Smart Dictators Don't Quash the Internet; They Subvert It for Their Own Purposes

I deviate from the normal topic matter of Lab Soft News because of the importance of this topic.  ---BAF

Social media such as Facebook have been much in the news lately in connection with the revolution in Egypt, Libya, and other Middle Eastern countries. A recent op-ed piece in the Wall Street Journal could serve as a playbook for dictators who want to use the social media to serve their own purposes (see: Smart Dictators Don't Quash the Internet; registration required). The author, Evgeny Morozov, makes some very important points and suggests that the IT-savvy young revolutionaries living under oppressive regimes may need to change some of their tactics. Below is an excerpt from it:

The Egyptian experience suggests that social media can greatly accelerate the death of already dying authoritarian regimes. But while it's important to acknowledge the role that the Internet played in the Egyptian uprising, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the protesters were blessed with a government that didn't know a tweet from a poke—as illustrated most of all, perhaps, by its desperate (and belated) gambit in temporarily shutting off the country's access to the outside world. The lethal blow that the Internet has helped to deliver to the Mubarak regime is likely to push fellow tyrants to catch up on the latest developments in Silicon Valley and learn the ropes of online propaganda....The Syrian government lifted a ban on Facebook and YouTube—nominally as a "concession" to opposition groups—but this was almost certainly done in order to more easily monitor public dissent. During the ban, Syrian dissidents could always get access to Facebook by using various tools for circumventing censorship and concealing their identities. This made Facebook slow and cumbersome to use, but it provided an extra degree of protection from the prying eyes of the Syrian police. Now that the ban has been lifted, the general population will flock to Facebook and expose themselves to the attention of the authorities....Meanwhile, the country's police officials have been distributing false information about protests via social media sites and text messaging in order to lure and then arrest anyone who shows up at the advertised venues.

So, to restate the obvious, autocratic regimes may now be coming to understand (a little late for some of them) that they can subvert the social media for their own purposes. For example, they can use Facebook and Twitter to publish false information and identify dissidents. Their agents can also falsely publicize mass rallies and then arrest the dissidents who arrive at the assigned location. This is going to lead to a cat-and-mouse game as we go forward in this Information Age. Luckily, some of the best technical minds around the world will will now focus on developing methods for using the web as a catalyst for change while at the same time ensuring the safety of dissidents and identifying traps by governmental agents.

Comments

[Brad Fallon]

Shutting the internet down in Libya will make the protesters more aggressive towards the removal of their fascist dictator Gaddafi.