28 Between enabling and restricting dissent: The two faces of social media
28 Between enabling and restricting dissent: The two faces of social media
Arne Hintz, Cardiff University
From the ‘Twitter’ and ‘Facebook-Revolutions’ in Iran in 2009 and Egypt in 2011 to the more recent activities of the Yo Soy 123 movement in Mexico, the Gezi Park protests in Turkey, or the Umbrella movement in Hong Kong, social media have been widely credited as an important force in supporting social and political change. While over-enthusiastic and technologically-deterministic notions of social media-based uprisings have been criticised, many observers maintain that digital platforms have been ‘effective catalysts’ for change and amplifiers of social movement activism. They have expanded the reach of protest mobilisations, enabled the creation of forums for free speech and for shared social and political criticism, and generated social spaces for developing critical discourses, especially where an open public sphere does not exist. Beyond facilitating protest, they have been vehicles to monitor elections and expose wrong-doings, and they have served as key platforms for ‘citizen witnessing’ and other forms of citizen journalism and grassroots reporting. As mechanisms for peer production and for sharing remixes, memes and mash-ups, they have become an essential infrastructure of contemporary participatory culture.
As crucial sites for protest and dissent, social media continue (and expand) the roles played by earlier forms of social movement media, alternative media, and ‘our media’. On a variety of platforms, these media have been used for spreading dissident information and have served as communication infrastructure for social movements – from the alternative press to video activism, and to the Indymedia network and grassroots tech groups (Milan, 2013). However most of these earlier media practices have been characterized by one decisive factor: they have been self-organised and self-managed, owned and controlled by civil society groups, typically in a non-profit, open and participatory fashion.
Social media, in contrast, are owned by private sector entities and operate under a commercial logic. As pointed out by Leistert, rather than guided by activist concerns, they are centred around ‘a complex and dynamic set of highly opaque tools for selling advertisements, commodities and data‘. With user data collection and analysis as their main business model, they track our online activities and preferences, and they provide a semi-public sphere of free and democratic communication only insofar as this aligns with their commercial goals. Social media users are customers, not citizens.
This has led to serious challenges for activists, and here I want to point to three of these.
First, the ‘big data’ generated through Google, Facebook and others is at the heart of current surveillance trends, as highlighted by the Snowden leaks. The ‘data mine’ of social media allows for the detailed monitoring and analysis of Internet users, including their loc