I'll check it out. From the first page (I know there are five) it seems to be missing the point. I also think the same article, written after much of the recent political upheaval, would be very different. But, again, only read the first page.
I wasn't trying to attribute some amazing otherworldly significance to Twitter. I was merely noting that it has been a very effective organizing tool in quite a few countries with oppressive governments.
There are certainly limitations (it's a tool, tools only do certain things), but from a communication and (what I actually care about) security perspective, it has provided a rapid dissemination technique for information that works nearly anonymously. Because tweets can be posted via text messages from a disposable phone, the authors of organizational information can be nearly impossible to identify*. This has interesting repercussions in my opinion. I'm not into the whole "social media is XXX" discussion, I'm a computer security and privacy person, and I am primarily interested in those aspects. But, clearly, keeping organizers largely anonymous makes it much harder to shut down protest movements and the like. Obviously, it's possible; If the government is willing or able to simply kill or imprison the entire group, anonymity is worthless. And, if the government has sufficient organization and will to remove everyone who would organize before momentum builds, they have a less obvious means of controlling dissent. But the requirements to suppress dissent are more pronounced now, and I suspect this will continue to have socio-political ramifications.
The limitations of the twitter framework, and even the limitations of the twitter framework used in conjunction with TOR are pretty well understood at this point, but you get quite a lot.
* the nearly is a key word. If enough resources are committed, the disposable phone's locations can be triangulated, the people suspected of having the wherewithal to organize can be tracked, and found. But this is a slow, resource-intensive process. It requires quite a bit of time and money for each bit of tracking.
I wasn't trying to attribute some amazing otherworldly significance to Twitter. I was merely noting that it has been a very effective organizing tool in quite a few countries with oppressive governments.
There are certainly limitations (it's a tool, tools only do certain things), but from a communication and (what I actually care about) security perspective, it has provided a rapid dissemination technique for information that works nearly anonymously. Because tweets can be posted via text messages from a disposable phone, the authors of organizational information can be nearly impossible to identify*. This has interesting repercussions in my opinion. I'm not into the whole "social media is XXX" discussion, I'm a computer security and privacy person, and I am primarily interested in those aspects. But, clearly, keeping organizers largely anonymous makes it much harder to shut down protest movements and the like. Obviously, it's possible; If the government is willing or able to simply kill or imprison the entire group, anonymity is worthless. And, if the government has sufficient organization and will to remove everyone who would organize before momentum builds, they have a less obvious means of controlling dissent. But the requirements to suppress dissent are more pronounced now, and I suspect this will continue to have socio-political ramifications.
The limitations of the twitter framework, and even the limitations of the twitter framework used in conjunction with TOR are pretty well understood at this point, but you get quite a lot.
* the nearly is a key word. If enough resources are committed, the disposable phone's locations can be triangulated, the people suspected of having the wherewithal to organize can be tracked, and found. But this is a slow, resource-intensive process. It requires quite a bit of time and money for each bit of tracking.
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