Abstract
New technology is neither inherently good, nor inherently bad, nor inherently neutral. When it comes to new ways to communicate and to share information, new technology irreversibly alters the social structure of a community, making new things possible and rendering the old ways of doing things inaccessible. When a community is already experiencing social change or tension, this only adds fuel to the fire. New access to information can lead to positive social change, but tools like social media can also be turned into a weapon. New tech plus new social structures can bring great instability and uncertainty to a society. That story—far more than foreign meddling—has played out repeatedly throughout the Global South.
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Notes
- 1.
Zeynep Tufekci, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 5.
- 2.
See Chapter 1 for a discussion of how this phenomenon played out at several points in human history.
- 3.
Twitter and Tear Gas, p. 27.
- 4.
Lara Logan, “The Deadly Beating that Sparked Egypt Revolution,” CBS News, published February 2, 2011, www.cbsnews.com/news/the-deadly-beating-that-sparked-egypt-revolution/ .
- 5.
“We Are All Khaled Said,” Facebook page, www.facebook.com/elshaheeed.co.uk .
- 6.
Lara Logan, “The Deadly Beating that Sparked Egypt Revolution.”
- 7.
Twitter and Tear Gas, p. 23.
- 8.
“Timeline: Egypt’s Revolution,” Al Jazeera, published February 14, 2011, www.aljazeera.com/news/middleeast/2011/01/201112515334871490.html .
- 9.
Abdel-Rahman Hussein and Julian Borger, “Muslim Brotherhood’s Mohamed Morsi declared president of Egypt,” The Guardian, published June 24, 2012, www.theguardian.com/world/2012/jun/24/muslim-brotherhood-egypt-president-mohamed-morsi .
- 10.
David D. Kirkpatrick, “Army Ousts Egypt’s President; Morsi Is Taken Into Military Custody,” The New York Times, published July 3, 2013, www.nytimes.com/2013/07/04/world/middleeast/egypt.html .
- 11.
“Egypt election: Sisi secures landslide win,” BBC News, published May 29, 2014, www.bbc.com/news/world-middle-east-27614776 .
- 12.
Kevin Roose, “Is Tech Too Easy to Use?,” The Shift, The New York Times, published December 12, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/12/12/technology/tech-friction-frictionless.html .
- 13.
Dan Arnaudo, “Brazil: Political Bot Intervention During Pivotal Events,” in Computational Propaganda, ed. Samuel Woolley and Philip N. Howard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), p. 136.
- 14.
Ibid.
- 15.
Ibid., p. 137.
- 16.
Ibid., p. 140, based on Éric Tadeu Camacho de Oliveira, Fabricio Olivetti De França, Denise Goya, and Claudio Luis de Camargo Penteado, “The Influence of Retweeting Robots during Brazilian Protests,” paper presented at the 2016 49th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS), Koloa, DOI: 10.1109/HICSS.2016.260.
- 17.
Chay F. Hofileña, “Fake accounts, manufactured reality on social media,” Rappler, last updated January 28, 2018, www.rappler.com/newsbreak/investigative/148347-fake-accounts-manufactured-reality-social-media .
- 18.
Lauren Etter, “What Happens When the Government Uses Facebook as a Weapon?,” Bloomberg Businessweek, published December 7, 2017, www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2017-12-07/how-rodrigo-duterte-turned-facebook-into-a-weapon-with-a-little-help-from-facebook .
- 19.
Maria A. Ressa, “Propaganda war: Weaponizing the internet,” Rappler, last updated October 3, 2016, www.rappler.com/nation/148007-propaganda-war-weaponizing-internet .
- 20.
Ibid.
- 21.
Ibid.
- 22.
Etter, “What Happens When the Government Uses Facebook as a Weapon?”
- 23.
Hofileña, “Fake accounts, manufactured reality on social media.”
- 24.
Ressa, “Propaganda War.”
- 25.
Etter, “What Happens When the Government Uses Facebook as a Weapon?”
- 26.
Alexandra Stevenson, “Philippines Says It Will Charge Veteran Journalist Critical of Duterte,” The New York Times, published November 9, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/11/09/business/duterte-critic-rappler-charges-in-philippines.html .
- 27.
Krishnadev Calamur, “The Misunderstood Roots of Burma’s Rohingya Crisis,” The Atlantic, published September 25, 2017, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/09/rohingyas-burma/540513/ .
- 28.
Timothy McLaughlin, “How Facebook’s Rise Fueled Chaos and Confusion in Myanmar,” Backchannel, WIRED, published July 6, 2018, www.wired.com/story/how-facebooks-rise-fueled-chaos-and-confusion-in-myanmar/ .
- 29.
Ibid.
- 30.
Ibid.
- 31.
“Human Rights Impact Assessment: Facebook in Myanmar,” BSR, published October, 2018, https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/2018/11/bsr-facebook-myanmar-hria_final.pdf , p. 12.
- 32.
Ibid., p. 11.
- 33.
Ibid., p. 12
- 34.
Brandon Paladino and Hunter Marston, “Facebook can’t resolve conflicts in Myanmar and Sri Lanka on its own,” Order from Chaos, Brookings, www.brookings.edu/blog/order-from-chaos/2018/06/27/facebook-cant-resolve-conflicts-in-myanmar-and-sri-lanka-on-its-own/ .
- 35.
McLaughlin, “How Facebook’s Rise Fueled Chaos and Confusion in Myanmar.”
- 36.
Paul Mozur, “A Genocide Incited on Facebook, With Posts From Myanmar’s Military,” The New York Times, published October 15, 2018, www.nytimes.com/2018/10/15/technology/myanmar-facebook-genocide.html .
- 37.
Ibid.
- 38.
“2018 Post-Election Report: Mexico and Colombia,” New Knowledge, accessed December 1, 2018, www.newknowledge.com/documents/LatinAmericaElectionReport.pdf .
- 39.
Laura Hazard Owen, “WhatsApp is a black box for fake news. Verificado 2018 is making real progress fixing that.,” Nieman Lab, published June 1, 2018, www.niemanlab.org/2018/06/whatsapp-is-a-black-box-for-fake-news-verificado-2018-is-making-real-progress-fixing-that/ .
- 40.
Prashant Bordia and Nicholas DiFonzo, Rumor Psychology: Social and Organizational Approaches (Washington, D.C.: American Psychological Association, 2017).
- 41.
I should note that, while private chat applications make it harder to discover disinformation operations on those applications, those applications are still indispensable to researchers. That’s because we care about the privacy of our communications, and end-to-end encrypted messaging apps are key to avoiding surveillance from adversaries, especially those with the power of governments behind them. As of 2018, Signal, from Open Whisper Systems, is the most often recommended encrypted communication app from security researchers, vulnerable activists, and tech journalists.
- 42.
Owen, “WhatsApp is a black box for fake news.”
- 43.
“AJ+ Español wins an Online Journalism Award for Verificado 2018,” Al Jazeera, published September 18, 2018, https://network.aljazeera.com/pressroom/aj-español-wins-online-journalism-award-verificado-2018 .
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Shaffer, K. (2019). Democracy Hacked, Part 2. In: Data versus Democracy. Apress, Berkeley, CA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-4540-8_6
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