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.
Ok (Score:1)
I don't understand the distinction being made between these two.
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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.
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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?
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being able to speak while hidden is the only free speech that still holds true if the government goes totalitarian
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In other words, in the light of recent events we should make sure that we retain that right.
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must of came off a little media-fear-spreading-ly
better to be safe then sorry, and even if one drop of totalitarian gets written in some small law(it will) its worth the small problem of having freedom on the internet, parents rising their kids and people having to learn to not trust everything
but its still a bit extreme think the law will result in some unstoppable censorship (as extreme as thinking the law wont have flaws that outweigh the cost of freedom, of course its not their freedom the older generat
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I come from a country where "it won't be so bad, they can't do THAT..." led to some really nasty atrocities. Maybe I'm just sensitive to statements like "it can't be that bad, they can't REALLY do that" for that reason.
Re:Ok (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Social Stigma (Score:2)
Actually that's getting worse with the peaking of Facebook. "Oh my gawd you don't have cute cuddly pics of your baby daughter on there? What's WRONG with you?"
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.
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.
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Sure.
But either doing that takes an enormous pile of accumulated data to mine (something like a database of all person's locations, occupations, typical spelling errors and modes of expression). Or even larger "after the fact" data gathering resources. It is also not impossible that someone monitors all internet connections routed to about everywhere.
But either of these is surely well out of reach of the average person or even (probably) most if not all governments. So that leaves only the possibility that
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But either doing that takes an enormous pile of accumulated data to mine (something like a database of all person's locations, occupations, typical spelling errors and modes of expression).
You mean like this [google.com] and this [facebook.com]? GPs point is valid provided that the information is available. Sadly, at least to some extent, it is.
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I wonder how many delusional ACs are furiously grinding their HDDs into dust as we speak. Well done martin-boundary. You have most likely just destroyed the /. conspiracy theory community.
Re:You fell for his beautiful trap! (Score:2)
What, shooting the messenger? Of course this was always the case. But the NSA wasn't saying.
+1 Julian Assange!
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Learning how to deliberately write (and speak) in a different manner than you usually do is helpful to those who are aware of what you've said.
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That's a valid issue, but not one you can do much about.
This isn't a valid issue. You want to abbrogate their freedom of speech - by preventing them from disagreeing with y
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This isn't a valid issue. You want to abbrogate their freedom of speech - by preventing them from disagreeing with you - to further yours.
No, I couldn't care less if they disagreed with me and replied to my anonymous postings anonymously themselves. What I do not want is for them to know who I am in real life and then be able to cease to do business with me because of our disagreement.
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For example, I'm pro-choice. I'll take that stand in whatever appropriate forum there is. If a client of mine can't do business with me because they read this post and link it to me, then honestly, I don't need their business. If instead that client
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This is called 'reality.' People are not rational. If they really don't like your position on some issue, they'll try to punish you however they can, even in ways completly unrelated to the issue at hand.
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
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No, he doesn't want to abrogate their freedom of speech. They are free -- anonymously or not -- to speak arguments against the ones he makes. All he wants is the freedom to speak his mind without his words being traced to him. That way, people can't refuse to interact with him socially or economically based on the views he expresses only as his anonymized persona. As a country, we (the US) recognize that there is a right to such a form of speech.
Whether people should be able to refuse to interact with s
Re:Ok, where do you draw the line (Score:1)
Where do you draw the line?
Holocaust denial? Blasphemy? Race hatred? Incitement to murder? Incitement to commit sexual crimes? Incitement to commit sexual crimes against children? Speaking out against free speech?
We don't live in an existential world. There ARE universal moral laws which we have to abide by. Lack of anonymity actually protects us. The only real argument is over where we draw the line and at what point your "theoretical" anonymity is breached by the investigation of law enforcement officers.
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While debatable; I would personally draw the line at anything provably false or slander that makes provable yet unlikely claims without citation/proof. To censor such things is very much fair. Just because I think other things are morally wrong doesn't make me right about them being morally wrong, so it is not my right to demand them to be censored.
Of course with anonymity networks that are censor resistant, such as FreeNet, there is essentially nothing you can do to stop that anyway.
That is the price that
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There ARE universal moral laws
If there are, one is an absolute right to express unpopular views anonymously. Without limitation.
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There ARE universal moral laws
If there are, one is an absolute right to express unpopular views anonymously. Without limitation.
I guess the question is, then, what's the point? Information is only as good as its source (as Pierre Salinger), so if you feel strongly that, say, Bush II personally hired the 9/11 pilots to fly into the WTC towers, if you post that anonymously somewhere, it doesn't mean anything. There's nothing behind it.
I'm not against protecting the ability to speak anonymously; there will always be some way to do it and that's fine. However, if what you're saying is important enough to say, isn't it important
Re:Ok (Score:4, Insightful)
Well, there are limits to this for good reason. Less because of reality, more because of how people work and think.
If I go ahead and spread, anonymously or pseudo-anonymously (by pretending to be someone or inventing a few people), lies about you, slander you and ruin your reputation, while at the same time cross-referencing it all to myself (my alter-egos) to make it appear credible, I can essentially and quite successfully ruin you. "igreaterthanu is a pedo". Let's repeat that a billion times for the next month or two, make sure your neighbors get copies of your face with that allegation, drop your name into the various hysteria spreading pages that don't even bother to check once whether any allegation is true and reference to that page... I bet your rep is down the loo quite fast.
I with the solution was just to educate people to not believe every bull and hype they run across, but I guess neither media nor government would have any interesting in that kind of education, so I'd guess it's a bit of a lost cause.
If you have any idea how to prevent this from happening, I am all for total anonymity. Also because I essentially agree with you, if it wasn't for the slander problem.
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Generally when these kinds of personal accusations are made anonymously, they are not given any credibility. Even your scenario where a network of anonymous and semi-anonymous pseudo personalities are created to spread a lie, there are those that look for an original source to determine credibility. I've never heard of a case that has worked otherwise. Consider, for example, the widely-spread rumor that "Glenn Beck raped and killed a girl in the 1990's". I've heard it repeated quite frequently, but I've
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The point, of course is to lampoon the whole "birther" movement, which GB happily pushed along with similarly insipid rhetoric.
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...so I'd guess it's a bit of a lost cause.
Not if you actually sanction people for acting on hearsay. Then they'll think twice. It's just much more convenient to kill the messenger.
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P> There are always consequences for exercising your freedoms. If there weren't then people would be running around causing mahem and destruction 24/7.
There always needs to be a ballance, but that balance needs to tipped somewhat in favor towards the people else the government will run right over the little guy.
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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.
I started using a fake name on the internet mainly to avoid spam. Heavens, if I had something very important to say, I'd sign it with my real name, and I wouldn't do it here. Yes, there are electronic fora in which I do use my true name. Slashdot is a geek kaffeeklatsch. It's fun, but not deep. If you do have something very important to say, then I think you should do it with your real name—I doubt someone is going to pay any attention to you if you fear to stand behind your words. Besides, the degree
Re:Ok (Score:4, Insightful)
I hate the catholic church, believe all religion is just a mixture of superstition and obsolete social codes, enjoy pornography and advocate for abortion rights and the use of contraception online.
I value my future employment, and know that employers like to google on candidates. I'll use my real name when that church's hell freezes over.
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There is more than one freedom bouncing around in the Bill of Rights. Freedom of association is exactly the same idea as freedom not to associate. Think about it. Were the founders so stark raving insane as to compel all people to associate all of the time? In other words freedom not to associate is part of your freedom and mine as well. Then it follows that some will say that we must associate unless certain exceptions are in play such as hiring people or choice of who we marry. That also will trash
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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.
You also have a guarantee that if nobody knows who you are, then nobody will want to listen to you or provide you any support. And in a complex technological society, it's difficult to live entirely alone. Heck, if you completely socially isolate yourself, you go mad - that's why solitary confinement is considered torture.
The only reason we trust people is because they build up a reputation over time. Unfortunately, reputation is a double-edged sword: it means that what you do and say has consequences. That
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You also have a guarantee that if nobody knows who you are, then nobody will want to listen to you or provide you any support.
That depends though, for example on /. I have psuedo-anonymity. Nobody knows who I am, but people can track my posts by my account.
Just because I have the option of posting as AC doesn't mean I should use it all the time, but I still want the right to use it. In the same way that I use electronic money (CCs and internet banking, etc.) for almost all of my transactions, I still want the ability to use cash which is anonymous. Anonymity doesn't solve everything but there are some situations where it is very i
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The only reason we trust people is because they build up a reputation over time. Unfortunately, reputation is a double-edged sword: it means that what you do and say has consequences. That's kind of the point, though - people generally don't like hanging out with people who aren't willing to stand behind their words and actions, because perfect consequence-freedom tends to breed irresponsibility.
This is only true if the majority of practitioners in your field of speech are also known. Any field where the total publicly known practitioners are fewer than constitutes a majority of all practitioners requires more complex analysis.
I wonder, though, how you feel about total delegation positions? There are difficulties in accountability when the speaker and the doer are always two different parties, even when both parties are known. Isn't this institutionalized freedom from consequence provided the sp
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"Really?"
"Man is least himself when he talks in his own person. Give him a mask, and he will tell you the truth."
Oscar Wilde
Actually it's easier to be anonymous IRL. (Score:2)
You send a letter without a return address and it's almost impossible to trace back. Just ask the UNABOMBER, or those retards mailing white powder around.
what a joke (Score:1)
the US should be fighting Egypt's recent mandatory licensing of group-oriented text-messaging services."
Egypt is under "state of emergency" laws and has been for most of the last 30 years.
Mandatory licensing of group-oriented text-messaging services is one of the smallest problems Egypt has with censorship and its token efforts at democracy.
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Note: Shirky's Philippine example re EDSA 2001 was not facilitated by "group oriented text message services." The 2001 EDSA phenomenon was totally P2P relays of text messages.
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If we want to play games I would suggest that a declared State of Emergency that alters the domestic observance of rights is better than an unmentioned Constitutional Crisis that alters domestic observance of rights. Can you imagine how much easier it would be for representatives to debate the War on Terror if it had been defined as a State of Emergency. Maybe that isn't helping the Egyptian citizens right now, but it seems a more assailable position.
The observation that Egypt has many issues when compare
Weaponizing social media? (Score:3, Insightful)
What are we going to do, make fun of the Taliban until they all go emo and commit suicide?
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+100 brilliant. I am liking your ideas and would like to subscribe to your journal.
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What are we going to do, make fun of the Taliban until they all go emo and commit suicide?
Making them look like fools is a good start. Communism didn't survive once people stopped believing, although it took a decade for the USSR to run down after that. We need to make Islam look ridiculous. An online sitcom about Mohammed's early life as a used camel dealer would be a good start. Something like Monty Python's "Life of Brian".
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It took about 15 years, but it worked against the Cult of $cientology.
PROTIP: The Internet's war on the Co$ predates Anonymous's hijinks by about 15 years. The USEN*T group alt.religion.scientology was arguably the first large-scale infowar. Yes, we lost anon.penet.fi, but in the end, we won the war. The cult is a shadow of its former self.
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The cult is a shadow of its former self.
Something i'd like to believe. By what metric? Number of members? Income? Is there a way to view hard figures on this?
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Nah, we're going to do this the right way. We're going to slashdot them.
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No but we'll make fun of their prophet.
'Weaponize' ??? (Score:2)
I read the summary and I'm still nonplussed.
Is Slashdot using joke words for the holidays?
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The term "weaponize" is Shirky's own. Here's the full context from his essay:
"In contrast, one of the most successful anti-censorship software programs, Freegate, has received little support from the United States, partly because of ordinary bureaucratic delays and partly because the U.S. government is wary of damaging U.S.-Chinese relations: the tool was originally created by Falun Gong, the spiritual movement that the Chinese government has called 'an evil cult.' The challenges of Freegate and Haystack de
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Cool, thanks.
(Even in context it still seems clumsy but in the context of a propaganda war perhaps militaristic language *is* apt.)
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A paywall isn't censorship. It is a rip-off, it does widen the knowledge gap between the rich and the poor, it is "shady", but it is not censorship.
Actually, only free registration required (Score:1)
Timothy writes:
> Only part of Shirky's piece is available for non-subscribers
It's true that Foreign Affairs magazine has a paywall, but in this case all that's required to read Shirky's full essay is a free registration.
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.
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From NGO ads washing US gov funding, near endless hidden start up funding comes with some strings.
As the NSA is physically part of your 'private' telco, other areas of the US gov are deep in your 'new' social networks and celebrity backed causes.
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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.
We need new tools (Score:2)
First, it turns commercial entities like Facebook,
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In my opinion we need new tools
We already have the tools to do everything you described. The real problems are:
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No, mrogers [slashdot.org] is right.
People who think we already have the tools don't understand the problem well enough. Broad-based education is an end, not a means. If it is a mandatory means (God help us), then we need tools to get us there.
As an important semantic point, if the scheme that gets us to our goals isn
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Or is this just some Americanism which has been allowed to go too far??
Gerunds? [wikipedia.org] Sorry to be a Grammar Nazi, but they exist in other languages as well.
Shirky and Gladwell are more or less in agreement (Score:3, Insightful)
Borgiapope's summary misses the point of both articles. In fact, the two authors are largely in agreement- it takes a well organized and disciplined group to organize change. Social media isn't enough by itself, although it might be useful as one tool among many in such an organization and it might be able to create an environment in which such an organization can flourish. If you accept these conclusions then you pretty much have to agree with Shirky that a policy focused on the short term exploitation of social media to effect quick change isn't the smartest strategy for US foreign policy. I don't think that Gladwell would disagree with that at all.
Social media: overrated (Score:4, Informative)
As far as the Philippines goes, Shirky has got it wrong. Shirky claims that text-messaging mobilization brought Joseph Estrada down. Not true. Estrada's political capital was on a steady decline owing to accusations of corruption and shady deals. Then he had a falling out with his ally, a prominent politician and gambling lord, who tattled on their agreements. Estrada was impeached for, among many other reasons, forging a signature. From there, it was downhill all the way to the precipice: opportunistic politicians made backroom deals, army and police generals withdrew their support, the judiciary colluded, and Estrada's then-vice president Gloria Arroyo took over.
Text messaging? All it did was whip up the mob which provided cover for what can be called, for all intents and purposes, a coup d'etat.
In the latter years of Gloria Arroyo, herself rocked by corruption scandals, all sorts of people tried to use social media to mobilize the crowds: blogs, Facebook, Twitter, what have you. Apart from the noise and the wasted electrons, did it result in her fall from power? No. Because business, congress, judiciary, and the military did not want any turbulent transition.
Social media did play a small role in bearing enough public pressure on Arroyo whenever she and her cronies tried constitutional change and term extension, but only as far as drawing attention of the international media (and the US and Chinese governments) to possible unrest and instability.
As to the actual transition, we did it the old-fashioned way: elections.
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Shirky would get confused I guess, since Philippine media at that time, kept reporting that the Philippines was the "text capital of the world" during those years and kept attributing Estrada's downfall to our text-happy countrymen.
Apart from the noise and the wasted electrons, did it result in her fall from power?
Fall from power isn't the only goal. People benefit from the transparency of government brought by additional info. Election is influenced by the amount of data the people get. What uncensored Internet brought the Philippines is that additional information—the things often
This is a joke, right ? (Score:4, Informative)
instead of emphasizing anti-censorship tools, the US should be fighting Egypt's recent mandatory licensing of
u.s. is emphasizing anti-censorship tools ? like how they pressured spain government to put out a censorship law, and failed ? like how they pressured heaven knows how many other governments to put out censorship laws ? like wikileaks ? like coica ?
...
this has to be a joke
The revolution will not be paywalled. (Score:1)
And isn't that just a bit ironic.
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False Dichotomy (Score:2)
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
Which is more important to sustain human life; oxygen, food, or water?
One cannot have democracy without free expression. That implicitly requires the pragmatic ability to think freely, to speak freely, to read freely, and to challenge or amplify existing expressions. Challenge and amplification, in turn, implicitly require free associati