it could have been poisoned; another message claimed political leaders were planning to cut water supplies to dehydrate members of one faith.
Two years earlier Kenya lived through an eerily similar tumultuous period. The political crisis that followed Kenya’s disputed election that took place on December 27, 2007, showed that the networks fostered by mobile technology, far from being “net goods,” could easily escalate into uncontrollable violence. “If your neighbor is kykuyu, throw him out of his house. No one will hold you responsible,” said a typical message sent at the peak of the violence; another one, also targeting Kykuyus, said, “Let’s wipe out the Mt. Kenya mafia,” adding, “Kill 2, get 1 free.” But there was also a more disturbing effort by some Kykuyus to use text messaging to first collect sensitive information about members of particular ethnic groups and then distribute that information to attack and intimidate them. “The blood of innocent Kykuyus will cease to flow! We will massacre them right here in the capital. In the name of justice put down the names of all the Luos and Kaleos you know from work, your property, anywhere in Nairobi, not forgetting where and how their children go to school. We will give you a number on where to text these messages,” said one such message. At one point, the Kenyan authorities were considering shutting down mobile networks to avoid any further escalation of violence (between 800 and 1,500 people died, and up to 250,000 were displaced).
Even though text messaging also proved instrumental in setting up a system that helped to track how violence spread around Kenya—a success story that gained far more attention in the media—one can’t just disregard the fact that text messaging also helped to mobilize hate. In fact, text messages full of hatred and highly intimidating death threats kept haunting witnesses who agreed to testify to the high-level Waki Commission set up to investigate the violence two years after the clashes. (“You are still a young man and you are not supposed to die, but you betrayed our leader, so what we shall do to you is just to kill you” was the text of a message received by one such witness.)
The bloody Uighur-Han clashes that took place in China’s Xinjiang Province in the summer of 2009 and resulted in a ten-month ban on Internet communications appear to have been triggered by a provocative article posted to the Internet forum www.sg169.com. Written by an angry twenty-three-year-old who had been laid off by the Xuri Toy Factory in China’s Guangdong Province, 3,000 miles from Xinjiang, the article asserted that “six Xinjiang boys raped two innocent girls at the Xuri Toy Factory.” (China’s official media stated that the rape accusations were fake, and foreign journalists could not find any evidence to substantiate such claims either.) Ten days later, the Uighur workers at the toy factory were attacked by a group of angry Han people (two Uighurs were killed, and over a hundred were injured). That confrontation, in turn, triggered even more rumors, many of which overstated the number of people who had been killed, and the situation got further out of control soon thereafter, with text messaging and phone calls helping to mobilize both sides (the authorities eventually turned off all phone communications soon thereafter). A gruesome video that showed several Uighur workers being beaten by a mob armed with metal pipes quickly went viral as well, only adding to the tensions.
Even countries with a long democratic tradition have not been sparred some of the SMS-terror. In 2005, many Australians received text messages urging attacks on their fellow citizens of Lebanese descent (“This Sunday every Fucking Aussie in the shire, get down to North Cronulla to help support Leb and wog bashing day.... Bring your mates down and let’s show them this is our beach and they’re never welcome back”), sparking major ethnic fights in an otherwise peaceful country. Ethnic Lebanese got similar messages, only calling for attacks on non-Lebanese Australians. More recently, right-wing extremists in the Czech Republic have been aggressively using text messaging to threaten local Roma communities. Of course, even if text messaging had never been invented, neo-Nazis would still hate the Roma with as much passion; to blame their racism on mobile phones would be yet another manifestation of focusing on technology at the expense of political and social factors. But the ease, scale, and speed of communications afforded by text messaging makes the brief and previously locally contained outbursts of neo-Nazi anger