5 Reasons Twitter Isn't Actually Overthrowing Governments

But hell, it's still possible to imagine 20,000 people sparking a regime change ... until you realize that number is also bullshit. The vast majority of them turned out to be people from all around the world who simply changed their Twitter location to "Tehran" in a scheme to confuse the Iranian authorities, whom they apparently thought of as the least competent law enforcement agency since Police Squad. Factor that in, and estimates of the number of active Twitter users in Iran is as low as 1,000 people.

Despite all the news stories about protests being organized through social networking, most demonstrations were arranged through text messaging, word of mouth or the time honored method of "Hey, it sounds like there's a riot happening down the street, let's go check it out."

Aside from the fact that many protesters don't even have Internet access, social networking is sort of a shitty way to organize. There's no leadership or sense of direction -- just a lot of people screaming about how much they hate the government. And that's just when we try to get a few friends together for a poker night. Attempting to get anything important accomplished multiplies the problem tenfold.

To organize an effective protest, you need structure and people who are truly committed to the cause -- willing to be arrested or killed. Social networking provides the exact opposite. History has shown that you're best off working with people you're close to -- they're the ones who will listen to your crazy ideas. Invite 500 of your Facebook friends to a protest, and 498 will RSVP "maybe" (meaning no) and the two who show up will only be there because they want to see you get your ass kicked by the riot police.

Case in point: In February, a huge protest in Syria organized over Facebook failed to materialize, because nobody knew who was in charge and everyone who said they would come wasn't really interested (assuming they were even in the country). The people who did want to protest didn't know about the event, because they've never used the Internet.

Which brings us to ...

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We like to imagine these protests as the modern youth versus a bunch of backwards, technophobic old men -- but authoritarian governments are actually pretty damn good at using the Internet. Impoverished, downtrodden peasants? Not so much.

In Tunisia, government agents phished their way into the email and Facebook accounts of prominent protesters, then locked them out of their own profiles, collected contact information on their associates and used the information to make arrests.

Iranian authorities took things a step further. Not only did they use Twitter to spread false rumors (which Westerners retweeted hundreds of times -- but more on that in a moment), they used information gleaned from social networking accounts to track down and harass protesters in other countries.

Even if the authorities don't go that far, letting them know when and where your protests will be held allows them to prepare enough security to keep the demonstrations under control. Any organizing done over social networking is open to the public eye, but privacy is important when you want to stage an effective protest -- that's why the best uprisings are the ones organized by word of mouth.

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So, let's say there's an uprising in the Middle East. The news wants to cover the story, but you can't just walk into Syria with a video camera and start recording. Twitter to the rescue!

So, for the last year, Twitter has been praised as an innovative new way for reporters to get the facts. They go on the air and quote Tweets from the protesters themselves, without the reporter having to actually be there. The problem is, the protesters giving the updates didn't have to actually be there, either.

So when the media says that, according to someone in Tehran, 700,000 people showed up at a protest, it sounds like a huge deal. That's about 10 Superdomes. Only later did we find out the number was actually around 7,000 people, and that half of them were only there because there wasn't anything interesting on television.

Not only does that kind of exaggeration give us a false impression of what's happening, it also gives us a one-sided view -- whether you like Iran's Ahmadinejad or not, the truth is that he does in fact have lots of supporters -- they just aren't using Facebook. It's like thinking that in 2004 everyone in America was unanimous in their hatred of George W. Bush just because it was trendy on the Internet to photoshop his face onto a bunch of chimpanzees. The truth was more complicated.

Even worse, all the fuss we made about Twitter being a great source of news made it less effective. Because Twitter can't distinguish between real news and made-up news, the West quickly drowned out the few pieces of accurate information with a flood of false rumors and useless messages (one third of the tweets related to the Iran protests were just repostings of other tweets), a problem compounded by the fact that it was impossible to tell who was really in Iran and who was sitting in their parent's basement in Cleveland. For some reason, nobody stopped and asked why all the Iranian protesters were tweeting in English and not Farsi, the language most people actually speak in Iran.

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Let's admit it: Most wars and revolutions are fought for complex political reasons -- the entirety of which most of us are unable to fully understand. For the average Joe, the Civil War was about slavery, the Iraq War was about oil and the Revolutionary War was about freedom. We want every war to be as simple as Star Wars.

The news media is partly to blame, every event needs to be translated into an easily understandable story. It needs a hook to make it compelling. Thinking of these uprisings as a "Twitter Revolution" gives us an easy narrative: modern, free-thinking youth use new technology to overthrow the old guard. It makes the story interesting for an audience who otherwise has no reason to care.

But this isn't a new phenomenon. In 2001, a revolution in the Philippines was credited to the power of the new technology of text messaging, not years of civil unrest. Go back further and you'll find that we gave the audio cassette credit for the 1979 Iranian Revolution. Or there was Tienanmen Square, where the modern wonder that was the fax machine was going to help beat China's oppressive government.

There's yet to be a newsworthy event we haven't linked to some buzzword we're familiar with; it simplifies things, and helps us put a human face on the story. It's hard for us to identify with an impoverished old man in Syria who's getting pushed around by the government, because we have no idea what that's like. Picturing some middle-class guy with a boring office job sticking it to the man with Facebook is a lot easier, since most of us are middle-class people with boring office jobs who dream of fighting the system with our edgy status updates.

And not only is the idea of a revolution powered by social networking accessible, it's also kind of appealing. It's nice to think that websites we use every day are helping improve the world, because that's a lot better than thinking about how Facebook's only contribution to society is to tell our friends how totally drunk we got last night.

Which leads to our final point ...

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That's why we love the idea of a revolution powered by social networking -- we can't fly down to Egypt to take part in a street protest, but we can hit "like" on a Facebook page that's organizing one. All it takes is one click, and suddenly you're an activist! Sure, it won't actually accomplish anything, but it does let the world know how much you care.

Slacktivism is nothing new, but it crosses the line from "pointless, but well-intentioned" to "jaw-droppingly delusional" once we claim more credit than we're due. In the wake of the revolution in Egypt it wasn't enough that the protesters used our social networking sites -- we had to pat ourselves on the back for teaching young Egyptians to use Google and Facebook. We're not sure whether it was the "type what you want to find into the little bar" or "don't get distracted by the thousands of results about tits" part they were having trouble with, but either way they apparently needed America's help to sort things out.

So we have the Gene Sharp affair, where the New York Times made the prominent political scientist sound like a modern-day Laurence of Arabia who taught ignorant dissidents around the developing world how to revolt -- an idea that was promptly mocked by Egyptian bloggers. Likewise, if you ask either 4chan or Julian Assange what they contributed to the revolution in Tunisia, they're quick to claim credit for the whole damn thing.

When you stop to think about it, it's actually pretty insulting. We were quick to label Tunisia's recent uprising the "Twitter Revolution" and the "Wikileaks Revolution," both of which sound asinine when you remember that Tunisia's protests began after Mohamed Bouazizi, a disgruntled street vendor, set himself on fire. Maybe we should be giving him some credit, not ourselves. Then again, the "Holy Shit, That Guy Just Set Himself on Fire, What the Fuck, Man?! Revolution" doesn't roll off the tongue quite as well.

You can read more from Mark at Gunaxin. Or see him experiment with various pseudosciences at Zug.

For more reasons why this whole social media thing may not be so cool, check out 6 Things Social Networking Sites Need to Stop Doing and 5 Wacky Internet Pranks That Can Get You Jail Time.