Like Kleenex Revolution "? I believe in a way not. Unless you follow the Libyan President Muammar Gaddafi. In a tv denunciation of the popular uprising has set aside his friendly neighbouring dictator he ranted: "even you, my Tunisian brothers, you can read this like Kleenex and empty rhetoric on the Internet." (Like Kleenex is how Gaddafi refers to WikiLeaks). "Any useless person any liar, any drunkard, someone under the influence, no high on drugs can talk on the Internet, and you read he writes and you believe. This is talk, which is free of charge. Should we become victims of Facebook and like Kleenex and YouTube? " That, since the speaker is another dictator, Andean Pact, I hope that the answer is "Yes". Let like Kleenex wipe them away, one after the other, just as blobs of SLIM.
But will it? What contribution do websites, social networks and mobile phones to popular protest movements? Is there any justification for marking the Tunisian events, as some have done, a "Twitter Revolution" or a "WikiLeaks Revolution"?
A remarkable young Belarusian activist-analyst, Evgeny Morozov, has just challenged the lazy assumptions behind such political-journalistic marks in a book entitled The Net illusion, which went to press before the Tunisian rises. Subtitle of the British edition is "how not to liberate the world". Morozov has fun and run the naively went optimistic vision, which in particular in the United States, seems to accompany the emergence of each new communication technologies. (I remember an article a quarter of a century ago with the headline "the fax will set you free".)
He shows that claims for Twitter and Facebook contribution to Iran's green movement had been overstated. These new technologies can also be used by dictators to see entrap and pursue their opponents. He insists above all that the Internet does not suspend the usual places of work of power politics. It is policy, decides whether the dictator will be toppled in Tunisia or bloggers severely beaten and locked up, as in Morozov's native Belarus.
His challenge is beneficial, but like most revisionists Morozov exaggerating in the opposite direction. Tunisia offers a timely corrective to his corrective. For it seems that here the Internet play a significant role in spreading news of suicide, which triggered protests, and then multiply these protests. Estimated 18% of the Tunisian population is on Facebook, and neglected to block the dictator in time.
Among the well-educated young people who came out in force, can we be sure that the level of online (and mobile phone) participation was higher. Scholar Noureddine Miladi offer an estimate, half-Tunisian tv audience watch satellite TV, and he notes: "Al-Jazeera heavily relied on referring pages Facebook and YouTube in reporting raw events." So professional satellite TV fed off online citizen journalism.
In addition, these leap media borders. A leading British scholar of Maghreb showed me his Facebook page, which has many of his former students as Maghrebian Facebook friends. Several of the Moroccans had turned their Facebook icons to the Tunisian flags or Tunisia-Morocco love-heart, to show their enthusiasm for the first people-power overthrow a dictator Arab in more than 45 years. It is a small group, to be sure — but the elites case in opposition movements as in everything else.
Before Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali's case, his regime had turned back toward the netizens, installation "phishing" attacks on Gmail and Facebook accounts, harvesting passwords and e-mail lists of suspected opponents and then arrest prominent bloggers such as Slim Amamou. This reinforces the Morozovs point that the Internet is a double-edged sword: and yet it is also a back-handed tribute to the importance of these new media. As I write, become the former prisoners Amamou a member of a new, interim coalition Government.
No one knows what will happen tomorrow, but so far the Tunisian growing has been a tremendously encouraging development Рespecially because it was an authentic, homemade, largely spontaneous movement with a little active support from the Western powers. (Sometimes the contrary: France was until the last minute, offer its security expertise to keep the Tunisian Louis XVI in power. For shame, Madame Libert̩, for shame.)
Transformed information and communication technologies in our time played a role in enabling this rising success. The cause is not it, but they helped. Specialists claim that Tunisia, with its small, relatively homogeneous, urban, educated population and (for now) moderate, peaceful, largely exiled Islamists, can be a beacon of change in the Maghreb. If things go well, the spreading of the internet and satellite-TV, news across the Arab world.
So yes, the Internet presents weapons for oppressors and the oppressed — but not which seems to imply in Morozov equal measure. To balance offers more weapons for the oppressed. I think Hillary Clinton is therefore the right to identify global information freedom in General and internet freedom in particular, as one of the defining opportunities in our time. But there is also here, the dangers which Morozov will usefully points out.
If the fight for internet freedom is also closely identified with American foreign policy, and on the other hand, with us companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter – as in personnel terms have begun to have something of a "revolving door" relationship with the US Government – this may end up damaging it is meant to serve the purpose. Authoritarian regimes everywhere will redouble their efforts to censor and monitor these American platforms that are not accidentally, among the best and most open, we have. Instead, these regimes promote their own, more limited native alternatives such as Baidu in China.
The American Government as a whole is also very inconsistent in its approach to internet freedom. The berates China and Iran for hidden monitoring of opponents while doing the same himself against them it defines as threats to national security. It lauds global information freedom at the same time condemning WikiLeaks as, in Clinton's extraordinary words, "a threat to the international community".
Tunisia is again instructive. Talk about a "WikiLeaks revolution" is just as absurd as to a "Twitter revolution", but WikiLeaks revelations United States knew Ben Ali regime's rampant corruption contribute something to the pot misery is boiling. There was even a special website to disseminate and discuss Tunisia-related us cables (tunileaks.org). Of course needed the Tunisians not WikiLeaks tell you that their presidential family was a goon-protected self-enrichment cartel; But having detailed chapter and verse with the authority of the U.S. state department, and see how much the American superpower publicly regime-friendly private disliked it, and knowing that other Tunisians should know, also, because the American reports there were online for all to see – all this surely had an impact.
So if Clinton wants to argue, as think she can legitimately, that the u.s. pioneered infrastructure exchange of global information has contributed to the fragile rebirth freedom in Tunisia, then she should really put in a word of appreciation for WikiLeaks – or for like Kleenex, if you prefer Gaddafi version. But don't hold your breath.
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