LRB · James Harkin · Cyber-Con: Tweet for the CIA!
►http://www.lrb.co.uk/v32/n23/james-harkin/cyber-con
The Iranian protesters had every reason to be paranoid about the internet. While some demonstrators were busy drumming up virtual support from the outside world, the police were scanning social networking sites to round them up. According to Evgeny Morozov, the Iranian authorities and their allies were quick to get into the swing, and were soon flooding mobile networks and the internet with false information and videos of dubious authenticity as a way of intimidating, dividing or demoralising the opposition. ‘Dear citizen,’ one cheery text sent to known protesters began, ‘according to received information, you have been influenced by the destabilising propaganda which the media affiliated with foreign countries have been disseminating.’ Morozov, an alumnus of George Soros’s Open Society Institute who blogs for Foreign Policy magazine, knows from his native Belarus that electronic activism doesn’t necessarily blow the doors off repressive regimes.