Social Media Shutdown?

In today's class, we viewed a YouTube video of Asmaa Mahfouz, an Egyptian woman who posted a viral YouTube video calling for protestors to gather against Mubarak in Tahrir Square on January 25, 2011. Amy Goodman, of Democracy Now!, shows clips from the video on her program:

In class, we compared Mahfouz's video with "Common Sense," a pamphlet distributed by Thomas Paine in 1776 that condemned the British monarchy. There are certainly similarities, but perhaps the biggest difference is the way in which the protestors' information was delivered. While Paine relied on pamphlets to spread awareness of liberty, today's technology — such as YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, for example — allows for viral videos and mass consumption at a much more rapid rate.

Brian Rank raised an interesting question in class: What would happen if these social media outlets were shut down in an effort to prevent viral videos from reaching the masses?

The shutdown is not impossible. In 2009, China shut down access to social media sites like Twitter, Facebook, Flickr and Blogger immediately before the 20th Anniversary of the massacres at Tiananmen Square. In January 2011, Egypt shut down "virtually all internet access" in an effort to control Mubarak's protestors. Libya, too, shut down internet access in February 2011 to keep protestors at bay.

According to an August 13, 2011 article on Wired, Britain is also considering a legal clause that allows the government to shut down social media websites in times of crisis. The reason, according to British Prime Minister David Cameron, is that social media often "[amplifies] panic, [spreads] misinformation and [causes] already-stretched police communications channels to be overloaded by people worried about some rumor they’ve read online."

It will be interesting to see how quickly a new method of dispersing information is developed in the event that the public is permanently disabled from using social media. In fact, I would bet that some of today's leading independent journalists have already considered this scenario. For now, we can only hope that our government does not follow along in other countries' footsteps.