'The use of culture to promote imperial agenda did not end after the Cold War'

Eva Golinger discusses the State Department sponsoring the Summit of the Alliance of Youth Movement (Translated from Spanish).

The potential use of these [new] technologies to promote psychological operations and propaganda is unlimited. Its strength is the speed of dissemination of messages and global coverage. [...]

The student movement "white hands" in Venezuela, financed and trained by U.S. agencies, anti-communist protests in Moldova, the demonstrations against the Iranian government and the latest virtual protests against President Chavez are examples of this new strategy. New technologies-Twitter, Facebook, YouTube and others, are the main weapons, and traditional media such as CNN and its affiliates, helping to exaggerate the real impact of these movements promoting matrices false and distorted view of its importance and legitimacy.

The Alliance Youth Movement is another chapter in the destabilization plans against sovereign countries that reject imperialist imperial domination. The double standard of Washington reaffirms this fact. While the Department of State encourages, supports and sponsors the training of young people from other countries in the use of new technologies to destabilize their governments, the United States criminalizes using Twitter and Facebook to convene protests against Washington's policies. This was shown three weeks ago when two American citizens were arrested for using Twitter to inform the protesters against the G20 summit in Pittsburgh on the repressive actions of the police.

For information on the US citizens arrested for using Twitter see Democracy Now!

See here for my earlier post about the over-reaction to Twitter as a revolutionary tool of democracy.

A few links to things that have happened in my absence.

The U.S. offer unconvincing assurances regarding its continued use of rendition.

Birth deformities in Fallujah continue - the cause remains unknown.

Obama's actions belie his rhetoric once more as he extends the Cuban trade embargo.

Trafigura, a company whose corporate social responsibility policy makes the Springfield Nuclear Power Plant look like Oxfam, is responsible for the several deaths and the injury of thousands due the to the dumping of toxic waste in Ivory Coast. The story serves as a measure of news agencies' priorities. Not one of the tabloids mentions the story at all. Meanwhile, David Leigh and Rob Evans, expose links to Conservative lords including the leader of the Conservative party in the Lords, Lord Strathclyde. And, that the victims are to receive little compensation.

The Other Taxpayers' Alliance continue their efforts to expose the Taxpayers' Alliance as a murky millionaires' club.

I found myself agreeing with pretty much everything David Mitchell writes about David Cameron and MPs expenses.

This Richard Littlejohn cock-up is exquisitely ridiculous. Whist this Daily Mail attempt to whip up a false moral outrage is tedious.

Update

*Pink link added retrospectively.

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.