While online social networks are helping advance protests in the Middle East, activists have discovered a surprising barrier to web organizing: Facebook.
To understand this dichotomy, it helps to distinguish between Facebook the company and Facebook the platform.
In Egypt, of course, organizers used the platform because Facebook was a popular way to demonstrate support for demonstrations – it has more users in Egypt than any other Middle Eastern country. They did not use it because the company backed the uprising or the right to assemble. Quite the opposite.
As a company, Facebook’s rules and architecture actually impeded organizers in Egypt. And its corporate policy is lukewarm on reform.
“The turmoil in Egypt is a matter for the Egyptian people and their government to resolve,” Facebook noted in a meek statement on the seventh day of protests. Then, worse than rhetoric and neglected in recent media coverage, the company actually shut down one of the top Egyptian protest groups in December. The group’s administrators were using pseudonyms to avoid government retaliation , according to Harvard researcher Jillian York, a violation of Facebook’s rules. One of those anonymous administrators turned out to be Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who was later abducted. At the time, the group's supporters protested Facebook and got it reinstated; soon they were back to protesting much bigger adversaries.
That was not an isolated skirmish for Facebook as a company, either. In contrast to Google, Facebook has refused to sign the Global Network Initiative , a compact devoted to preventing web censorship by authoritarian governments and protecting individual privacy, based on the standards in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. (Both of those goals cut into the profits generated from doing business in closed societies and monetizing users’ information.) It is technically possible, of course, for Facebook to require Westerners to use their real identities, while affording some protection to users risking their lives to fight police states. So far, the company has usually declined.
These are key tradeoffs, especially as the pseudo-public forums of privately held companies play a pivotal role in international uprisings. Lately, a lot of Western media commentary has focused on the fashionable question of whether Egypt was (or wasn’t!) a digital uprising, as if apportioning the proper people-to-tech ratio for credit is an urgent priority. For reformers and governments, however, the core policy questions are more about information policy and human rights. After all, in asymmetric conflicts between oppressive regimes and the people whom they oppress, it is no surprise that the authoritarians will try to refract innovations for their agenda. What is striking, instead, is that when facing down Goliath, some protestors found a hole to exploit before their oppressors caught up.
One can point to many factors that helped trigger Egypt’s uprising. The big ones are obviously “offline,” real-world social conditions. There is also no doubt, however, that another trigger was the threat of a citizen turning the tools of surveillance back on the state: The martyred Khaled Said had video of police corruption in June, when Egyptian police grabbed him from an Internet café and beat him to death. In turn, the sousveillance of Said’s corpse was another trigger, as illicit pictures of his disfigured face, snapped on a cellphone in the morgue, went viral online. And then came the Facebook trigger: First Google executive Ghonim helped form the famous solidarity group as a riposte to those pictures. Then other groups responded, and helped spread the street protests. In each of those cases, the trigger was a network – the mere threat of using one, or the act of growing one to mobilize more people.
The answer to whether Egypt-style uprisings succeed in other countries will depend, at least in part, on how those networks are operated by American companies, and how they respond to pressure from governments around the world.
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This post is excerpted from a longer essay originally published in The Nation. You can discuss this series with Ari Melber on his Facebook page.
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I'm not advocating against social networks and the internet. In fact I think they're one of the most incredible things to arise in my lifetime. It's just silly to engage with a tool if you don't inherently know anything about how it actually works.
Bob Dylan said: "I think of a hero as someone who understands the degree of responsibility that comes with his freedom." -- people need to be humbly reminded of this.
We just have new Internet-based ways of doing what people have done for centuries. None of these social media companies in question were set up or designed for political revolution. The platforms they've created allow people of like mind and interest to connect. If those like minds and interests center on political movements, then so be it. The companies and platforms are content agnostic to a large extent. We should be having the discussion about how to generally help people who want change in their government and not about whether web platforms and social media companies have a political agenda.
Facebook's is not built for revolution, that does not mean it is bad.
The Internet can be the vehicle that takes us to 1984, or a
great tool for democracy.
People are not up to understanding this and not technical enough to make decisions on it.
It's scary.
neither is Facebook a revolution
Facebook in just a tool and a commodity - get over it already
If FB doesn't adjust to reality it will disappear as so many others have. Electronic and new media are not responsible for the uprisings but they are tools that helped them happen. I have long supported the view that what helped bring down the Soviet Union was its inability to control information. The FAX and Copy machine didn't cause the fall of the Soviet Union but they did certainly spread information that the oppressed people used to their advantage. Another classic example of the truism that the pen is more powerful than the sword.
Had Putin been in charge at the time, however, the Soviet Union would probably still be intact today. No amount of information or blood spilled would have mattered.
Gorbachev tried to reform the system from within because the situation was not sustainable: it didn't work. If Putin was in charge he might had delayed the collapse for a while but it was inevitable.
My aunt whose hair were washed with laundry soap at the Intercontinental because there was no shampoo has been telling me that there was no hope since the seventies. It was not a matter of if but a matter of when; everybody knew it.