Source: Boiling Frogs Post
TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES:
TRANSCRIPT AND SOURCES:
As anyone who has logged on to the internet in the last five years is
all too aware, social media websites have exploded in popularity to the
point where they are virtually impossible to avoid.
Facebook is expected to hit one billion users later this year. Twitter handles almost 300 million tweets per day. Every second, one hour of video footage is uploaded to YouTube.
With this rise in popularity of social media has come an attendant rise in another trend: the dinosaur media’s attempts to portray these websites as revolutionary tools for freedom loving people around the world.
From Moldova to Iran, Egypt to Tunisia, hyperventilating reporters
around the world with deadlines to meet and little information to go on
have resorted to making up stories about how Twitter, Facebook and
YouTube have shaped the course of revolutions and uprisings around the
world. The only problem with this oft-repeated narrative is that it is almost certainly wrong.
Certainly, journalistic laziness can be used to explain at least some
of this tendency of so-called reporters to “research” reports while
surfing the net in the comfort of their hotel room, but this is not the
whole story. In fact, the entire myth of the social media revolution has
been carefully constructed by US State Department-linked NGOs with a
vested interest in overthrowing unfriendly regimes in certain parts of
the world. And it is this story, when put together, that paints these
so-called social media revolutions in an altogether darker light.
One of the men who has been influential in shaping the narrative of
how social media websites facilitate the “democratization” of
authoritarian regimes is Evgeny Morozov, a visiting scholar at Stanford University and former fellow of George Soros’ Open Society Institute. Although he has since switched to arguing the so-called dangers of a free and open internet, he was instrumental in pioneering the concept of a twitter revolution during the Moldovan uprising in 2009. In the pages of Foreign Policy, the Economist and openDemocracy,
he crafted much of the language that was to shape the discourse on
social media revolution in the coming years: how the concept of
“networked protests” facilitated “flashmobs” and helped spur “huge
mobilization efforts” around Twitter hashtags. His original post was
quickly followed by an update
noting that there were, in fact, only 70 registered Moldovan Twitter
users in the world at the time, thus casting doubt on the assertion that
Tweets about the uprising had even been noticed in Moldova, but the
narrative was established and the media was happy to run with it.
Similar flaws could be found in the reasoning of every one of the
subsequent media-touted “social media revolutions.” In the Iranian
unrest of 2009, 30000 Tweets began flooding Twitter
with live updates on the action in Iran, most written in English. The
tweets were not authored by Iran’s relatively minuscule tweeting
population of under 20,000, however, but were posted almost entirely by a
handful of newly-registered users
with identical profile photos. Coincidentally, within hours of this
phenomenon starting, the newsrooms of Iran’s biggest political enemy,
Israel, were already on the story, writing articles about the valiant Iranian opposition who was so intent on Tweeting every sign of dissent.
The uprisings of the Arab Spring are equally suspect. Despite
widespread reports of Twitter’s importance in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen,
the number of Twitter users in the three countries combined is less than 15,000. Facebook hardly fares better, with penetration in Egypt reach just over 4.5% in July of 2010, far less than anything broadcast on any of the major television networks.
Although the proponents of this twitter revolution myth are comfortable admitting
that the entire phenomenon has been blown out of proportion by the
media, one thing that they explicitly refuse to examine are the
motivations behind these revolutions in the first place. In 2010, Evgeny
Morozov himself gave a keynote address
at the Berlin re:public conference in which he went out of his way to
avoid addressing the fundamental issue of why these US-unfriendly
governments are being overthrown, and whose interests these revolutions
really serve.
In the end, the social media revolution phenomenon–to the extent that
it is not simply a cover for funding, training, and even providing
direct military cooperation to subversives in countries that have been
targeted for “regime change”–is nothing more nor less than another
weapon in the arsenal of the Western powers who have been caught time
and again destabilizing uncooperative governments around the world for
decades.
What makes the irony of this supposed support for revolutionaries in
countries like Iran and Syria all the more apparent is the way that the
political puppets who profess their solidarity with the internet
activists of these countries are the very same people who are
implementing more and more draconian controls over their own citizens’
use of the internet to inform themselves and organize dissent.
In August of 2011, while the media and the political class were still
soiling themselves with delight over the supposedly spontaneous
uprisings that supposedly took place via social media in the so-called
Arab Spring, the Bay Area Rapid Transit authority shut down cell phone service
throughout the BART network in order to quell a planned demonstration
over the shooting death of a passenger the previous month. The irony of
an American government authority using the precise methods of internet
disruption on its citizens that had earned the supposed tyrants of the
Middle East that same government’s wrath was apparently lost on all
involved.
In November of last year, it was revealed
that the US State Department had helped to fund Psiphon, an online
encryption system that helps users circumvent government firewalls that
was then distributed in Syria. Later that month, Syria was demonized
for breaking American technology sanctions when it was found to have
acquired Internet filtering technology developed by a California-based
company. Yet Senator Joe Lieberman has been happy to openly muse about adapting this technology for use by the American government against its own citizens.
The most startling hypocrisy of all, however, occurred last February during a speech
by US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at George Washington
University. The speech was ostensibly about the brave men and women of
Egypt who stood up against the authoritarian Mubarak and how they used
the internet to organize their dissent. During her speech, ex-CIA
analyst and well-known online dissident Ray McGovern stood up and turned
his back to Clinton to make a silent protest about America’s ongoing
wars of aggression around the world. He was immediately beaten up and removed by security.
Oddly, the establishment media failed to portray McGovern’s protest as a “Twitter revolution,” or even to report on it at all.
