Internet: Opium for the masses?

Thanks to the internet, governments have lost their monopoly on controlling information, while citizens have acquired access to other sources of knowledge and the ability to organise more safely. Many people will use this access to learn more about democracy, which will unshackle them from government propaganda. They will use this new power to push the government on accountability (as has happened to a limited extent in China, where online campaigners have had corrupt local officials sacked). When the next crisis strikes—such as the flawed Iranian election in 2009, or high fuel prices in Burma in 2007—citizens will turn to the internet to see how unpopular the regime has become. Discovering others of like mind, they will see the protests and, if the regime hasn’t responded with violence, join to create a “snowball” capable of crushing the most rigid authoritarian structure.

Social scientists have named these snowballs “information cascades.” They explain why, when most citizens may believe that a revolution will not succeed, they will still pour into the streets if everyone else is protesting; so many people can’t be wrong. Perhaps the most famous example is described in a 1994 paper by UCLA political scientist Susanne Lohmann. She sought to explain the sudden appeal of the “Monday demonstrations” in the East German town of Leipzig, which began in September 1989. Lohmann argues that the East German fence-sitters watched the protests unfold and, noting the lack of government retaliation, decided to join in. In the circumstances, it was the most rational thing for them to do.

It’s not hard to see how the internet might amplify information cascades and so strengthen the position of activists. The point is made most famously by the American web guru Clay Shirky. He is a darling of the social media world, a consultant for government, corporate and philanthropic bodies, and a source for reporters seeking quotes on how the internet is changing protest. He is also the man most responsible for the intellectual confusion over the political role of the internet. Shirky adapted Lohmann’s theories for the age of MySpace in his bestseller Here Comes Everybody (2008). The major lesson he drew from Leipzig is that people should “protest in ways that the state was unlikely to interfere with, and distribute evidence of their actions widely.” Why? Protesters are in a win-win situation: “If the state didn’t react, the documentation would serve as evidence that the protesting was safe. If the state did react, then the documentation of the crackdown could be used to spur an international outcry.”

But the truth is often different. In Belarus, most fence-sitters watched the state’s response and, acting rationally, went searching for higher fences. In Iran [2009], the famous photograph of Neda Agha-Soltan, murdered in the streets, went viral and became a symbol of the “green revolution.” Whether it encouraged any fence-sitters is much less obvious.

Information cascades often fail to translate into crowds, even without state fear-mongering. [2008’s] anti-Farc protests in Colombia—aided by Facebook—attracted huge crowds. But [2009’s] anti-Chávez protests did not, although they were organised by the same group using the same methods. The aim was for 50m people to rally worldwide but only a few thousand turned up. The same has been true when people have tried to organise protests in Azerbaijan and Russia.

Yet even if the internet doesn’t always bring people out onto the streets, its adherents have another, subtler argument. For democracy to succeed, they say, you need civil movements to help make protests more intense, frequent and well-attended. A vibrant civil society can challenge those in power by documenting corruption or uncovering activities like the murder of political enemies. In democracies, this function is mostly performed by the media, NGOs or opposition parties. In authoritarian states—or so the story goes—it is largely up to lone individuals, who often get locked up as a result. Yet if citizens can form ad-hoc groups, gain access to unbiased information and connect with each other, challenges to the state become more likely. And social theorists like Robert Putnam argue that the emergence of such groups increases social capital and trust among citizens.

It is true that the internet is building what I call “digital civic infrastructure”—new ways to access data and networks to distribute it. This logic underlies many western efforts to reshape cyberspace in authoritarian states. The British foreign secretary David Miliband has enthused about the potential of the communications revolution to “fuel the drive for social justice.” “If it’s true that there are more bloggers per head of population in Iran than in any other country, this makes me optimistic,” he has also said. In early November 2009, US secretary of state Hillary Clinton announced Civil Society 2.0, a project to help grassroots organisations around the world use digital technology, which will include tuition in online campaigning and how to leverage social networks.

But the emergence of this seemingly benign infrastructure can backfire on western governments. The first snag is that turning the internet into a new platform for civic participation requires certainty that only pro-western and pro-democracy forces will participate. Most authoritarian societies, however, defy easy classification into the “good guys vs bad guys” paradigms of the Bush era. In Egypt, for example, the extremist Muslim Brotherhood is a political force—albeit mostly missing from the Egyptian parliament—that can teach Hosni Mubarak a lesson about civic participation. It has an enviable digital presence and a sophisticated internet strategy: for example, campaigning online to get activists released from prison. Western governments shouldn’t be surprised when groups like this become the loudest voices in new digital spaces: they are hugely popular and are commonly denied a place in the heavily policed traditional public sphere.

Similarly, the smartest and most active user of new media in Lebanon is not the western-backed government of Saad Hariri, but the fundamentalist troublemakers of Hizbullah, whose suave manipulation of cyberspace was on display during the 2006 war with Israel. In Russia, the internet has given a boost to extreme right-wing groups like the Movement Against Illegal Immigration, which has been using Google Maps to visualise the location of ethnic minorities in Russian cities and encouraging its members to hound them out. Criminal gangs in Mexico are fond of YouTube, where they flaunt their power by uploading videos of their graphic killings. Generally, in the absence of strong democratic norms and institutions, the internet has fuelled a drive for vigilante justice rather than the social variety Miliband was expecting.

And it gets worse. Ultra-loyalist groups supporting Thailand’s monarchy were active during both the September 2006 coup and more recent street protests, finding anti-monarchy material that needed to be censored via a website called Protecttheking.net. In this, they are essentially doing the job usually reserved for the secret police. In much the same way, the Iranian revolutionary guards posted online photos of the most ardent protesters at the June 2009 rallies, asking pro-Ahmadinejad Iranians to identify them. And in August 2009 religious fundamentalists in Saudi Arabia launched a campaign to identify YouTube videos they found offensive and pressure the company to delete them—a form of digital “hacktivism” which must be delighting the official censors.

And it doesn’t help that anyone with a computer and an internet connection can launch a cyber-attack on a sovereign nation. [In 2008] I took part in one—purely for the sake of experiment—on the websites of the Georgian government. As the Russian tanks were marching into South Ossetia, I was sitting in a cafe in Berlin with a laptop and instructions culled from Russian nationalist blogs. All I had to do was to input the targets provided—the URLs of hostile Georgian institutions (curiously, the British embassy in Tbilisi was on that list)—click “Start” and sit back. I did it out of curiosity; thousands of Russians did it out of patriotism. And the Russian government turned a blind eye. The results of the attack were unclear. For a brief period some government emails and a few dozen websites were either slow or unavailable; some Georgian banks couldn’t offer online services for a short period.

Yet while the internet may take the power away from an authoritarian (or any other) state or institution, that power is not necessarily transferred to pro-democracy groups. Instead it often flows to groups who, if anything, are nastier than the regime. Social media’s greatest assets—anonymity, “virality,” interconnectedness—are also its main weaknesses.

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So how do repressive governments use the internet? As we have seen, the security services can turn technology against the logistics of protest. But the advent of blogging and social networking has also made it easier for the state to plant and promote its own messages, spinning and neutralising online discussions before they translate into offline action. The “great firewall of China,” which supposedly keeps the Chinese in the dark, is legendary. In truth, such methods of internet censorship no longer work. They might stop the man on the street, but a half determined activist can find a way round. And more often than not, official attempts to delete a post by an anti-government blogger will backfire, as the blogger’s allies take on the task of distributing it through their own networks. Governments have long lost absolute control over how the information spreads online, and extirpating it from blogs is no longer a viable option. Instead, they fight back. It is no trouble to dispatch commentators to accuse a dissident of being an infidel, a sexual deviant, a criminal, or worst of all a CIA stooge.

Moreover, the distracting noise of the internet—the gossip, pornography, and conspiracy theories—can act as a de-politicising factor. Providing unfettered access to information is not by itself going to push citizens of authoritarian states to learn about their government’s crimes. Political scientists talk about the preference for non-political information as “rational ignorance.” It’s a fancy way of saying that most people, whether in democracies or not, prefer to read about trivia and what’s useful in daily life—restaurant and film reviews and so on—than about the tedious business of governance.

One study from early 2007, by a Saudi academic, showed that 70 per cent of all content swapped by Saudi teenagers via Bluetooth was pornographic. Authoritarian governments know that the internet could be a new opium for the masses. They are tolerant of rampant internet piracy, as in China. In many cases, they push the cyber-hedonistic pursuits of their youth. Government-controlled internet providers in Belarus, for example, run dedicated servers full of pirated digital goodies for their clients to download for free. Under this new social contract, internet users are allowed plenty of autonomy online—just so long as they don’t venture into politics.

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We shouldn’t kid ourselves. Nobody knows how to create sustainable digital public spheres capable of promoting democracy. Western interventions can even thwart the natural development of such spaces. Governments usually give cash to a favoured NGO—often based outside the authoritarian state in question—which has the job of creating new social media infrastructure: group blogs, social networks, search engines and other services that we take for granted in the west. The NGOs then hire local talent to work on a Belarusian Twitter or an Egyptian version of the blog-search platform Technorati.

Yet these services work because they are born in entrepreneurial cultures where they can be speedily built and adapted to local needs. The stodgy form-filling process of angling for the next juicy grant, which in truth drives nearly all NGOs, is a world away from a freewheeling Palo Alto start-up. The result is a clumsy arrangement in which NGOs toil away on lengthy, expensive and unnecessary projects instead of ditching them when it becomes apparent they won’t work and moving on to the next idea. Despite millions of dollars poured into the former Soviet Union, NGO-funded new media projects that are alive and kicking a year after the original grant has ended can be counted on the fingers of one hand.

So should we stop funding projects that use the internet to promote democracy? Of course not. Even a sceptic like me can see the upside. Western governments and NGOs shouldn’t abandon their digital democracy push, they should just improve it. One way would be to invest in tools that help make digital civic spaces less susceptible to government spin. There are some interesting prototypes—particularly based around Wikipedia edits—that supply readers with visual hints that some contributors may not be trustworthy. As Twitter and Facebook emerge as platforms for cyber-activism in authoritarian states, it is essential they are aware of their new global obligations, including the need to protect the data entrusted to them by activists. Elsewhere, cyber-attacks on NGOs are poised to intensify. We in the west should be prepared to step in and help the dissenting voices, providing free and prompt assistance to get back online as soon as possible.

Some consistency in dealing with cyber-attacks is also needed. If we treat cyber-attacks that Russian nationalists launch on Estonian or Georgian targets as crimes, we cannot approve when our own “hacktivists” launch similar attacks on Iranian government websites. And western governments should refrain from confirming paranoid autocrats’ theories about a Twitter revolution, thus necessitating a crackdown.

 

Extract from How dictators watch us on the web EVGENY MOROZOV