§
). At the same
time, the reaffirmation of support for Internet freedom by the United States and other
Western states in the wake of the Middle Eastern protests caused the pendulum to
swing back.
In this context, the U.S. government’s firm and prompt denouncement on
January 28 (via Twitter at first) of Egypt’s crackdown on the Internet and social
mediaand Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s official denial of any U.S. role in coercing
private companies to deny services to Wikileaks in her “Internet freedom” speech on
February 15 may be seen as part of this overall trend.
In the end, however, the U.S. government’s somewhat moderated but persistent
blame-laying upon Wikileaks is not the weakest link in its public reaffirmation of
support for Internet freedom.
Nor are the familiar claims, routinely made by Internet
activists and a number of foreign governments, of political bias in the U.S. Internet
freedom support agenda. Nor is the widespread concern about the potential for U.S.
support to compromise local forces who accept it as non-genuine, pro-Western actors.
The weakest link in U.S. policy on the matter is
the automatic connection it
makes between social media networks and a Western-style democracy agenda. While
the U.S. government (and others) are probably doomed to make this connection, it is a
problematic one in several ways. By emphasizing the power of new technologies in
§
Criticism came from a wide range of sources including
The Guardian
, other newspapers, exchanges at Harvard University’s Berkman Center
for Internet Society (see links
1
,
2
,
3
), etc.
6
spreading Western democratic values, this approach ignores the socioeconomic and
social justice and equality dimensions of the mass protests in the Arab world, which
may be linked to, but is not identical to, political democracy promotion, especially in its
liberal sense. Also, while effective as a grassroots tool to bring down an authoritarian
regime, social media-based network activism may not be best suited for political
competition at the stage of “post-revolutionary” state-building, governance reform, and
institutionalized politics
in general, compared to more institutionalized and better
organized actors. More generally, net-based information and communication tools may
serve as powerful accelerating factors of social protest, but they do not in and of
themselves reflect or dictate the substantive natures (sociopolitical, value-based, and
ideological) and contextual forms of such protests. These tools and technologies are
utilized by different sociopolitical forces in different contexts, ranging from secular left-
wing trade unions
,
reformist and radical Islamists (as in Bahrain and Syria), and right-
wing populists and nationalists.
If there is a positive pattern to discern in the impact of Internet-based tools and
social media networks on recent developments
in the Middle East, it may have less to
do with fostering Western-style democracy than in encouraging relatively
less violent
forms of mass protest. In
contrast to Tunisia and Egypt, low or minimal social media
activism (especially in Libya and Yemen) tend to roughly correspond with violent
escalation, even as a host of other factors, not least of which is the degree of government
repression, may ultimately contribute to violence. In this context,
the use of ICT may be
seen as the new “technical” basis for reviving the phenomenon of mass,
non-violent
protest campaigns. This pattern is certainly one that merits further empirical and
analytical investigation.
© PONARS Eurasia 2011. The George Washington University Elliott School of International Affairs. This publication was made
possible by a grant from Carnegie Corporation of New York. The statements made and views expressed are solely the
responsibility of the author.
www.ponarseurasia.org
