look the other way and produce upbeat copy about the emancipatory nature of the Twitter Revolution. As pundits were competing for airtime and bloggers were competing for eyeballs, few bothered to debunk the overblown claims about the power of the Internet. As a result, the myth of Iran’s Twitter Revolution soon joined the gigantic pile of other urban myths about the Internet’s mighty potential to topple dictators. This explains how, less than a year after the Iranian protests, a Newsweek writer mustered the courage to proclaim that “the revolts in Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Burma, Xinjiang, and Iran could never have happened without the web.” (Newsweek, it must be noted, has been predicting an Internet-led revolution in Iran since 1995, when it published an article pompously titled “Chatrooms and Chadors” which posited that “if the computer geeks are right, Iran is facing the biggest revolution since the Ayatollah Khomeini.”)
Unless journalists fully commit themselves to scrutinizing and, if necessary, debunking such myths, the latter risk having a corrosive effect on policymaking. As long as Twitter is presumed to have been instrumental in enabling the Iranian protests, any technologies that would allow Iranians to access Twitter by bypassing their government’s censorship are also presumed to be of exceptional importance. When a newspaper like the Washington Post makes a case for allocating more funding to such technologies in one of its editorials, as it did in July 2010, by arguing that “investing in censorship-circumvention techniques like those that powered Tehran’s ‘Twitter revolution’ in June 2009 could have a tremendous, measurable impact,” it’s a much weaker argument than appears at first glance. (The Post’s claim that the impact of such technologies could be “measurable” deserves close scrutiny as well.) Similarly, one should start worrying about the likely prominence of the Internet in American foreign policy on hearing Alec Ross, Hillary Clinton’s senior adviser for innovation, assert that “social media played a key role in organizing the [Iranian] protests,” a claim that is not very different from what Andrew Sullivan declared in June 2009. Even though Ross said this almost a year after Sullivan’s hypothetical conjecture, he still cited no evidence to back up this claim. (In July 2010 Ross inadvertently revealed his own hypocrisy by also proclaiming that “there is very little information to support the claim that Facebook or Twitter or text messaging caused the rioting or can inspire an uprising.”)
Where Are the Weapons of Mass Construction?
If the exalted reaction to the Iranian protests is of any indication, Western policymakers are getting lost in the mists of cyber-utopianism, a quasi-religious belief in the power of the Internet to do supernatural things, from eradicating illiteracy in Africa to organizing all of the world’s information, and one of the central beliefs of the Google Doctrine. Opening up closed societies and flushing them with democracy juice until they shed off their authoritarian skin is just one of the high expectations placed on the Internet these days. It’s not surprising that a 2010 op-ed in the Guardian even proposed to “bombard Iran with broadband”; the Internet is seen as mightier than the bomb. Cyber-utopianism seems to be everywhere these days: T-shirts urging policymakers to “drop tweets, not bombs”—a bold slogan for any modern-day antiwar movement—are already on sale online, while in 2009 one of the streets in a Palestinian refugee camp was even named after a Twitter account.
Tweets, of course, don’t topple governments; people do (in a few exceptional cases, the Marines and the CIA can do just fine). Jon Stewart of The Daily Show has ridiculed the mythical power of the Internet to accomplish what even the most advanced military in the world has so much difficulty accomplishing in Iraq and Afghanistan: “Why did we have to send an army when we could have liberated them the same way we buy shoes?” Why, indeed? The joke is lost on Daniel Kimmage, a senior analyst with Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty, who argues that “unfettered access to a free Internet is ... a very practical means of countering Al Qaeda. . . . As users increasingly make themselves heard, the ensuing chaos ... may shake the online edifice of Al Qaeda’s totalitarian ideology.” Jihad Jane and a whole number of other shady characters who were recruited to the terrorist cause online would be sad to learn that they did not surf the Web long enough.
By the end of 2009 cyber-utopianism reached new heights, and the Norwegian Nobel Committee did not object when Wired Italy (the Italian edition