Twitter & the digital divide

Twitter has been receiving numerous plaudits due to Twitter’s role in the media coverage of the Iranian election protests.

Twitter is a jolt of democratisation to journalism.

To date, the most salient, powerful example of Twitter's influence has been Iranian protesters using the service (among many other methods) to assemble marches against what they feel has been an unjust election.

There is no question of Twitter's power

Many users have become accustomed to clicking on Twitter when news breaks. There, they can find a sea of reaction, commentary and links to actual articles.

There is an obvious weakness in the rapidity and lack of accountability that a more 'democratic' journalism brings

News that circulates on Twitter, re-tweeted from person to person, can spread quickly - often too quickly for it to be verified. False rumours spread daily on Twitter.

However, it is another aspect of Twitter that is troubling me, the power of Twitter and who it serves. Twitter is less democratic than it appears. Rash declarations proclaiming the unambiguously beneficial value of services like Twitter to the larger discourse are over-simplistic. Reality is more complex.

Let us reconsider the Iran protests and Twitter.

It is hard to say how much twittering is actually going on inside Iran. The tweets circulated by expatriates in the United States tend to be in English -- the Twitter interface does not support the use of Farsi. And though many people may be sending tweets out of Iran, their use inside Iran may be low, some say.

This helps explain the almost uniform opposition to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Twitter when he receives strong support in poorer rural Iran. Whilst I welcome greater exposure of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's regime's human rights abuses, people ought to be aware of the bias of Twitter. In the light of the tidal wave of opposition to Ahmadinejad, Twitter was functioning as medium of propaganda for the U.S. State Department without the requirement of their engagement. A fact underscored by the U.S. State Department urging Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance that would have temporarily stopped service to Iran during the protests.

Twitter excludes the disadvantaged. Twitter effectively provides a megaphone to those with access to the required media that can afford to invest the time whilst the vast majority of the world cannot afford to have their voices heard.

Reaction to recent events in Latin America provides a further example. In the face of growing investment in American imperialism in the region, it is the geographically remote from the region that tend to pass comment. In the wake of the Honduras coup, for example, the privileged self-interested few who support the coup were disproportionately loud. The majority of Hondurans, those that were to benefit from the ousted Zelaya's progressive reforms, the poor, seldom tweet.

It seems as though the privileged few continue to have the upper hand.

Honduras & the ultra-conservative mainstream media

I appreciate that I have been going on about the Honduras coup quite a bit. The reason is that the mainstream media has largely ignored the situation, and when they have covered it, they have tended to be misleading. The latest offering from Media Lens is on this topic and is well worth a read. It brings to light the work of many of the best writers on the situation in Honduras whilst castigating The Independent for ultra-conservative opinion pieces on the issue.

80% Carbon cut - a landmark pledge?

The Independent leads on "US agrees landmark pledge to slash emissions" today, is this as inspiring as it appears?

Looking at the US climate-change bill, George Monbiot thinks not.

The cut proposed by [2050 is 80%, yet by] 2020 is just 17%, which means that most of the reduction will take place towards the end of the period. What this means is much greater cumulative emissions, which is the only measure that counts. Worse still, it is riddled with so many loopholes and concessions that the bill's measures might not offset the emissions from the paper it's printed on. You can judge the effectiveness of a US bill by its length: the shorter it is, the more potent it will be. This one is some 1,200 pages long, which is what happens when lobbyists have been at work.

The Economist describe the US climate change bill as 'A squeaker, with more to come'.

Instead of straight talk, however, Mr Obama has mostly been offering happy talk. When the House of Representatives narrowly passed a climate-change bill on June 26th, he rejoiced that it would create millions of new green jobs and reduce America’s “dangerous dependence on foreign oil”. Almost as an afterthought, he mentioned that it might do something for the planet. As usual, he gave the impression that planet-cooling will require no sacrifice from voters.

This is drivel. The shift to a lower-carbon economy will destroy jobs as well as create them, and hit growth. Greens wish Mr Obama would use his immense popularity and rhetorical skills to persuade Americans that such costs are outweighed by the benefits of helping to avert planetary catastrophe. But rather than shaping public opinion, he is running scared of it. And so, even more, is Congress.

So, the bill is a fudge, and the pledge (if it is even upheld) will be too. Sadly, as Monbiot points out, "This bill is the best we're going to get for now because the corruption of public life in the United States has not been addressed."

Obama’s Cairo speech

What he did say was largely inoffensive, what he failed to say …

Fisk writes

About the Venue

[P]lease note that Obama has chosen Egypt for his latest address to the Muslims, a country run by an ageing potentate – Hosni Mubarak is 80 – who uses his secret police like a private army to imprison human rights workers, opposition politicians, anyone in fact who challenges the great man's rule.

And that: …

The Egyptian Organisation of Human Rights, a separate group, discovered that 10 of the 29 died after torture. In one case, rights groups acquired a videotape of a prisoner being anally raped with a stick by a police officer. Other videos show one of Mubarak's political opponents – a woman – being sexually molested by a plain-clothes police officer in a Cairo street.

As for the speech itself: …

when Obama said that some governments, "once in power, are ruthless in suppressing the rights of others", there was a roar of applause from the supposedly obedient audience. […] As the Palestinian intellectual Marwan Bishara pointed out yesterday, it is easy to be "dazzled" by presidents. This was a dazzling performance. But if one searched the text, there were things missing.

There was no mention – during or after his kindly excoriation of Iran – of Israel's estimated 264 nuclear warheads. He admonished the Palestinians for their violence – for "shooting rockets at sleeping children or blowing up old women in a bus". But there was no mention of Israel's violence in Gaza, just of the "continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza". Nor was there a mention of Israel's bombing of civilians in Lebanon, of its repeated invasions of Lebanon (17,500 dead in the 1982 invasion alone). Obama told Muslims not to live in the past, but cut the Israelis out of this. […]

For a man who is sending thousands more US troops into Afghanistan – a certain disaster-to-come in the eyes of Arabs and Westerners – there was something brazen about all this. When he talked about the debt that all Westerners owed to Islam – the "light of learning" in Andalusia, algebra, the magnetic compass, religious tolerance, it was like a cat being gently stroked before a visit to the vet. And the vet, of course, lectured the Muslims on the dangers of extremism, on "cycles of suspicion and discord" – even if America and Islam shared "common principles" which turned out to be "justice, progress and the dignity of all human beings".

There was one merciful omission: a speech of nearly 6,000 words did not include the lethal word "terror". "Terror" or "terrorism" have become punctuation marks for every Israeli government and became part of the obscene grammar of the Bush era.

An intelligent guy, then, Obama. Not exactly Gettysburg. Not exactly Churchill, but not bad. One could only remember Churchill's observations: "Words are easy and many, while great deeds are difficult and rare."

Chomsky notes that:

Obama's June 4 Cairo address to the Muslim world kept pretty much to his well-honed "blank slate" style -- saying very little of substance, but in a personable manner that allows listeners to write on the slate what they want to hear. CNN captured its spirit in headlining a report "Obama looks to reach the soul of the Muslim world."

Whereas John Pilger - Smile on the face of the tiger [Please read in full]

President Barack Obama made his “historic” speech in Cairo, “reaching out to the Muslim world”, reported the BBC. “Just as it devastates Palestinian families, the continuing humanitarian crisis in Gaza,” said Obama, “does not serve Israel’s security.” That was all. The killing of 1,300 people in what is now a concentration camp merited 17 words, cast as concern for the “security” of the killers. This was understandable. During the January massacre, Seymour Hersh reported that “the Obama team let it be known that it would not object to the planned resupply of ‘smart bombs’ and other hi-tech ordnance that was already flowing to Israel” for use in Gaza.

Robert Fisk: How can you trust the cowardly BBC?

Robert Fisk passionately denunciates the BBC Trust's decision to criticise Jeremy Bowen's coverage of the Middle East.

[The BBC Trust] is now a mouthpiece for the Israeli lobby which so diligently abused Bowen. [...] If you allow yourself to bow down before those who wish you to deviate from the truth, you will stay on your knees forever.

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