苹果6p触摸ic更换教程:Smart Dictators Don't Quash the Internet - WS...

来源:百度文库 编辑:九乡新闻网 时间:2024/03/29 16:48:39

Smart Dictators Don't Quash the Internet

Mubarak had no idea how to counter the power of social media. China, Russia and Iran know better

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Guy Martin for the Wall Street Journal.

Egyptians celebrate in Tahrir Square after hearing the news that Hosni Mubarak has resigned. Protestors in Egypt were lucky that the government didn't know a tweet from a poke. Activists in other countries may not fare so well.

The tragic death of Khaled Said—the 28-year-old who in June 2010 was dragged from an Internet cafe in Alexandria and beaten by the Egyptian police—was the event that galvanized young Egyptians, pushing them to share their grievances on Facebook. A group called "We Are All Khaled Said" quickly reached hundreds of thousands of members and played an instrumental role in promoting the protests that eventually swept Hosni Mubarak from power.

The Egyptian experience suggests that social media can greatly accelerate the death of already dying authoritarian regimes. But while it's important to acknowledge the role that the Internet played in the Egyptian uprising, we shouldn't lose sight of the fact that the protesters were blessed with a government that didn't know a tweet from a poke—as illustrated most of all, perhaps, by its desperate (and belated) gambit in temporarily shutting off the country's access to the outside world. The lethal blow that the Internet has helped to deliver to the Mubarak regime is likely to push fellow tyrants to catch up on the latest developments in Silicon Valley and learn the ropes of online propaganda.

Take the Khaled Said incident. Although the two police officers suspected of beating up Mr. Said were eventually arrested, the Egyptian government ignored the anger of their netizens for far too long. That anger subsided, but it never went away; the turn of events in Tunisia helped to reinvigorate it.

Compare Egypt's experience to a similar case in China, where in 2009 Li Qiaoming, a 24-year-old peasant detained for illegal logging, was soon reported dead. The police told Mr. Li's parents, implausibly, that he had hit his head on a wall while playing a game of hide-and-seek with fellow inmates. The incident quickly generated almost 100,000 comments on just one popular Chinese blogging site, and the authorities reacted quickly.

Instead of trying to suppress online conversation, they reached out to the outraged netizens, inviting them to apply to become members of a commission to investigate the circumstances of Mr. Li's death. The resulting commission wasn't really allowed to investigate anything, of course, but by then the social unrest was quelled.

In retrospect, it's shocking how few pre-emptive steps Mr. Mubarak's regime had taken to control the Internet. There were no China-style attempts at Internet filtering; no Kremlin-style online propaganda chiefs or government-paid bloggers; virtually no cyber-attacks on the websites of bloggers and activist organizations. Mr. Mubarak's only foray into the world of Internet control was to beat up and jail bloggers—a tactic that only helped to publicize their cause.

It's not surprising, then, that officials were caught off-guard by the protests, which were mostly planned and discussed publicly online. Only after the online movement had gained an impressive offline momentum in Tahrir Square did Mr. Mubarak's associates choose to switch off the Internet for a few days, further revealing their incompetence. It's not that the Egyptian regime lost the online battle. They simply never entered it to begin with. It wasn't the Internet that destroyed Mr. Mubarak—it was Mr. Mubarak's ignorance of the Internet that destroyed Mr. Mubarak.

Other authoritarian regimes are taking cues from the events in Egypt, toughening their Internet controls. The Syrian government lifted a ban on Facebook and YouTube—nominally as a "concession" to opposition groups—but this was almost certainly done in order to more easily monitor public dissent. During the ban, Syrian dissidents could always get access to Facebook by using various tools for circumventing censorship and concealing their identities. This made Facebook slow and cumbersome to use, but it provided an extra degree of protection from the prying eyes of the Syrian police. Now that the ban has been lifted, the general population will flock to Facebook and expose themselves to the attention of the authorities.

In Sudan, Oman Al-Bashir has promised to extend electricity to the remote corners of the country so that his supporters can go online and defend him on Facebook. Meanwhile, the country's police officials have been distributing false information about protests via social media sites and text messaging in order to lure and then arrest anyone who shows up at the advertised venues.

Following this week's protests in Bahrain, Twitter was flooded with pro-government propaganda in a poorly veiled attempt to make it a less credible source of information about the protests. As for the authorities in Iran, they have learned their lesson from the 2009 uprising and have developed the most comprehensive Internet control strategy in the Middle East, setting up dedicated units of "cyber-police" and experimenting with advanced Internet surveillance techniques that may even allow them to detect dissidents who are using anti-censorship tools.

The most urgent Internet question facing many dictators today is what to do about American social networking sites like Facebook. Many are bound to follow the lead of Russia and China, which have championed homegrown competitors. An online group calling for the overthrow of the Russian government wouldn't survive for long on Vkontakte, Russia's alternative to Facebook.

Russian social networking sites already dominate the online landscape in most of the former Soviet republics, and it's highly unlikely they would side with pro-democracy protesters. In December 2010, as anti-government protests were brewing in Belarus after its contested presidential election, an online group supporting one of the candidates mysteriously disappeared from Vkontakte, depriving opposition groups of an important tool for mobilizing sympathizers.

In Vietnam, the government has banned Facebook and started its own site with the forbidding name of goonline.vn, hoping to make it the most popular state-run social networking site in the country.

Judging by the relative success of Moscow and Beijing in taming the democratic potential of the Web, it seems dictators learn fast and are perfectly capable of mastering the Internet. It's only by anticipating their response that those of us who care about democracy in the West can make their tough methods less effective. After all, these regimes have turned mostly to Western companies and consultants for advice about the technology of repression.

Triumphalism about recent events in the Middle East is premature. The contest is still in its early stages, and the new age of Internet-driven democratization will endure only if we learn to counter the sophisticated measures now being developed to quash it.

—Mr. Morozov, a visiting scholar at Stanford University, is the author of "The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom."