Eight months ago, as Egyptians flooded the streets of Cairo in protest, the government tried to stem the tide by cutting off access to Twitter and Facebook – social networks that had been so associated with democratic uprisings that labels such as “the Twitter Revolution” were being bandied about.
On Wednesday, British Prime Minister David Cameron addressed the rioting that swept his country and declared that he was looking into blocking unspecified troublemakers’ access to Twitter and another network, BlackBerry Messenger.
With the speed of a looter on the make, social networks have gone from heroes of the Arab Spring to the newly-anointed villains of the British riots. One day, implement of utopia; the next, yob’s best friend.
Throwing his digital lot in with Hosni Mubarak is hardly a flattering comparison for Mr. Cameron. But his choice of target reflects a very real public unease with the way social networks seem to inspire people to action.
For vast swathes of the population, social networks remain new and foreign – and foreigners always make good scapegoats. As governments and citizens alike grasp for explanations amidst riot and revolt, attention always goes to the odd factor out. Whether they deserve that wariness is another question entirely.
For one thing, the role of social media in the Arab uprisings may have been overstated in the first place. As central as some social networks were to the action (Facebook in particular was central to setting off the revolt in Tunisia), they were part of a larger media ecosystem. Twenty-four-hour coverage from broadcast media like Al-Jazeera may have been more influential.
The question of whether the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt could have succeeded without social networks was never settled. Pundits kicked around the notion that the Internet could enable a gentler sort of revolution, before events in Libya rendered it grimly absurd. Facebook intervention was out; NATO intervention was back in.
Fast forward to Britain this week, when headlines announced that disaffected youth used the communication tools at their disposal, and that many of these happened to be the BlackBerry. (Pity the marketing people at RIM, who must have thought their branding woes couldn’t have gotten worse.) But to suggest that the BlackBerry radically expedited, let alone caused, the rioting doesn’t pass the sniff test. Putative rioters had televisions, phones and eyes. They would have figured it out.
The truth about social networks is that for all their potential, they’re more nuanced than grand news narratives give them credit for. They’re not broadcast mechanisms that drive home the same idea to everyone at once. We already have those mediums, of course, and they’ve proved exceedingly potent at inciting mass action.
“No one interacts with Facebook or Twitter; they interact with their corner of Facebook or Twitter,” says Ethan Zuckerman, a researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, and a close observer of the Arab uprisings. “What social media can do is reinforce the idea that a behaviour is common.”
That behaviour might be looting, but it might also be volunteer street clean-ups, another one of the less-reported group activities that social networking enabled this week.
In the end, it’s the frightened reaction of states themselves that turns social networks into such heroes and bogeymen. The profile of Facebook in Egypt’s mass demonstrations, for instance, was greatly amplified by the fact that the besieged government moved to cut it off.
Cracking down on citizens’ communications in times of crisis would put Mr. Cameron in the company of a large and unsavoury bunch of autocrats. Panicking in the face of an unfamiliar and hard-to-control technology is a time-honoured response for governments and citizens alike. Making a scapegoat of them only enhances their mythos.
It won’t be long before he finds out there’s no use shooting the instant messenger.
Ivor Tossell is a technology columnist who writes for The Globe and Mail.
