Attributing Too Much to Twitter
I think I’m going to say “no” to Joe Scarborough’s question:
Will Twitter and the Internet prevent a Tiananmen Square-styled crackdown in Tehran? Will technology trump theocracy?
I think there’s no doubt that the growth of modern information technology facilitates organizing anti-regime protests in authoritarian states. I don’t think you need to attribute that all to Twitter, as such, but the overall pattern is clear. Organizing mass demonstrations requires a lot of communication, and things that make communication easier make organizing easier.
But when you have your mass protests, you still have the key question. Do the security services just kill a bunch of people (Tiananmen)? Does the regime blink and surrender (Velvet Revolution)? Does the regime attempt surrender, only to be undercut by a hardline coup (USSR, 1991)? Does the regime attempt to resist, only to be undone by a coup (Romania)? Information technology doesn’t seem to me to have anything to do with this. It all has to do with internal regime politics, and the attitudes of the people leading and serving in the security forces.
21 Responses to “Attributing Too Much to Twitter”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
June 18th, 2009 at 10:17 am
Robert Wright has been talking about this for years, in his book Non-Zero and on Bloggingheads. He says that technology makes economic and then political progress possible, but that it’s not a given. A government has the option of cracking down on the technology in order to impede that progress, with the necessary trade-off being disengagement from the world around it.
June 18th, 2009 at 10:18 am
If all the protesters set their Twitter to “stun” they could immobilize Iran’s security forces peacefully. Gotta think outside the box on this stuff.
June 18th, 2009 at 10:20 am
I mostly agree but wonder what you’re talking about in the Soviet Union. There were protests, but only _after_ the hard-line coup, and to the extent the regime can be said to have “surrendered” it was to Yeltsin and the like, not the coup leaders. Maybe you mean not sending in troops to East Germany and the like? That would be in ‘89, not ‘91, and not because of protests in the Soviet Union. So, this example seems pretty confused to me, even if the general point of the post is okay.
June 18th, 2009 at 10:26 am
A Fistful of Euros has a pretty good analysis of why Ahmadinejad is likely to prevail.
June 18th, 2009 at 10:30 am
What these technologies do is create a sense that there are many others out there that share a point of view, that resistance may not be futile, and they may even create a false sense of a movement’s breadth. But a false sense is just as good as a real one if it’s getting people out into the streets. It becomes self-fulfilling.
June 18th, 2009 at 10:32 am
Yep. But we don’t like to think about this, because it’s depressing. It’s more fun to believe that social networking has liberated us all from the danger of a police state.
June 18th, 2009 at 10:34 am
Organizing mass demonstrations requires a lot of communication, and things that make communication easier make organizing easier.
Iran is a fairly wealthy country with oodles of people who have cell phones, Internet access, and so on. The flexible nature of communicating with packets means its harder today for a regime to clamp down on communications in places where those options exist. Close one avenue, and two more open up. Twitter is getting its 15 minutes now, but even if the Iranian government magically changed the way cell phones transmit data within its borders, somebody will cook up something else to replace it. China’s screwball censorship tactics are about as effective as one could expect, but illicit internet traffic is pretty common in China in practice (so I’ve been told). Once China has a high enough percentage of its population fiddling around with computers all day, its game over for the censorship policies.
June 18th, 2009 at 10:48 am
Matt gave an example yesterday about how if people you don’t like are against something, that may be reason to be more enthusiastic about it. Negative indicators?
So the Chamber of Commerce comes out against the new proposed financial regulations and consumer safety board which means they’re probably good and worthwhile.
So after Ahmadinejad was declared victor, the regime shut down facebook, twitter, etc. And kicked out foreign journalists.
However Scarborough doesn’t like Ahmadinejad or the Chinese government and those two are still bad and repressive, however much we dislike Scarborough.
June 18th, 2009 at 10:49 am
Yup – we were just discussing this fact. There are some general reasons the news media is falling all over themselves to over-hype Twitter, I think this post does a good job of explaining the phenomenon.
June 18th, 2009 at 10:50 am
Modern communications technology doesn’t stop totalitarian regimes from cracking down on their own people. However, it makes it virtually impossible for them to do so in a plausibly deniable manner.
Throughout most of the 20th century, governments could commit the most vile atrocities and have a reasonable chance of covering them up. For decades, many Westerners, including eminent scholars and scientists, believed that the Soviet Union under Lenin and Stalin was a humane and well-run state, and that claims of mass starvation were false. Even Nazi Germany had many defenders in the West prior to World War II. And Western governments routinely covered up colonial atrocities.
That is no longer the case. North Korea and Burma have successfully continued totalitarian rule, but by doing so they have sacrificed their economies and become pariahs in the eyes of the world. No one can look to North Korea as they once did to the Soviet Union and think it is a viable blueprint for the future. Governments that actually want to have economic growth and good relations with other countries have to show more restraint. China and Iran are acting in a more subtle manner than North Korea and Burma because they have more to lose.
June 18th, 2009 at 10:51 am
I think IT communication tech does somewhat improve the odds of success in these sorts of things.
Assume that the government is going to crackdown on the protest Tianamen style. Make another assumption that the government forces to be used in the crackdown are 100% behind the government. At that point, anything that increases the amount of accurate information about the protesters is likely to improve the attitude of the forces towards the protesters in a positive manner, and decrease the likelyhood of a crackdown.
It might not be enough to make a difference, but every bit helps in situations like this.
June 18th, 2009 at 10:52 am
Ahmadinejad is not the head of a regime. He is Iran’s president. The regime extends over and beyond Ahmadinejad.
Although there no doubt that the movement taking place contains elements who are deeply hostile to the regime itself, from a distance it looks like the aim of the movement as a whole is not to topple the Iranian regime. This is primarily a reformist movement, not a revolutionary movement.
June 18th, 2009 at 10:56 am
I’ll go ahead and play devil’s advocate here. Yes, it may prevent a massacre. It won’t eliminate the possibility of bloodshed but I’ll bet having a whole lot of witnesses makes the commission of a crime less probable.
June 18th, 2009 at 11:38 am
Although there no doubt that the movement taking place contains elements who are deeply hostile to the regime itself, from a distance it looks like the aim of the movement as a whole is not to topple the Iranian regime. This is primarily a reformist movement, not a revolutionary movement.
This is entirely true, but…
The Iranian regime is an unwieldy hybrid. It has, already in place, all the practical mechanisms of a French-style Republic: a Parliament with a Prime Minister, a President with a measure of independent authority, and regularly scheduled elections.
But behind the scenes lurks a parallel theocratic state with its own vaguely Soviet-style institutions: a clerical council (the assembly of experts) with its own chairman, which elects a Supreme Leader who has dictatorial discretion within certain limits but owes his authority to the Assembly, and a Politburo of sorts (the Council of Guardians) which holds much of the real power and is half-appointed by the Supreme Leader and half by the parliament. In practice, the theocratic state runs the democratic state as a dog and pony show… winnowing any troublesome candidates from the field and keeping the parliament and President away from the levers of real power… to focus on only the most mundane
In this context, the differences between reforms, revolution, bureaucratic power struggle, and coup d’etat are not all that easy to parse. Few in Iran seem to want another revolution that smashes existing institutions and builds new ones. What we’re seeing is a power struggle between various existing nodes of power within the hybrid system. But if reformist elements, backed by street protests, succeed in expanding the authority of the Majlis and the President (with that power in the hands of modernizing elements), bringing about open elections, and circumscribing the authority of the clerics to interfere with the democratic process, then that would effectively result in revolutionary change.
June 18th, 2009 at 11:52 am
Disagreeing a bit with the argument, I don’t think it’s controversial to say that if the Mousavi’s people had not been able to turn out crowds over the past few days, this would already be over. SMS messaging has had a consistent role in organizing protests in China, both against local governments and in nationalistic anti-Japanese demonstrations. Obviously that hasn’t brought down the government, but it is a widely used tool even when it isn’t visible to us via Twitter.
In the face of a unified regime prepared to crack down, that won’t matter, but effective mass mobilization can be an input to internal regime politics and security forces attitudes. Also, for now the Basij militia seems to be the main countervailing force, so as long as it stays a movement vs. movement conflict outmaneuvering is a possibility. I’m no Iran expert, but from what I’ve read Ackmadinejad can directly manage them but is not effectively in charge of some of the more conventional forces.
June 18th, 2009 at 11:52 am
tom c Says:
June 18th, 2009 at 10:56 am
I’ll go ahead and play devil’s advocate here. Yes, it may prevent a massacre. It won’t eliminate the possibility of bloodshed but I’ll bet having a whole lot of witnesses makes the commission of a crime less probable.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
There has been much state sanctioned mayhem and murder during several recent uprisings that pre-date cell phones with cameras, Twitter, texting, etc. Small, concealable, hand-held camcorders have been around for decades. Their certain presence and use didn’t seem to dissuade violent security forces in past events.
June 18th, 2009 at 11:52 am
What we’re seeing is a power struggle between various existing nodes of power within the hybrid system.
In a way, it mirrors the technology. When the regime opened up access to Facebook recently, it was basically a tightly-monitored venue for free expression, which makes it simultaneously free and unfree. So the idea of strictly-defined zones of “free expression” that marks election season extends outwards.
You can curb tech with crude means (Burma’s junta cutting the cables) or sophisticated ones (China’s firewall) and you can ringfence free expression for totalitarian purposes. But the latter is inherently unstable and potentially subversive, depending on the intersection of the monopoly of violence and the monopoly on communication.
June 18th, 2009 at 12:03 pm
This strikes me as correct. I disagreed with your last post about twittering, and thought it missed the point of its importance, which is namely, not that twitter makes people better at organizing (maybe it does, maybe it doesn’t)… what was important was that people were able to use the service to get pass state censors. So its given the Iranian people the ability to organize and protest more easily when it might have been more difficult in the past, so that’s great, but of course whether or not these protests will change the power dynamics in Iran is still a question that hangs in the balance.
June 18th, 2009 at 1:06 pm
It doesn’t here; why would it there?
June 18th, 2009 at 10:43 pm
Once again, this is fundamentally a proxy fight between Khamenei and Rafsanjani, with Moursavi being Rafsanjani’s stalking horse, and Ahmadinejad being Khamenei’s.
Khamenei has just told Moursavi he has to toe the line or he’s out. My guess is that all this will blow over within another week or two once various compromises have been made and various other people have been muzzled.
There’s certainly not going to be any “revolution” here, via Twitter or anything else.
I just got my own Twitter account – mostly to track Sharon Corr, who’s become addicted to Twitter in the last couple weeks in the run up to the release of her new solo album. Sharon’s actually following my tweets and has responded to several fans directly.
I’m also tracking Matt and Joseph Cirincione so far. So Matt can expect my gratuitous insults on his Twitter updates whenever he says something stupid – which will probably be daily.
June 19th, 2009 at 3:21 pm
I think we should go back to using letters and the pony express or how about we use rotary phones. I call 10 people and each of them call 10 people and we can see how many people we can get. I just hope the 10 people I call don’t have any zeros or nines in there phone numbers. Come on, is this really worth even debating? It is all just a level of communication. Is twitter narcissistic? Not any more narcissistic as it is when you tell a friend about your mundane day at work over a phone conversation. Embrace it, use it, mobilize, take control, and make it better…make our lives better. There is no revolution except for a communication revolution. Twitter is just a step. The next step will be out soon.