Tweeting the revolution

Washington - After the "Arab Spring" surprised the world with the power of technology to revolutionise political dissent, governments are racing to develop strategies to respond to, and even control, the new player in the political arena - social media.

Anti-government protesters in Tunisia and Egypt used Twitter, Facebook and other platforms to run rings around attempts at censorship and organise demonstrations that ousted presidents Zine El Abidine Ben Ali and Hosni Mubarak.

That served as a wake-up call to those in authority. By allowing millions of citizens to coordinate political action quickly and often without conventional leadership, the new technology is challenging traditional political power structures.

"We are well beyond being able to consider social media a fad," said Alec Ross, one of the creators of technology policy for Barack Obama's 2008 presidential campaign and now senior adviser for innovation to US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

"If you are not open to social media spaces, then you are not attuned to the dynamics on the street and you sacrifice both understanding and power."

Being ahead of the game when it comes to embracing social media, Washington hopes, will be key to maintaining its influence in a changing world.

Diplomats at every level are being trained to use it to explain US policy and, more importantly, listen to what is being said and written in the countries in which they operate. Ross says that as an early adopter of the technology, the State Department is now becoming an adviser to other governments on social media.

The United States, too, has seen some modest signs of social media-organised protest, with hundreds of protesters occupying Wall Street for days this month in anger at perceived excesses by its banks. In Europe, activists have used similar tools to coordinate mass street unrest, although few expect US disturbances on that scale.

Monitoring online dissent

Since events in Cairo and Tunis blindsided governments, analysts and markets around the world, experts say investment has stepped up hugely in tools to monitor social media platforms in the hope of predicting future upheaval.

"What people are increasingly looking at is predictive analysis," said Rohini Srihari, a computer scientist at the University at Buffalo, State University of New York.

"The Holy Grail is to beat the news. They are looking to predict a specific riot or protest at a specific location and time."

Much of the interest in that technology is seen coming from intelligence and national security agencies, but private companies and investors are also taking notice and new firms springing up offer a range of analytic products.

Not all promise to predict events with precision - but they do offer ways to deliver insight on wider trends and snapshots of online debate.

"Social media is better for strategic rather than tactical analysis," Fadl Al Tarzi, chief operating officer at United Arab Emirates-based monitoring firm News Group International, told a conference on social media and politics at the United States Institute for Peace in Washington, DC.

"It is hard to predict exactly when something will happen but it can show you broader trends. Yes, if you had enough conversations with enough of the right people you would get the same level of information but that is not always economic or feasible to do or possible at the same speed."

Whither censorship?

Political repression, economic crises and the widening wealth gap in many countries could all fuel further growth in social media-fed protest. Much of this growth, like recent protests against cuts in Spain and many of the demonstrations of the "Arab Spring", may prove peaceful but some of it has already proved violent and disruptive.

The question for governments is what responses might prove effective and acceptable. So complex and fast-moving are modern systems, some experts suspect, that any attempts at censorship or shutdowns will simply be circumvented or overwhelmed.

But there are clear signs that some in authority would dearly like to find ways of tightening controls.

British Prime Minister David Cameron was widely criticised, even within his own party, for threatening to impose censorship and shut down social media and messaging platforms in response to London's August riots.

The way inner city youths used secure smartphone messaging to coordinate mass looting sprees and arson showed such tools were not merely the preserve of political activists.

San Francisco's BART transit system faced widespread anger and accusations of breaching the US constitutional guarantees of free speech when it sought to shut down cellphone services within the system in an attempt to stymie protests after a shooting by a transit authority police officer.

Autocratic states, however, have few such reservations. In Russia, websites used by dissident bloggers found themselves under cyber attack from hackers suspected of being sympathetic to the Kremlin.

China's use of its sophisticated system to monitor and sometimes censor online debate efforts is widely believed to have stepped up dramatically this year. Beijing's communist leaders managed to avoid the widespread street protest they saw elsewhere, but failed to prevent almost unprecedented criticism of their response to a high-speed rail crash.

In the Middle East, the reaction has been mixed. Some countries have moved to arrest or threaten bloggers or those they accuse of spreading "malicious rumours", while others have also tried to reach out to online activists.

Carrot and stick approach

"There's been quite a strong reaction," said Sultan al-Qassemi, a blogger and commentator based in the UAE. "It's a carrot and stick approach. Some of it is good. But they have been also seeking out individual people to make examples of."

In effect, major social media companies - such as Google, Facebook and Twitter - could become gatekeepers of debate and dissent.

And while some internet giants such as Facebook may be willing to make concessions to access markets like China, Google looks to be bracing for an era of confrontation.

In July, its chairperson Eric Schmidt told a conference in Dublin he believed the firm's tussles with governments over internet censorship would get worse, adding that his own colleagues faced a mounting danger of arrest and torture. During the Egyptian revolution Google executive Wael Ghonim was seized and arrested for involvement in helping organise the protests.

At the State Department, Ross said he believes the world is still nowhere near a global consensus on how to handle the coming changes. But finding solutions, he said, is vital.

Many argue that if governments are not to shut down the internet and other networks altogether - with all the attached economic costs and at the risk of producing a still-larger backlash - then they will have little choice but to allow the relatively free flow of communication, including dissent.

"If you are willing to sacrifice economic modernity and growth, then turn off the internet," said Ross.

"But if you want to be part of a vibrant, global marketplace and build a knowledge-based economy, you have to have an open internet.... We hope to maximise the benefits and minimise the negative impact of living in a hyper-networked world."