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  |  23 апреля, 2013   |   Читать на сайте издания

The Kremlin Does Not Fear the Twitter Revolution

 Gazeta.ru publication

 

By Yekaterina Vinokurova

 

Sources close to the Kremlin are insisting that the impact of the Twitter revolution should not be exaggerated. The Foundation for the Development of Civil Society(FCSD), headed by the former Kremlin official Konstantin Kostin, has prepared a report which claims that social networks take a secondary role to traditional media in the dissemination of information about protests. It also claims that the most important factor in organising protests is the inability of the authorities to formulate an alternative information agenda and clumsy attempts to introduce online censorship.

 

The FCSD is close to the Kremlin and is led by the former head of the Presidential Administration’s Department of Internal Policy, Konstantin Kostin. The Foundation prepared the report which refutes the widespread viewpoint that social networks were responsible for the mass motivation of protests. Parts of the study were made available to Gazeta.ru.

 

The report analyses the role of social media in revolutionary and mass protests against authoritarian regimes in recent years, particularly in the events of April 2009 in Moldavia and the failed ‘Green Revolution’ in Iran in the summer that year. As the report points out, the protestors coordinated on the whole through mass text messages. In Moldavia it was the social network site ‘odnoklassniki’ (‘schoolfriends’) which played a major role in mobilizing protests.

 

To quote from the report: ‘The micro-blogging Twitter service came into its own later, but it was the fact that Twitter became the core weapon for opposition activists which attracted the attention of the Western media.’

 

‘Moreover, among those who followed the events in Kishinev, it soon became clear that the most vociferous micro-bloggers were not those who were actually involved in the events, but Romanian journalists and Moldavians living abroad. As a result Twitter was not used for the coordination and mobilisation of protests but almost exclusively for attracting attention from abroad – mostly through the ‘geographical’ hashtag#pman (about 30,000 tweets). According to the study there were approximately 10 of these tweets a minute.’

 

There was a similar situation in 2009 in Iran. Protestors were mostly mobilised by the traditional media and only around 100 activists who took part in the protests actively micro-blogged events as they happened. The report points out that in Iran the protestors were extremely coordinated because the country had established a system of political and religious Internet censorship which prompted them to resort to more traditional media outlets.

 

Consequently, censorship of the Internet has not played into the hands of the authorities. Twitter played its role in attracting the attention of foreign media resources say experts from the Foundation.

 

It was this sort of synergy between social networks and traditional media outlets which played a pivotal role in the events of the ‘Atav Spring’ in 2010-2011. News about the self-immolation of Mohammed Bouazizi, the Tunisian vegetable vendor on December 17th, 2010 were at first ignored by the Tunisian media but quickly spread via Twitter and Facebook and was then aired on the Qatari television station Al Jazeera – the only independent television channel in the country. The fact that the authorities put a block on information about Bouazizi in the days following his self-immolation by controlling the State press resulted in a growth in trust in alternative sources of information beyond the influence of government censorship.

 

The FCSD believe that when faced with a revolution at the end of January 2011, the Tunisian and Egyptian authorities were mistaken in attempting to block all alternative sources of information. In Tunis for example they blocked access to video hosting sites YouTube and Vimeo and the graphic hosting site Flickr and also the social networking site Facebook.

 

Egypt also blocked opposition newspapers, but when the public protest against the regime of Hosni Mubarak gained momentum, Egyptian authorities blocked access to Facebook and Twitter, and from 27th January to 6th February it was impossible to use mobile phones in Egypt.

 

Although these actions by the authorities made it difficult for the protestors to communicate, in the end the ban on the use of mobile phone communication ended up by increasing the number of protesters. Thus the ‘prohibitive’ approach of the authorities in trying to combat the revolution by attacking social networks was flawed say experts from the Foundation.

 

‘Many analysts, including Alexander Dunn from the Cairo Institute of Human Rights believe that by censoring cellular networks rather than censoring the internet is what led to a powerful wave of social outrage which forced the non-political sectors of society to become party to political events of that period. In fact, as a result of such tough intervention by the State, the most popular sources of information became satellite channels – like the Al Jazeera TV channel, and the political system became pressured by information which came from abroad. According to the same data, over 45% of tweets on events in Egypt were published outside of Egypt and surrounding Arab countries. Only 29% of posts about unrest in the country actually came from people living in Cairo. Over 60% of the posts were re-tweeted says the report.

 

In the cases of Moldvia and Iran the role of traditional media was mostly to report content from the blogosphere and social network sites with a media ‘boomerang’ effect which effectively gave the political event itself a far more important meaning than it deserved

 

Experts from FCSD point out in conclusion, that social networks are just one of the tools for mobilisation of protests. It is clear that mostly they attract the attention of foreign media – in particular media with a political, revolutionary agenda. When it comes to mobilising the blogosphere, social networks are on a par with traditional media and means of communication such as mobile communications. The main mistake of authoritarian regimes is their attempt to block access to social networks instead of trying to promote alternative media outlets says the Foundation.

 

Kostin told Gazeta.ru: ‘We believe that the role of social networks in revolutions of recent years is exaggerated and that in fact is political forces and traditional media which are playing an increasingly significant role in what is happening. Social media can incite discontent but this is simply a tool for activists to promote their positions.’

 

Political scientist Marina Litvinovich was closely connected with the protest movement in Russia in 2000 and does not agree with experts from FCSD. She suggests that social networks play an important role in the mobilisation of activists who are not supported by traditional media outlets. She says that a total block of social networks in a situation involving an escalation of protests for authoritarian regimes would be a mistake.

 

Mikahil Velmakin, a civic activist and coordinator of the Municipal Council of Deputies in Moscow, worked with the opposition during the ‘orange revolution’ in Ukraine in 2004-2005. In an interview with Gazeta.ru, he agrees that social networking activity alone will not be enough to create the ‘boomerang effect’ in traditional media outlets..

 

‘I don’t agree that blocking access to social networks and independent media websites is a good way to combat protests under authoritarian regimes’ says Velmakin. ‘In Belarus they tackled the problem of protests by blocking access to opposition media outlets, to social network sites and cut off mobile phone signals in the squares where demonstrations were planned so that people could not coordinate. That works.’ In Russia, access to information from mainstream media outlets was denied to protesters only a couple of times: once on the actual day of elections to the State Duma when at least 14 information resources came under DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attack. They included the internet portals Slon.ru and Kasparov.Ru, the Echo of Moscow site, and the magazines The New Times and Big City. Similar DDoS attacks were directed at the Echo of Moscow site, the newspaper Kommersant and the TV channel Dozhd on the day of the Bolotnaya Square march on 6th May 2012. Following the march, opposition activists were prosecuted in the ‘Bolotnaya Case.’  

 

Ilya Klishin, Editor-in-Chief of the TV channel ‘Dozhd’ was one of the administrators of the Facebook protest group page ‘We were on Bolotnaya and we will be back’ which played a significant role in mobilizing protests against electoral fraud during the elections to the State Duma in the winter of 2011-2012. He agrees with the findings of the report.

 

‘In Egypt, tens of thousands of people came out to protest on Tahrir Square’ he says ‘but when the authorities cut off Internet access, hundreds of thousands of people turned up. In other countries access to the Internet was not completely cut off but only restricted but the point is that it is counterproductive for the authorities to block social networking sites.’ Klishin says that the real role of social networking sites in mobilising protests should not be exaggerated – thus echoing the premise of one of the main theorists of non-violent protests Gene Sharp. In an interview with Gazeta.ru in August, Sharp, who is the founder of the Albert Einstein Institute in Moscow expressed doubt that the politicisation of social networking sites is qualitatively different from past methods of peaceful protest. The Albert Einstein Institute is considered by its critics in post-soviet space (countries of the CIS) as the mastermind behind the ‘colour revolutions’.