The Wrong Way To Weaponize Social Media 90
BorgiaPope writes "NYU's Clay Shirky, in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, calls the US government's approach to social media 'dangerous' and 'almost certainly wrong,' as in its favoring Haystack over Freegate. The Political Power of Social Media claims that the freedom of online assembly — via texting, photo sharing, Facebook, Twitter, humble email — is more important even than access to information via an uncensored Internet. Countering Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker, Shirky looks at recent uprisings in the Philippines, Moldova, and Spain to make his point that, instead of emphasizing anti-censorship tools, the US should be fighting Egypt's recent mandatory licensing of group-oriented text-messaging services." Only part of Shirky's piece is available for non-subscribers, but Gladwell's New Yorker piece is all online.
Re:Ok (Score:3, Interesting)
The internet can be anonymous. Anonymity is very hard to achieve in real life compared to the levels offered by the internet.
Only with true anonymity comes true freedom of speech.
That said, "texting, photo sharing, Facebook, Tiwtter, humble email" are not the most anonymous of the communication methods that the internet offers by far. IMHO If you replace that by "anonymous internet communication" then it is a solid point, otherwise not so much.
Re:Ok (Score:3, Interesting)
The internet can be anonymous. Anonymity is very hard to achieve in real life compared to the levels offered by the internet.
Only with true anonymity comes true freedom of speech.
That said, "texting, photo sharing, Facebook, Tiwtter, humble email" are not the most anonymous of the communication methods that the internet offers by far. IMHO If you replace that by "anonymous internet communication" then it is a solid point, otherwise not so much.
Really? If you have to hide covering in a corner while voicing your opinions in a way that make sure they can't be attributed to you, you don't really have true freedom of speech do you, if you assume you have to hide your opinions.
You have freedom for repercussions (and responsibility) for your words, but is that really true freedom of speech?
Re:Ok (Score:5, Interesting)
If I have a guarantee that nobody knows who I am when I say something then it follows that I have a guarantee that nobody can do anything to me because of what I said.
Laws can always protect freedom of speech in real life, but they can't protect you against someone who disagrees with you enough to want to do some damage to you and does so before law enforcement can step in. They also can't stop people not wanting to be your friend or not wanting to do business with you because of your point of view.
Freedom of speech should grant me the right to say anything I like with no consequences to myself, not just from the government. There is nothing you can do to stop people from treating you different in subtle ways if they know what you said and they strongly disagree with you. Therefore, anonymity is the only way to achieve that. If anonymity is not "true" freedom of speech then "true" freedom of speech is impossible to gain. Life isn't perfect, anonymity is the closest thing to freedom that we have.
Mostly US backed (Score:5, Interesting)
The problem with that was it got very messy and the press seemed to link the CIA, US embassies back to the new juntas.
With todays 'internet' US gov backed NGO's can fund opposition groups that will rise up and sell out under the banner of 'freedom"
“Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.” should be a hint.
If you can follow pipelines, China, oil and the CIA front The National Endowment for democracy it all starts to look the same.
From Tibet (vast mineral wealth), Serbia, Georgia, Ukraine, Myanmar, Uygar ect, the soft destabilizations are just a new idea for the great game.
Re:Ok (Score:5, Interesting)
Not entirely. There are (statistical) ways of identifying people solely by *what* they say, and *how* they say it. For example, suppose you're completely anonymous and there's no way to trace where your speech comes from. Now let's say you visited Area 51 and saw the spaceships, and you like to talk about the particular details of what you saw online. Most anonymous commenters on the internet couldn't talk about those details and let alone get them right, but you can. So you're formally anonymous, but you still stick out and the exact contents of your speech can betray you.
To truly preserve your anonymity in plain sight, you cannot say too many useful things, at least nothing original that hasn't been already said by many other people before you, and will also be said by many people after you. And that of course means you have to be a nobody who doesn't say interesting things and doesn't influence people.
Hedges - The Next Step (Score:4, Interesting)
The ability to commit suicide is a hedge against slavery. The ability to say "no" (a relatively recent innovation in history) is a hedge against shitty "contracts."
The ability to coordinate with like-minded people on a large scale in economic, social, and political dimensions is a hedge against the limited set of opportunities afforded to us by traditional capital, consolidated media, and mere voting.
Shirky's right. Improved, sophisticated, unstifled collaboration that allows people to raise their heads out of the prepackaged trough of opportunity is of primary importance today, to be prioritized even above addressing problems of government control over media talking points.