Media of the Regimes

A recent article on abcnews talks about the use (or abuse) of social media by governments, for the most part referring to Chinese, Iranian, Egyptian, and Russian governments.

My question is whether or not the author is aware that our own government is probably monitoring our use too. The difference is that we're still allowed full access to everything. I'm fairly certain if you posted in your Facebook or Twitter status that you were going to assassinate the president, they would know. I'm not going to spend this post talking about our own government's surveillance though, because that's a can of worms I don't want to get into.

Instead, let's talk about those other countries. Apparently, they're using social media to spread propaganda. I'm not sure I have a problem with that. It's their country, it will be run how they wish, and the people living there will believe what they want to believe. The only danger is that social media adds to propaganda what it does to advertising: an authentic and personal message. China is actually paying people approximately 50¢ per comment for that very reason. This has the potential to become a powerful brainwashing tool. But it won't.

Why? Because there are too many other people active in it. Even if countries block all tweets, status updates, and blogs from other countries they still have their own population to deal with. If the Iranian elections aren't an indication of the futile attempts of a government to bend national social media to their wishes I don't know what is. The entire time Iranians were tweeting about the horrible things happening there, government agents were attempting to subvert everything citizens said. It didn't work. Every time an agent tried to say a claim was false, they were immediately exposed by other users. The ratio for government to citizen users was not in their favor, and it never will be. Unless they can come up with a program that not only seeks out key phrases and finds the user responsible (which they do) but actually changes the user's posts, there's nothing to worry about. Even then there are work-arounds, and again I have to reference the Iranian election. Government officials were tracking down dissenters by checking up on their profile locations on Twitter, but users (including myself) helped thwart those efforts by changing our time zones and locations to the same place as the citizens (Tehran). This made it take 2, 3, 4 times as long to track down people they could actually do anything about.

In short, does it have the potential to turn scary? Yes. Will it? No. The internet belongs to the world's citizens, not governments, no matter how much regulation is imposed. They will not stand for being brainwashed.