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.

Comments

Re:Ok

[martin-boundary]

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.

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.