Tara Harms's List: Negative Effects

“Social media really empowered the protests,” Melton said. “It’s harder to control news through these social networks.”

-- Thousands of anti-government protesters, some hurling rocks and climbing atop an armored police truck, clashed with riot police Tuesday in the center of Cairo in a Tunisia-inspired demonstration to demand the end of Hosni Mubarak's nearly 30 years in power.

Police responded with blasts from water cannons and set upon crowds with batons and acrid clouds of tear gas to clear demonstrators crying out "Down with Mubarak" and demanding an end to Egypt's grinding poverty, corruption, unemployment and police abuses.

A double-edged sword

For instance, social media was celebrated as the most important factor in Iran’s Green Revolution, during which protesters gathered in the streets following the disputed presidential election in 2009. However, since the revolt collapsed, the Iranian security service began a fierce crackdown on the protesters. The same technology that was said to have prompted the people into the streets, assisted the Iranian security services in following the trails left by the protesters in their ‘tweets,’ resulting in thousands of arrests, jail terms, and imposition of death penalties.

The Egyptian uprisings of 2011 are commonly known as the “Facebook revolution,” the Moldavian revolt of 2009 has been dubbed the “Twitter revolution”, and we are all love children of the “digital era.” But do blogs, Twitter, Facebook groups and podcasts fracture the public attention so that their messages are also fractured and therefore less meaningful?

 

Citizen journalists, tweeters, and Facebook users across the globe certainly serve us by erasing divisions based on gender, religion, race, and nationality, but the unfortunate truth is that so-called “slacktivists” rarely take any real further action when they go offline.