Is Twitter Helping in Egypt?

What happened in Tunisia was not a Facebook revolution, and what’s happening now in Egypt is not a potential Twitter revolution. As Malcolm Gladwell argued persuasively in this magazine a few months ago, technology cannot a revolution make.

Yet social media technology is clearly shaping events. Facebook and Twitter have undoubtedly accelerated the protests by spreading news that would otherwise have taken a long time to spread, by quickly connecting people who aren’t generally able to connect in authoritarian countries, and by inflaming passions. As anyone who has read a political blog in this country knows, the Internet is marvelous at getting you to believe more strongly what you already believe. And if you believe that Hosni Mubarak or Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali is a fool who needs a boot in his back, then you’re going to believe that once you start spending some time online. If you don’t believe me, scroll through #cairo on Twitter. It’s hard to read the tweets and not want to take up arms in the streets.

One must, however, be cautious about praising the impact of social media on social protest. For starters, it’s not as though technology always works to favor the people in the streets. (Nor is it the case that one should always favor the people in the streets.) Governments control the pipes through which all that information flows. This means they can block sites or, as Egypt has just apparently done, shut down the entire Internet and thus confuse everyone who has come to rely on it. In Iran, the government clearly had some success using the Internet to disrupt and slow the green revolution. In Tunisia, the government hacked the password of nearly every Facebook user in the country. Had Ben Ali not fallen so quickly, that information would have been extremely useful. Technological tools can be used quite effectively by the masses, or by the man.

The other thing to worry, or at least wonder, about is how revolutions inspired by the Internet will change their countries. Movements that center around hashtags often don’t center around leaders. Who is the Václav Havel of Tunisia? Headless movements have advantages: are the charismatic people who are best at leading protests really the people you want to lead your country after the government changes? But they also have disadvantages: if a government falls, who, then, will run it? Over at the Daily Beast, Les Gelb provides a history lesson, noting that “in rotten regimes that fall to street mobs, the historical pattern has been moderates followed by new dictators.” A revolution that plays out in part through one-hundred-and-forty-character bursts of passion may actually make that even more likely.
