In the wake of a controversial police shooting, Britain’s capital city has been rocked by two straight days of widespread rioting and looting. As with previous riots — such as those in Vancouver, British Columbia following the Stanley Cup final — everyone seems to be looking for a culprit, with some blaming Twitter and Facebook, and others pinning the violence on BlackBerry and its instant messaging abilities. But that’s a little like blaming individual trees for the forest fire. As we’ve pointed out before with respect to the uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, these are just aspects of our increasingly real-time, mobile and connected lives, and that can be an incredibly powerful force for both good and bad.

Although they are completely different in important ways, there are also some interesting similarities between the riots in London this weekend and the uprisings in Egypt’s Tahrir Square. Both were triggered by the death of a man whom some believed was unfairly targeted by the authorities. In Britain, it was Mark Duggan — a 29-year-old father of four shot dead after being stopped by the police — and in Egypt, it was Khaled Said, a 28-year-old businessman who was pulled from an Idknternet cafe and beaten to death by security forces. Both deaths also led to the creation of Facebook pages that became the focus of a social-media effort that ultimately fueled the protests.

Different causes, same network effects

That said, the two demonstrations obviously had completely different causes and outcomes. In Egypt, the protests were the result of decades of corrupt and authoritarian rule by a dictator, as well as food shortages, unemployment and so on — and they led to the toppling of the government, followed by the military taking control of the country. In Britain (as in Vancouver), the events that allegedly triggered the riots seemed to be mostly an excuse for young thugs to loot stores and burn things.

As more than one person has pointed out (including notorious social-media skeptic Malcolm Gladwell) these kinds of riots and uprisings have been happening for centuries, without the need for Twitter or Facebook or BlackBerry’s BBM. But while they may not cause revolutions, there’s no question that these kinds of mobile, real-time networks and technologies can help to fuel them when they occur. As Jared Cohen of Google Ideas described in the aftermath of the revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt, social media tools may not be a trigger for such events, but they can clearly act as “an accelerant.”

In some cases, this is because mobile and social tools like Twitter and Facebook and SMS messaging can be used to coordinate specific acts or gatherings, as some observers have said they were by thugs in London. But there’s another aspect to social-media use that can fuel these events, and that is the impact of seeing others posting about their behavior.

Social media provides validation

In other words, being able to see that demonstrators were revolting in Tunisia seemed to help trigger the same kind of response in Egypt, because it helped protesters in Tahrir Square in Egypt see themselves as part of a larger movement, or at least not alone in their desire to revolt. That’s a positive use of these tools (unless you’re a member of the totalitarian government in either country, of course), but the same phenomenon also theoretically makes it easier for people to justify their behavior in a riot in London, because others are doing the same thing.

Is this specific to social media like Twitter or Facebook? Hardly. As some noted about the almost hysterical coverage of these tools by mainstream media, television news reports and tabloid newspapers arguably do as much to publicize and legitimize that kind of behavior as any social network does.

The difference with Twitter and Facebook is that they are always on, and real-time in a way that even television often isn’t. But the real power comes from the connections that such tools allow between individuals: people who may not even know each other, but become part of a much larger phenomenon via their social connections and their ability to communicate quickly and easily. That can help citizens rise up against their dictatorial governments, but it can also help thugs and thieves take advantage of a cause to create panic and disorder. Unfortunately, you can’t have one without the other.

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Although there are lots of things to criticize about Facebook, one thing that many users — and many companies that use the network’s social graph — like about it is that the social network requires users to register with their real names. In fact, that’s arguably one of Facebook’s big strengths: it allows you to know who you are connecting to and sharing information with. At the same time, however, that approach makes it difficult for political dissidents in countries such as Egypt to use the network as a tool for organizing protests, since they don’t want the authorities to be able to track their activities. But despite some pressure from activists and their supporters, a Facebook official said today the company has no plans to change its policy.

A lot of attention has been focused recently on the use of social tools such as Twitter and Facebook in uprisings in Tunisia and the more recent popular revolt in Egypt. Although debate continues about how much of an effect these tools have had (a topic we have written about before on a number of occasions) there is no question that activists and revolutionaries in both countries have made use of all the tools at their disposal to organize, including SMS and social networks. While they may not create revolutions where none would otherwise exist, they can certainly speed up the process.

Egyptian activist says using Facebook was crucial

To take just one example, Wael Ghonim — the Google staffer who was released Monday after being detained for almost two weeks by the Egyptian government, and who has become a figurehead of the popular movement — has talked about how the Facebook page he helped administer was instrumental in building support for the January 25th demonstrations that started the recent uprising. Although he used the name “El Shaheed,” which in Arabic means “the martyr,” the social network has a strict policy against the use of pseudonyms, and some protest-oriented groups in Tunisia and elsewhere have found themselves shut down because of this policy.

While Facebook and other social networks make it easy to spread the word and rally popular support to such causes, however, they also make it easy for government operatives to track activists and dissidents who use such channels to communicate. Although Facebook has taken action to stop outright hacking of the kind the Tunisian government engaged in, there is nothing to stop the police from simply watching what gets posted and then following or tracking down those individuals. According to a recent story in the Daily Mail, that’s exactly what government agents have been doing.

Some argue Facebook’s policy is outdated

Jillian York, who works for Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society and is the author of a research paper about Facebook and other social networks called “Policing Content in the Quasi-Public Sphere,” has been one of those arguing that the company should find some way of modifying its policies so that the social network can be used by dissidents in a variety of ways, without the fear of being tracked by government agents and suddenly disappearing in the night.

I, for one, would like to see Facebook abandon this policy. It is, for lack of a better word, inane in light of how the platform is used globally. Facebook should listen to their users and accommodate their needs. To me, abandonment of the policy isn’t even that necessary; I just want to see a stop to crackdowns on vulnerable activists.

However, Simon Axten of Facebook’s public policy team told The Register in the UK that the company’s “real name culture” is an essential element of the social network, and that while Facebook is talking to human-rights groups about ways they can use the platform without exposing themselves to government retaliation, the whole point of the social network is to replicate people’s real-world connections online. In general, he said, “the benefits of real-name culture outweigh the risks.” Although author David Kirkpatrick says that sources have told him that Facebook has been debating the policy internally, Axten said there are no plans to change the real-name requirement.

So while Facebook makes it easy for you to connect with that old friend from high school, it will also continue to make it easy for governments to track the activities of dissidents as well. Social networks are a sword that can cut both ways, it seems.

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After weeks of discussion in the blogosphere over whether what happened in Tunisia was a “Twitter revolution,” and whether social media also helped trigger the current anti-government uprising in Egypt, author Malcolm Gladwell — who wrote a widely-read New Yorker article about how inconsequential social media is when it comes to “real” social activism — has finally weighed in with his thoughts. But he continues to miss the real point about the use of Twitter and Facebook, which is somewhat surprising for the author of the best-seller The Tipping Point.

Although the topic of social media’s role in events in Tunisia and Egypt has been the focus of much commentary from observers such as Ethan Zuckerman and Jillian York of Global Voices Online, and also from Foreign Policy magazine columnist and author Evgeny Morozov, the response from Gladwell was all of about 200 words long. In a somewhat defensive tone, he suggested that if Chinese Communist leader Mao Zedong had made his famous statement about how “power grows from the barrel of a gun” today, everyone would obsess over whether he made it on Twitter or Facebook or his Tumblr blog. Gladwell concluded that while there is a lot that can be said about the protests in Egypt:

Surely the least interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another. Please. People protested and brought down governments before Facebook was invented. They did it before the Internet came along.

In other words, as far as the New Yorker writer is concerned, the use of any specific communications tools — whether that happens to be cellphones or SMS or Twitter or Facebook — may be occurring, and may even be helping revolutionaries in countries like Egypt in some poorly-defined way, but it’s just not that interesting. This seems like an odd comment coming from someone who wrote a book all about how a series of small changes in the way people think about an issue can suddenly reach a “tipping point” and gain widespread appeal, since that’s exactly what social media does so well.

Gladwell is not the only doubter

Gladwell isn’t the only one who has taken a skeptical stance when it comes to the use of social media in such situations. Foreign Policy writer Morozov is also the author of a book called “Net Delusion,” in which he argues that the views of some “cyber-utopians” are in danger of distorting political discourse to the point where some politicians think that all people require in order to overthrow governments is Internet access and some Twitter followers. This view was echoed in a recent piece in BusinessWeek entitled “The Fallacy of Facebook Diplomacy,” which argued that “the idea that America can use the Internet to influence global events is more dream than reality.”

But as sociology professor Zeynep Tufekci argues in a blog post responding to Gladwell — and as we argued in a recent post here — the point is not that social media tools like Twitter and Facebook cause revolutions in any real sense. What they are very good at doing, however, is connecting people in very simple ways, and making those connections in a very fast and widely-distributed manner. This is the power of a networked society and of cheap, real-time communication networks.

Weak ties can also connect to and become strong ties

As Tufekci notes, what happens in social networks is the creation of what sociologist Mark Granovetter called “weak ties” in a seminal piece of research in the 1970s (PDF link) — that is, the kinds of ties you have to your broader network of friends and acquaintances, as opposed to the strong ties that you have to your family or your church. But while Gladwell more or less dismissed the value of those ties in his original New Yorker piece, Tufekci argues that these weak ties can become connected to our stronger relationships, and that’s when real change — potentially large-scale global change — can occur.

New movements that can bring about global social change will still require people who interact with each other regularly, and trust and depend on each other in somewhat dense networks. Or only hope is if those networks span the globe in a tightly-knit, broad web of activity, interaction, personalization. Real change will come only if we can make friends we care about everywhere and we make bridge ties that cover the world in a web of common humanity.

That’s not to say that the question of who is using which social-media tool is inherently more interesting than the actual human acts of bravery and risks that people in Tunisia and Egypt have taken, or are taking. But those tools and that activity can bring things to a tipping point that might otherwise not have occurred, or spur others (possibly even in other countries) to do something similar. Why else would governments like Mubarak’s be so quick to shut down the Internet and cellphone networks? And that is interesting — or should be — regardless of what Malcolm Gladwell might think.

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Just as it was during the recent uprisings in Tunisia, the role of social media in the recent upheaval in Egypt has been the subject of much debate since the unrest began on Thursday. Daily Show host Jon Stewart on Friday poked fun at the idea that Twitter might have played a key part in the demonstrations, and there are many observers who share his skepticism. The real trigger for the uprisings, they argue, is simply the frustration of the oppressed Egyptian people — which is undoubtedly true. But it also seems clear that social media has played a key role in getting the word out, and in helping organizers plan their protests. In the end, it’s not about Twitter or Facebook: it’s about the power of real-time networked communication.

Foreign Policy magazine columnist Evgeny Morozov has argued that Twitter and Facebook should not be credited with playing any kind of critical role in Tunisia, and suggested that doing so is a sign of the “cyber-utopianism” that many social-media advocates suffer from: that is, the belief that the Internet is unambiguously good, or that the use of Twitter or Facebook can somehow magically free a repressed society from its shackles. Morozov, who has written an entire book about this idea called Net Delusion, made the point in his blog post after the Tunisian uprising that while social media might have been used in some way during the events, tools like Twitter and Facebook did not play a crucial role — that is, the revolution would have happened with or without them.

Zeynep Tufekci, a professor of sociology who has also looked at this issue, described in a post following the revolution in Tunisia how professional observers distinguish between what she called “material,” “efficient” and “final” causes — in other words, things that are required in order to produce a certain outcome, and things that are nice to have but are not a requirement. Tufekci argues that social media was a crucial factor in Tunisia, while Jillian York of Global Voices Online believes that social media tools are useful, but not necessary. Ethan Zuckerman, one of the founders of Global Voices Online, has also written about how the uprisings in both Tunisia and in Egypt have more to do with decades of poverty and repressive dictatorships than they do with social media.

But is anyone really arguing that Twitter and Facebook caused the revolutions in Tunisia or Egypt, or even the earlier public uprisings in Moldova or Iran for that matter? Maybe cyber-utopians somewhere are doing this, but I haven’t seen or heard of any. The argument I have tried to make is simply that they and other social media tools can be incredibly powerful, both for spreading the word — which can give moral or emotional support to others in a country, as well as generating external support — as well as for organizational purposes, thanks to the power of the network. As Jared Cohen of Google Ideas put it, social media may not be a cause, but it can be a powerful “accelerant.”

Did Twitter or Facebook cause the Tunisian revolt? No. But they did spread the news, and many Tunisian revolutionaries gave them a lot of credit for helping with the process. Did Twitter cause the revolts in Egypt? No. But they did help activists such as WikiLeaks supporter Jacob Appelbaum (known on Twitter as @ioerror) and others as they organized the dialup and satellite phone connections that created an ad-hoc Internet after Egypt turned the real one off — which, of course, it did in large part to try and prevent demonstrators from using Internet-based tools to foment unrest. As Cory Doctorow noted in his review of Evgeny Morozov’s book, even if Twitter and Facebook are just used to replace the process of stapling pieces of paper to telephone poles and sending out hundreds of emails, they are still a huge benefit to social activism of all kinds.

But open-network advocate Dave Winer made the key point: it’s the Internet that is the really powerful tool here, not any of the specific services such as Twitter and Facebook that run on top of it, which Winer compares to brands like NBC. They have power because lots of people use them, and — in the case of Twitter — because they have open protocols so that apps can still access the network even when the company’s website is taken down by repressive governments (athough they didn’t mention Egypt or Tunisia by name, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and general counsel Alexander Macgillivray wrote a post about the company’s desire to “keep the information flowing).

In the end, the real weapon is the power of networked communication itself. In previous revolutions it was the fax, or the pamphlet, or the cellphone — now it is SMS and Twitter and Facebook. Obviously none of these things cause revolutions, but to ignore or downplay their growing importance is also a mistake.

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As it did during the recent shootings in Arizona, the Twitter network provided a ringside seat for another major news event on Friday — the overthrow of a corrupt government in the African nation of Tunisia, after weeks of protests over repression and economic upheaval. And even as the country’s ruler was being hustled onto a plane, the debate began over whether Twitter had played even more of a role in the revolution than just reporting on it as it happened: was this the first real Twitter revolution? The correct answer is probably yes and no. Did it help protesters, and thus the end goal of overthrowing the government? Undoubtedly. Was it solely responsible for that happening? Hardly.

Among those arguing the question — on Twitter, of course — were foreign affairs commentator Evgeny Morozov, who writes for Foreign Policy magazine, along with Jillian York of Harvard’s Berkman Center for the Internet and Society, Ethan Zuckerman — who founded Global Voices Online while he was a fellow at the Berkman Center (and has written his own post about Twitter’s role in Tunisia) — as well as media theorist Clay Shirky and sociologist Zeynep Tufekci from the University of Maryland. After some debate on the issue, Shirky (responding to Morozov) said that “no one claims social media makes people angry enough to act [but] it helps angry people coordinate their actions.” The Foreign Policy writer, meanwhile, responded by arguing in a blog post that Twitter did not play a strong role in the events in Tunisia on Friday:

Would this revolution have happened if there were no Facebook and Twitter? I think this is a key question to ask. If the answer is “yes,” then the contribution that the Internet has made was minor; there is no way around it.

Jillian York also cautioned against attributing too much of what happened to social media, saying: “Don’t get all techno-utopian. Twitter’s great for spreading news, but this revolution happened offline” (she later amended her comment, however, saying that she definitely believed social media played a role in the day’s events). Tufekci, meanwhile, wondered why there had to be such a dividing line between offline vs. online activity, asking: “I don’t get this was it online or offline dichotomy. The online world is part of the world. It has a role.” She added that trying to answer the question of whether it was a Twitter revolution was “like asking was the French Revolution a printing press revolution?”

There’s no question that Twitter definitely helped to spread the information about what was happening in Tunisia, as demonstrated by the tweets and videos and other media collected by Andy Carvin at National Public Radio while the events unfolded. And at least one Tunisian revolutionary, who runs a website called Free Tunisia, told a Huffington Post blogger that social media such as Twitter — along with cellphones, text messaging and various websites — was crucial to the flow of information and helped protesters gather and plan their demonstrations. Said Bechir Blagui:

They called it the jasmine revolt, Sidi Bouzid revolt, Tunisian revolt… but there is only one name that does justice to what is happening in the homeland: Social media revolution.

The role of social media in activism is something that has been debated a lot over the past year or so, in part because of a piece Malcolm Gladwell wrote poo-poohing the idea that tools like Twitter and Facebook could ever have much to do with real activism. Shirky responded to this argument — at least somewhat — in a piece he wrote on the topic for Foreign Affairs magazine recently, arguing that social media and other modern communication networks may not directly lead to revolution, but they sure help.

The reality is that Twitter is an information-distribution network, not that different from the telephone or email or text messaging, except that it is real-time and massively distributed — in the sense that a message posted by a Tunisian blogger can be re-published thousands of times and transmitted halfway around the world in the blink of an eye. That is a very powerful thing, in part because the more rapidly the news is distributed, the more it can create a sense of momentum, helping a revolution to “go viral,” as marketing types like to say. Tufekci noted that Twitter can “strengthen communities prior to unrest by allowing a parallel public(ish) sphere that is harder to censor.”

So was what happened in Tunisia a Twitter revolution? Not any more than what happened in Poland in 1989 was a telephone revolution. But the reality of modern media is that Twitter and Facebook and other social-media tools can be incredibly useful for spreading the news about revolutions — because it gives everyone a voice, as founder Ev Williams has pointed out — and that can help them expand and ultimately achieve some kind of effect. Whether that means the world will see more revolutions, or simply revolutions that happen more quickly or are better reported, remains to be seen.

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