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The Wrong Way To Weaponize Social Media
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.
I don't understand the distinction being made between these two.
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.
What are we going to do, make fun of the Taliban until they all go emo and commit suicide?
I read the summary and I'm still nonplussed.
Is Slashdot using joke words for the holidays?
Clay Shirky's arguing about censorship from behind a paywall? That's idiotic.
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.
In the good old days of the cold war, the US would just offer a military clique cash and recognition. After a well backed coup anyone who was an issue was killed by death squads.
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.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Extremist much?
Unless you're talking about a WMD you left in the toilet, twitter has no legit use at all.
I love these "academics", well I mean I *hate* them.
fuck you all!
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.
First, it turns commercial entities like Facebook, which couldn't give a fuck about fighting censorship, into vital tools for opposition movements. If there's one thing the WikiLeaks/Anonymous bunfight has shown, it's that internet companies aren't mature enough as institutions to balance their short term political and financial interests against their long term responsibility to protect free speech. We can't rely on them.
Second, it means that all communication between people in authoritarian societies has to cross the border twice, even though borders are among the easiest places to monitor and control. If you wanted to design a communication system for prisoners in neighbouring cells, I doubt your design sketch would begin, "First get the message to a trusted third party outside the prison."
Unfortunately, moving the social media sites inside the firewall doesn't solve the problem. Take China for example. There are already Chinese equivalents of Facebook, Twitter, and other firewalled sites, but they're subject to a variety of pressures to police their users, especially those that start to form political groups. If Facebook isn't going to stand up for Chinese dissidents then Baidu certainly won't.
It's also pretty tough to maintain social media sites outside the firewall that are dedicated to supporting opposition movements - such sites are susceptible to DDoS attacks and subtler forms of infiltration and monitoring, as in the Ghostnet case. The basic problem is that the web wasn't designed or implemented with censorship-resistance in mind. Let's not ask anyone to bet their life on the security of Wordpress.
So what do we do? In my opinion we need new tools. Tools that are designed with security in mind, that don't rely on servers inside or outside the firewall, that can be used from an internet cafe or a mobile phone, that don't produce easily recognised traffic patterns, that can be used to hold meetings, plan rallies, or just tell jokes - in short, to talk to people you trust without revealing anything to people you don't. We already have some partial solutions we can learn from - Freenet, WASTE, txtmob, CryptoSMS, Gazzera, Retroshare, SocialVPN - and a million research papers that never made it as far as implementation. Now we need some specs, some code, many eyes and regular backups. :-)
Or is this just some Americanism which has been allowed to go too far??
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.
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.
Freedom of speech should grant me the right to say anything I like with no consequences to myself
No.
Try again, soccer mom. Oh, and lern2responsibility.
Or is this just some Americanism which has been allowed to go too far??
Gerunds? Sorry to be a Grammar Nazi, but they exist in other languages as well.
'We are trying to prove ourselves wrong as quickly as possible, because only in that way can we find progress.' RPF
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 has to be paid to grant anonymity. What does it matter anyway? You don't have to believe the lies and they can't hurt you.
I dream of a nation where a man is not judged by his skin color but by an number assigned by a credit rating agency.
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.
Please enumerate these universal moral laws. Who or what codifies them? Also, using the qualifier "universal" gives a pretty vast scope so please be sure to take into account alien civilizations (that may or may not exist) in your answers.
There ARE universal moral laws
If there are, one is an absolute right to express unpopular views anonymously. Without limitation.
"Somebody has to do something. It's just incredibly pathetic it has to be us."
--- Jerry Garcia
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.
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
Read radical news here
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 enough to commit yourself to it?
The CB App. What's your 20?
The only reason for even having slander/libel laws is that some people are so uneducated they'll believe anything they hear.
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?"
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
What, shooting the messenger? Of course this was always the case. But the NSA wasn't saying.
+1 Julian Assange!
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
And isn't that just a bit ironic.
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 association. Claiming that any one of these things is more important than the others is to imply that the others are less important. They are all required. To posit that any component can be lost without losing the whole is -- at best -- the beginning of a philosophical exploration.
Supposing that any one is more or less important is perhaps a fine beginning to a thesis which uses modus tollens (denying the consequent) to show that all components are required, but surely it is no rational conclusion in itself.
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
http://spectregroup.wordpress.com/2009/06/19/what-tipped-you-off/