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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.
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.
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.
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?
What are we going to do, make fun of the Taliban until they all go emo and commit suicide?
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.
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.
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"
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 demonstrate how difficult it is to weaponize social media to pursue country-specific and near-term policy goals."
There's never time to do it right, but there's always time to do it over.
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.
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.
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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. :-)
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.
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.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
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 and this? GPs point is valid provided that the information is available. Sadly, at least to some extent, it is.
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.
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
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
Doesn't have to be the government, even. Social stigma or private organisations can be oppressive too. Would you like to openly advocate for a cause, if it meant the risk of protestors setting up outside your house or harassing you and your family? Or your employer deeming you an embarassment to the company and fireing you?
I work in a school. Chances are I'll work in another school. I even used to work in a catholic school, and may do so again - finding work is hard, I won't turn down a position just because I don't agree with the school's religion.
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.
And if you are in the south all it will take is ONE preacher in the right place to say "bennomatic is a baby killing bastard!" to not only completely destroy your business, by making sure not a single person in the community will do business with you, but if there are any fundies that are say...a few bubbles off of plumb? Well lets just say I hope you own a gun or are able to throw away everything you have worked for and start anew somewhere else.
It is NEVER the popular speech that we need freedom of speech for, it is the unpopular. By tying everyone's words that they say online to an individual you have just "Disneyfied" speech on the Internet, because to dare to speak out or advocate anything that is any any way unpopular would simply be too risky.
For a perfect and topical example, look at the "pro pedo" Amazon book. The man who wrote it is currently sitting in prison for writing a book. Sure it is a tasteless book, but it is still just a collection of thoughts on paper and as such no more offensive than Mein Kampf or Mao's little red book, which I would actually classify those two as more offensive seeing is how we can attribute 80 million plus dead to those. What amazed me was the discussions I saw were VERY heavily in favor of free speech, pointing out that it is ALWAYS the speech the public does not agree with that needs to be defended, less ALL speech be degraded into nothing but a chorus of the masses.
But how many of those would have actually came out for free speech if tomorrow there would be a sign at work that says "John is for protecting a kiddy fiddler!". You can be rest assured with the mob mentality going on now anyone who said anything but "string him up!" WILL lose their job, and could even be faced with violence. Or look at how the librarians had to fight to protect the right to check out books with anonymity, because some feds decided "Cather in the rye" equaled "terrorist that needs investigating"? Do you REALLY want a USA where you can not be an advocate for anything without wearing it on a T-shirt?
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.