Luke Alnutt of Radio Liberty/Radio Free Europe has it all wrong about Twitter on his Tangle Web blog -- and frankly, I think it's just irresponsible of him to write this -- and it exhibits another instance of this closed mind that shouldn't be persisting unchallenged on a web site devoted to opening minds.
Alnutt makes it sound from the headline as if false reports on Twitter panicked people in Minsk when there was a bomb in the metro.
That's ridiculous -- it did no such thing. There is no evidence whatsoever that people in Minsk panicked because of Twitter.
ITAR-TASS (!), the Russian official news service, and the Belarusian police (!) are hardly a source for this story. I shouldn't have to point that out.
You can't claim there is no such thing as a Twitter revolution, and join industrial cyber-debunker Evgeny Morozov in saying that there's no such thing especially in places like Minsk -- because there aren't enough users with enough reach - and then suddenly press Twitter into service to be "the reason" for "panic" in Belarus.
First of all, I'm not aware that there was any panic. It doesn't seem there was. Could we point to some report *other than ITAR TASS* reporting that people were *arrested on those charges* to make this claim?
That is, sure, people ran like hell out of the subway and sure they were frightened and frantically calling loved ones and sure they were scared on every other stop. But panic is not what the pictures show. There weren't crowds stampeding (and this is a capital that has had crowds tragically stampede in the metro in the past).
The pictures of eyewitnesses and media show people helping others into ambulances, emergency medical people arriving very fast and in large numbers, police controlling the situation and blocking people from the area and stopping journalists -- this is not "panic".
What Luke is talking about are some tweets that made the rounds that were false reports. Must as with the Moscow Metro March 29, when there were further reports of multiple explosions elsewhere, in Minsk there were reports that a bus had an explosion, and that other places had an explosion.
These were either mistaken retweets from people spreading rumours they hadn't checked, or deliberate falsehoods of the sort that you get on the telephone to 911 after terrorist attacks such as 9/11 and other major disasters.
Right. *On the telephone*. We all saw false reports made after 9/11; fake bomb scares by copycats, opportunists, weirdos, *on the telephone* before there was any ever Twitter. Just because fake reports, by deliberate, sick, or misguided people came in on *telephones* didn't make us all stop using the *telephone* or declaring "the telephone" as guilty of spreading rumours and needed "controls" or "debunking". Copycot reports like this happen with every disaster. Every one knows it. People make false reports and try to panic others. Yes, the radio was once used to panic people thinking there really were aliens from outer space coming to get us. But it's pretty hard to use media to panic people. It's not really that often that it happens. Of course, it's more likely to happen in a closed, totalitarian society or authoritarian country like Belarus. But Belarus has a lot of alternative news, and a lot of smart people.
It's ridiculous, truly, the net-nannying that comes from Luke Alnutt and others on the medium of the Internet and the mobile phone and these applications. The debunkers seem to have a greater belief in their magical powers than the utopianists!
Alnutt describes how Belarusian police arrested three people and charged them with spreading rumours on Facebook and Twitter. Without any judgement about how *that may be very wrong*. He seems to let it sit without condemnation.
Sorry, but those people don't deserve to be *arrested* if all they have done is retweet a rumour, or repeated something they thought was true. That happens a lot on the Internet; so it happens on Twitter and Facebook. If they deliberately did this out of spite or copycat compulsion or who knows what, they may properly face charges, if you can find they caused damage. But...did they?
They spread rumours. Like the rumour that people keep repeating as if it were true that these social media somehow spread more panic than anything else or are more particularly or spectacularly guilty of this than past media *ahem*.
Clay Shirky said an interesting thing at the Council on Foreign Relations the other night: "Social media cannot be weaponized." I actually don't agree with him about his context, i.e. that it can't be used by authoritarian governments and terrorists for ill such as to make them not needing control, particularly preemptive control by Western governments. It's an interesting thesis nonetheless and I will return to it.
But what Alnutt is essentially saying is that yes, social media can be weaponized and cause panic, and terrorists or others of ill will or just clueless gits may do this to the harm of us all.
I think this is an unsustainable premise, and I think it's a completely undocumented claim that again, comes from a felt need to see social media through the scrim of a few scornful thinkers like Morozov and a need to somehow constantly debunk and even trash social media, out of a sense that it competes with mainstream media, or out of a sense that this debunking service is somehow needed because of these supposed "cyberutopians" out there. Paging Jeff Jarvis!
The fact is, Twitter is self-correcting. That's it's beauty. It is still free enough that it is possible. Last summer, when there were pogroms in southern Kyrgyzstan, there were Bakiyev supporters, freelance opportunists, just plain hateful assholes tweeting stuff like, "40,000 Bakiyev supporters are marching on Bishkek with iron rods and rifles". Well, they weren't. There weren't 40,000 of anything. People blocked these rumour-mongers and hate-inciters and told them to get lost. They debunked them instantly and they lost credibility. Those who repeated these rumours in innocence had to work very hard after that to work their way back up to Twitterati respectability. And that happens in every crisis and revolution and mass disturbance or natural castrophe. Twitter is self-correcting because...the people on it correct themselves or each other.
I don't mean to invoke any magic Internet woo-woo here. I don't think a whole lot of "crowdsourcing" or "wikis" which I think collectivize without true collaboration of individuals and err toward technocommunism intead of liberal democracy.
Even so, the people who follow an event, who develop followers on a topic, who become experts on a topic, get to be known -- and very quickly. Known, respected bloggers in Belarus who were on the scene or got to the scene were tweeting the facts as they saw them. We could find them very fast because they used hashtags and others who knew and trusted them retweeted them. If anything, they *under* reported the story saying there were only 20 hurt or only 5 dead when there were in the end 23 killed and hundreds wounded. The independent press of record that has built up credibility *didn't* publish these false rumours Luke is invoking.
The real spreaders of panic, if there are any such spreaders to be had, are in the Lukashenka regime for controlling the media and harassing the alternative outlets. The KGB was likely the culprit subjecting the main independent news site, charter97.org, to a DDoS attack right when everyone was trying to get news about the metro bombing. Yet Luke Alnutt didn't think of that. He wanted to blame Twitter. Not the KGB.
I didn't even *see* the fake stories that Alnutt is now touting -- no doubt helped to see them by instigator Evgeny Morozov. I was watching all the Belarus sites and Twitter accounts all day and didn't seem them. I have numerous Belarusian friends and supporters of Belarus on my Facebook list, and I didn't see this fake report. Of course, I'll go look again. He says he called his Belarusian bureau at RFE/RL -- no bastion of honest reporting either and often very politicized in their judgements (for example, with their nasty malice about the opposition they don't like). I'd like more proof.
So basically, I demand a recall on this story. I think it needs other eyes and other analysts. There isn't some massive or even significant misuse of Twitter in Belarus over this metro explosion; there wasn't panic; there were reputable people tweeting who got the story right; and it is no "textbook case" of anything except the closed minds of Alnutt and his sources like Morozov on these issues. I'm all for diversity of opinion about the evolving story of the Internet. What I don't think you can justify is deliberate manipulation of the story and claim there is "Twitter panic" when there isn't.
Recent Comments