The Dark side of social media

1. What We Don't Get About
Social Media's Dark Side
By Evgeny Morozov
May 2012

2. The Background
My perspective: shaped by NGO/philanthropy
experience
2005-2006 excitement about “blogs” =
today's excitement about “social media”
Got frustrated with uncritical and naïve
embrace of “technological fixes” by policy-
makers

4. What is it to be “critical” of the Net?
* It's NOT to reject it as unimportant,
unnecessary or uninteresting (≠SKEPTICISM)
* It's NOT to deny that the Net can enhance
democracy, undermine authoritarianism, etc
(≠DISMISSAL)
* It's NOT to suggest that bad guys (dictators,
NSA, Microsoft) will always win (≠ PESSIMISM)

5. Instead we need to...
- Reject claims of the Net's “inherent logic”
- Avoid “is-ism” mentality
- Recognize that preserving the liberating
potential of the Net will be hard work

6. I. Authoritarian regimes
- Utility of soc media depends on the political
cycle
- Emergencies/revolutions aren't representative
1
events
- If current business and political trends
continue, the Net will be less useful to dissidents,
more useful to dictators

7. Why is the “dark side” so hard
to notice?

8. Technology & Social Change
Instrumentalist vs Ecological
Perspectives

9. Instrumentalist Perspective
- The Internet is just a neutral tool, an instrument,
an amplifier
- It can be used for both good and bad
- It's all about how people use it
- If the Internet weren't available, protesters would
have used some other tool
- The Net's role is most interesting during/right
before protest

10. Exhibit A: Zuckerberg
“Social media’s role [in the Arab Spring] is maybe a bit
12
overblown. If people want change, then they will find a
way to get that change. Whatever technology they
10
may or may not have used was neither a necessary
nor sufficient case for getting to the outcome that
8
they got to, but having people who wanted change
6
Column 1
Column 2
was. I don’t pretend that [if] Facebook didn’t exist, that
Column 3
this wouldn’t even be possible. Of course it would have”
4
Mark Zuckerberg on Charlie Rose, Nov 7, 2011
2
0
Row 1 Row 2 Row 3 Row 4

11. Questions to Zuckerberg:
1. Doesn't the Internet alter – in one way or another -
how and why people “want change”?
2. More broadly: doesn't the notion of “change” mean
something different for a person with Internet access
than to a person without it?

12. Exhibit B: Malcolm Gladwell
“People protested and brought down governments
before Facebook was invented... People with a
grievance will always find ways to communicate with
each other. How they choose to do it is less
interesting, in the end, than why they were driven to
do it in the first place.”
Malcolm Gladwell, “Does Egypt Need
Twitter?”, New Yorker's News Desk blog

13. Questions to Gladwell
1. Is someone who has a grievance and is online
fundamentally different from someone who has
a grievance and is offline?
2. To what extent does the Internet alter what it
means “to have a grievance”? Does it give rise
to new grievances that wouldn't be possible
before?
3. Didn't technology/media play at least SOME
role in the run-up to East German protests or the
French revolution?

14. Exhibit C: Clay Shirky 1.0
"Because the cost of sharing and coordinating has
collapsed, new methods of organization are available to
ordinary citizens, methods that allow events to be
arranged without much advance planning."
Clay Shirky, Here Comes Everybody, 2008

15. Key Question to Shirky 1.0
1. What if the Net makes it more likely that
people WON'T organize protests (e.g. fears of
surveillance or slacktivism or cyber-
hedonism...)
2. More broadly: Instrumentalist position knows
how to deal with assessing effectiveness of
protest, but what about its likelihood?

16. Ecological Perspective
- The Net is more than a tool; it transforms both
the environment where politics is made, and
those who participate in politics
- In authoritarian regimes, the Internet may be
creating a new, digital, networked public
sphere
- The Internet's most interesting impact is not
during protest but before & after it

17. Exhibit A: Shirky 2.0
1
“...What I didn't do a good enough job of assessing [in Here Comes
Everybody] is that ...the ability to turn people out on the street is
the end of a long process rather than a shortcut...Countries where
this kind of turnout worked best was where there had been years of
conversation in advance among people who were politically like-
minded enough to agree on a strategy.“
Clay Shirky, interview with Anneberg Digital News, Nov 2011

18. Exhibit B: Marc Lynch
”
“... the strongest case for the fundamentally transformative effects of the
new media may lie in the general emergence of a public sphere
capable of eroding the ability of states to monopolize information
and argument, of pushing for transparency and accountability, and
of facilitating new networks across society...The question of whether
that authoritarian state can adapt to this challenge, as it has to others in
the past, should shape our research agenda in the coming years.”
Marc Lynch, “The Limits and Promise of Online Challenges
to the Authoritarian Arab State

19. Ecological Tradition: Key Questions
1. Can we ** predict ** the influence that the Internet
will have on a given *ecology*? How do we know
we have told the whole story? → importance of
context and local knowledge
2. If we can predict that influence, how do we
translate its influence on ** ecology ** to its impact
on political life? (e.g. “networked public sphere”:
what is its impact?)

20. Propositions
1. Smart dictators will use the Net to suppress
some of the Net's emancipatory capabilities
WHILE developing new, repressive capabilities
2. Whether they succeed depends on many
factors, many of them independent of
technology
3. The task is to understand their game plan

21. Dictators' Adaptation Strategies
- From Censorship to New Forms of Harassment
- Propaganda
- Surveillance
- Control of online resources
- Use of tech to outsmart the protesters
- Post-protest clean-up with emerging tech

22. New forms of censorship
- Delegating Censorship to Private Companies
●
- Bypassing the Dictator's Dilemma: From
Filtering to Customized Censorship
●
- Cyber-attacks: Tomaar

23. New Forms of Propaganda
- China's 50-cent army
●
- Russia's “Spinternet” initiatives
●
- Active use of Twitter by pro-government
forces in Syria and Bahrain

24. New forms of surveillance
- Spying on activists with Western
technology
- Mobile tracking
- Data-mining + social graph analysis

25. Control of Online Resources
- Russia/China vs Egypt/Tunisia: platform
control
- Iran's “halal” internet
●
- Pressure on BlackBerry (and now others) to
keep servers in the country

26. Outsmarting protesters
- Flashmobs in Belarus
- Fake protests in Sudan
- Facebook pressure in Zimbabwe

27. Post-protest “clean up”
- Facial recognition technology
- Voice analysis
- Identification of who was in the protest zone
through mobile phones

28. The real Internet Freedom Agenda
To thwart these adaptation strategies, we'll need
to ask a lot of tough questions about
- how Silicon Valley should run its affairs
- how tightly we want to regulate exports of
technology to repressive regimes
- how far Western law enforcement agencies want to
go in terms of online surveillance

29. Dystopian future?
- The Net is NOT inherently liberating; its liberating
potential may shrink or grow depending on the
circumstances
- Dictatorships may collapse for all sorts of reasons
but let's not make their jobs easier
- Key Q: will the Net be MORE or LESS conducive to
dissent in 5 years?

30. II. Democracies
- Instrumental vs Ecological logic works here as
well
- Optimists point to growth in an individual's
ability to a) get published b) find supporters &
organize together
- Heavily influenced by US preoccupation with
civil society & freedom of expression

31. Democratization of Everything?
- Analogies to printing press are misleading
- Corporate environment + state apparatus
more complex
- Getting published ≠ Getting heard
- Inequality reinforced online?

32. Trivially true but...
- This is not the only effect – once again, we
need an ecological rather than instrumental
perspective
- Transition to “social media” from “Web 1.0”
publishing adds many more layers of complexity

33. New Players = More Complexity
Old Model: Your hosting company
New Model: Apple, AMZN, Google, FB, Twitter
====================================
Old Model: You paid $ and they left you alone
New Model: It seems free but it isn't

34. The new intermediaries
- Powerful but their civic commitments are often
neither obvious nor transparent
- Run by geeks who have some odd ideas about
democracy
-Their incentive structure is profit-oriented rather
than democracy-oriented

35. Being “critical” of new intermediaries
* Whatever their role in improving access to
information or assisting collective action, we
shouldn't accept these new intermediaries and
their mediating role uncritically
* These new intermediaries may end up
empowering those already in power, producing
less effective politics, lowering the quality of the
public debate, etc

36. Google as lifestyle intermediary

37. Google: the car

38. Amazon as literary intermediary

39. Personalization of Text?

40. Facebook as political intermediary

41. What's to be done
- The point is not to reject these
intermediaries
- Rather: push for alternative
values/designs
●
- Otherwise: easy to see these tools having
a negative effect on democratic politics

42. Thank you!
Evgeny.morozov@gmail.com
Twitter: @evgenymorozov