iranian police eagerly followed the electronic trails left by activists, which assisted them in making thousands of arrests in the crackdown that followed. The government even crowd-sourced its hunt for enemies, posting on the Web the photos of unidentified demonstrators and inviting Iranians to supply names.

"The Iranian government has become much more adept at using the Internet to go after activists," said Faraz Sanei, who tracks Iran at Human Rights Watch. The Revolutionary Guard, the powerful political and economic force that protects the ayatollahs' regime, has created an online surveillance center and is believed to be behind a "cyberarmy" of hackers that it can unleash against opponents, he said.

Repressive regimes around the world may have fallen behind their opponents in recent years in exploiting new technologies -- not unexpected when aging autocrats face younger, more tech-savvy opponents. But in Minsk and Moscow, Tehran and Beijing, governments have begun to climb the steep learning curve and turn the new Internet tools to their own, antidemocratic purposes.

The countertrend has set off a debate over whether the conventional wisdom that the Internet and social networking inherently tip the balance of power in favor of democracy is mistaken. A new book, "The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom," by a young Belarus-born American scholar, Evgeny Morozov, has made the case most provocatively, describing instance after instance of strongmen finding ways to use new media to their advantage.

After all, the very factors that have brought Facebook and similar sites such commercial success have huge appeal for a secret police force. A dissident's social networking and Twitter feed is a handy guide to his political views, his career, his personal habits and his network of like-thinking allies, friends and family. A cybersurfing police officer can compile a dossier on a regime opponent without the trouble of the street surveillance and telephone tapping required in a pre-Net world.

If Mr. Mubarak's Egypt has resorted to the traditional blunt instrument against dissent in a crisis -- cutting off communications altogether -- other countries have shown greater sophistication. In Belarus, K.G.B. officers now routinely quote activists' comments on Facebook and other sites during interrogations, said Alexander Lukashuk, director of the Belarus service of Radio Free Europe/ Radio Liberty. Last month, he said, investigators appearing at the apartment of a Belarussian photojournalist mocked her by declaring that since she had written online that they usually conducted their searches at night, they had decided to come in the morning.

In Syria, "Facebook is a great database for the government now," said Ahed al-Hindi, a Syrian activist who was arrested at an Internet cafe in Damascus in 2006 and left his country after being released from jail. Mr. Hindisaid he believed that Facebook was doing more good than harm, helping activists form virtual organizations that could never survive if they met face to face. But users must be aware that they are speaking to their oppressors as well as their friends, he said.

Widney Brown, senior director of international law and policy at Amnesty International, said the popular networking services, like most technologies, are politically neutral.

"There's nothing deterministic about these tools -- Gutenberg's press, or fax machines or Facebook," Ms. Brown said. "They can be used to promote human rights or to undermine human rights."

In China, Mr. Morozov said, thousands of commentators, nicknamed the 50-Cent Party, are trained and paid to post pro-government comments on the Web and steer online opinion away from criticism of the Communist Party. In Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez, after first denouncing hostile Twitter comments as "terrorism," created his own Twitter feed.

In Russia, Mr. Morozov noted, Prime Minister Vladimir V. Putin has managed to co-opt several prominent new-media entrepreneurs, including Konstantin Rykov, whose many Web sites now skew strongly pro-Putin and whose anti-Georgia documentary about the Russia- Georgia war of 2008 went viral on the Web.

Mr. Mubarak's government, evidently concluding that it was too late for mere monitoring, unplugged his country from the Internet altogether. It was a desperate move from an autocrat who had not learned to harness the tools his opponents have embraced.

Copyright International Herald Tribune Jan 31, 2011