Do Twitter and Facebook support or undermine Iran's Green reform movement?
Is web-based “slacktivism” an inadequate and even dangerous alternative to real political activity? Cyber-solidarity certainly feels good, writes Evgeny Morozov, who is researching the Internet’s impact on authoritarian states at Washington DC’s Georgetown University. But he identifies a downside to Iran’s ‘Twitter Revolution’:
As it happens, both Facebook and Twitter give Iran’s secret services superb platforms for gathering open source intelligence about the future revolutionaries, revealing how they are connected to each other. These details are now being shared voluntarily, without any external pressure. Once regimes used torture to get this kind of data; now it’s freely available on Facebook.
The U.S. government needs to “radically rethink” the role of cold-war-era institutions like Radio Free Europe and Voice of America, he suggests, and develop “more nimble and popular platforms.”
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