[LINK] "The Dark Side of Twittering a Revolution"

[rfmcdonald]

Blogger Jamais Cascio relinked to an old post he wrote during the 2009 Iran events. Social networking systems can be used to get the masses for something good, true; equally, they can be used for something bad.

In noting the potential power of social networking tools for organizing mass change, I thought out loud for a moment about what kinds of dangers might emerge. It struck me, as I spoke, that there is a terrible analogy that might be applicable: the use of radio as a way of coordinating bloody attacks on rival ethnic communities during the Rwandan genocide in the early 1990s. I asked, out loud, whether Twitter could ever be used to trigger a genocide. The audience was understandably stunned by the question, and after a few seconds someone shouted, "No!" I could only hope that the anonymous reply was right, but I don't think he was.

iran twitterConsider, for a moment, what we're seeing happening in Iran: mass-action coordinated, at least in part, through Twitter; traditional media in Iran having lost any legitimacy for the angry populace, alternative media--like Twitter--increasingly becoming the sole source of information; and a growing sense of persecution and crisis, abetted by the limited streams of rumor-heavy news. Let me again emphasize that I don't think that what's happening in Iran is a misuse of social media; what I do think is that the same kinds of dynamics that have allowed for a potential democratic revolution in Iran could emerge just as readily in support of something far darker.

In a 1999 presentation for the Montreal Institute for Genocide and Human Rights Studies, Professor Frank Chalk noted five circumstances that would allow the maximum intensity of a media-driven response to a crisis:

1. the introduction of a new medium of communication, such as radio [or Twitter];
2. the use of a completely new style of communication;
3. the wide-spread perception that a crisis exists;
4. a public with little knowledge of the situation from other sources of information, and
5. a deep-seated habit of obeying authority among the target audience.

All of these circumstances pertain to the promulgation of the genocide in Rwanda in 1994 and many of them are found in other cases of genocide and genocidal killings, as well.

It's easy to see how well this model applies to the Iranian situation, too.

The transparency of Twitter and like platforms does mean does mean it's relatively easy to keep track, and certainly the sort of monologue of Rwanda's famously anti-Tutsi Radio Mille Collines can't go unchallenged, but, nevertheless.