January/February 2011
ESSAY
The Political Power of Social Media
Technology, the Public Sphere, and Political Change
Clay Shirky
CLAY SHIRKY is Professor of New Media at New York University and the author of Cognitive Surplus: Creativity
and Generosity in a Connected Age [1].
On January 17, 2001, during the impeachment trial of Philippine President Joseph Estrada, loyalists in the Philippine
Congress voted to set aside key evidence against him. Less than two hours after the decision was announced,
thousands of Filipinos, angry that their corrupt president might be let off the hook, converged on Epifanio de los
Santos Avenue, a major crossroads in Manila. The protest was arranged, in part, by forwarded text messages reading,
"Go 2 EDSA. Wear blk."The crowd quickly swelled, and in the next few days, over a million people arrived, choking
traffic in downtown Manila.
The public's ability to coordinate such a massive and rapid response -- close to seven million text messages were sent
that week -- so alarmed the country's legislators that they reversed course and allowed the evidence to be presented.
Estrada's fate was sealed; by January 20, he was gone. The event marked the first time that social media had helped
force out a national leader. Estrada himself blamed "the text-messaging generation"for his downfall.
Since the rise of the Internet in the early 1990s, the world's networked population has
grown from the low millions to the low billions. Over the same period, social media
have become a fact of life for civil society worldwide, involving many actors -- regular
citizens, activists, nongovernmental organizations, telecommunications firms, software
providers, governments. This raises an obvious question for the U.S. government: How
does the ubiquity of social media affect U.S. interests, and how should U.S. policy
respond to it?
As the communications landscape gets denser, more complex, and more participatory,
the networked population is gaining greater access to information, more opportunities
to engage in public speech, and an enhanced ability to undertake collective action. In the political arena, as the
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protests in Manila demonstrated, these increased freedoms can help loosely coordinated publics demand change.
The Philippine strategy has been adopted many times since. In some cases, the protesters ultimately succeeded, as in
Spain in 2004, when demonstrations organized by text messaging led to the quick ouster of Spanish Prime Minister
José María Aznar, who had inaccurately blamed the Madrid transit bombings on Basque separatists. The Communist
Party lost power in Moldova in 2009 when massive protests coordinated in part by text message, Facebook, and
Twitter broke out after an obviously fraudulent election. Around the world, the Catholic Church has faced lawsuits
over its harboring of child rapists, a process that started when The Boston Globe's 2002 exposé of sexual abuse in the
church went viral online in a matter of hours.
There are, however, many examples of the activists failing, as in Belarus in March 2006, when street protests
(arranged in part by e-mail) against President Aleksandr Lukashenko's alleged vote rigging swelled, then faltered,
leaving Lukashenko more determined than ever to control social media. During the June 2009 uprising of the Green
Movement in Iran, activists used every possible technological coordinating tool to protest the miscount of votes for
Mir Hossein Mousavi but were ultimately brought to heel by a violent crackdown. The Red Shirt uprising in Thailand
in 2010 followed a similar but quicker path: protesters savvy with social media occupied downtown Bangkok until the
Thai government dispersed the protesters, killing dozens.
The use of social media tools -- text messaging, e-mail, photo sharing, social networking, and the like -- does not have
a single preordained outcome. Therefore, attempts to outline their effects on political action are too often reduced to
dueling anecdotes. If you regard the failure of the Belarusian protests to oust Lukashenko as paradigmatic, you will
regard the Moldovan experience as an outlier, and vice versa. Empirical work on the subject is also hard to come by,
in part because these tools are so new and in part because relevant examples are so rare. The safest characterization of
recent quantitative attempts to answer the question, Do digital tools enhance democracy? (such as those by Jacob
Groshek and Philip Howard) is that these tools probably do not hurt in the short run and might help in the long run --
and that they have the most dramatic effects in states where a public sphere already constrains the actions of the
government.
Despite this mixed record, social media have become coordinating tools for nearly all of the world's political
movements, just as most of the world's authoritarian governments (and, alarmingly, an increasing number of
democratic ones) are trying to limit access to it. In response, the U.S. State Department has committed itself to
"Internet freedom"as a specific policy aim. Arguing for the right of people to use the Internet freely is an appropriate
policy for the United States, both because it aligns with the strategic goal of strengthening civil society worldwide
and because it resonates with American beliefs about freedom of expression. But attempts to yoke the idea of Internet
freedom to short-term goals -- particularly ones that are country-specific or are intended to help particular dissident
groups or encourage regime change -- are likely to be ineffective on average. And when they fail, the consequences
can be serious.
Although the story of Estrada's ouster and other similar events have led observers to focus on the power of mass
protests to topple governments, the potential of social media lies mainly in their support of civil society and the
public sphere -- change measured in years and decades rather than weeks or months. The U.S. government should
maintain Internet freedom as a goal to be pursued in a principled and regime-neutral fashion, not as a tool for
effecting immediate policy aims country by country. It should likewise assume that progress will be incremental and,
unsurprisingly, slowest in the most authoritarian regimes.
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THE PERILS OF INTERNETFREEDOM
In January 2010, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Clinton outlined howthe United States would promote Internet
freedom abroad. She emphasized several kinds of freedom, including the freedom to access information (such as the
ability to use Wikipedia and Google inside Iran), the freedom of ordinary citizens to produce their own public media
(such as the rights of Burmese activists to blog), and the freedom of citizens to converse with one another (such as
the Chinese public's capacity to use instant messaging without interference).
Most notably, Clinton announced funding for the development of tools designed to reopen access to the Internet in
countries that restrict it. This "instrumental"approach to Internet freedom concentrates on preventing states from
censoring outside Web sites, such as Google, YouTube, or that of The New York Times. It focuses only secondarily
on public speech by citizens and least of all on private or social uses of digital media. According to this vision,
Washington can and should deliver rapid, directed responses to censorship by authoritarian regimes.
The instrumental view is politically appealing, action-oriented, and almost certainly wrong. It overestimates the value
of broadcast media while underestimating the value of media that allow citizens to communicate privately among
themselves. It overestimates the value of access to information, particularly information hosted in the West, while
underestimating the value of tools for local coordination. And it overestimates the importance of computers while
underestimating the importance of simpler tools, such as cell phones.
The instrumental approach can also be dangerous. Consider the debacle around the proposed censorshipcircumvention
software known as Haystack, which, according to its developer, was meant to be a "one-to-one match
for how the [Iranian] regime implements censorship."The tool was widely praised in Washington; the U.S.
government even granted it an export license. But the program was never carefully vetted, and when security experts
examined it, it turned out that it not only failed at its goal of hiding messages from governments but also made it, in
the words of one analyst, "possible for an adversary to specifically pinpoint individual users."In contrast, one of the
most successful anti-censorship software programs, Freegate, has received little support from the United States,
partly because of ordinary bureaucratic delays and partly because the U.S. government is wary of damaging U.S.Chinese
relations: the tool was originally created by Falun Gong, the spiritual movement that the Chinese government
has called "an evil cult."The challenges of Freegate and Haystack demonstrate how difficult it is to weaponize social
media to pursue country-specific and near-term policy goals.
New media conducive to fostering participation can indeed increase the freedoms Clinton outlined, just as the
printing press, the postal service, the telegraph, and the telephone did before. One complaint about the idea of new
media as a political force is that most people simply use these tools for commerce, social life, or self-distraction,
but this is common to all forms of media. Far more people in the 1500s were reading erotic novels than Martin
Luther's "Ninety-five Theses,"and far more people before the American Revolution were reading Poor Richard's
Almanack than the work of the Committees of Correspondence. But those political works still had an enormous
political effect.
Just as Luther adopted the newly practical printing press to protest against the Catholic Church, and the American
revolutionaries synchronized their beliefs using the postal service that Benjamin Franklin had designed, today's
dissident movements will use any means possible to frame their views and coordinate their actions; it would be
impossible to describe the Moldovan Communist Party's loss of Parliament after the 2009 elections without
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discussing the use of cell phones and online tools by its opponents to mobilize. Authoritarian governments stifle
communication among their citizens because they fear, correctly, that a better-coordinated populace would constrain
their ability to act without oversight.
Despite this basic truth -- that communicative freedom is good for political freedom -- the instrumental mode of
Internet statecraft is still problematic. It is difficult for outsiders to understand the local conditions of dissent.
External support runs the risk of tainting even peaceful opposition as being directed by foreign elements. Dissidents
can be exposed by the unintended effects of novel tools. A government's demands for Internet freedom abroad can
vary from country to country, depending on the importance of the relationship, leading to cynicism about its motives.
The more promising way to think about social media is as long-term tools that can strengthen civil society and the
public sphere. In contrast to the instrumental view of Internet freedom, this can be called the "environmental"view.
According to this conception, positive changes in the life of a country, including pro-democratic regime change,
follow, rather than precede, the development of a strong public sphere. This is not to say that popular movements will
not successfully use these tools to discipline or even oust their governments, but rather that U.S. attempts to direct
such uses are likely to do more harm than good. Considered in this light, Internet freedom is a long game, to be
conceived of and supported not as a separate agenda but merely as an important input to the more fundamental
political freedoms.
THE THEATER OF COLLAPSE
Any discussion of political action in repressive regimes must take into account the astonishing fall of communism in
1989 in eastern Europe and the subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. Throughout the Cold War, the
United States invested in a variety of communications tools, including broadcasting the Voice of America radio
station, hosting an American pavilion in Moscow (home of the famous Nixon-Khrushchev"kitchen debate"), and
smuggling Xerox machines behind the Iron Curtain to aid the underground press, or samizdat. Yet despite this
emphasis on communications, the end of the Cold War was triggered not by a defiant uprising of Voice of America
listeners but by economic change. As the price of oil fell while that of wheat spiked, the Soviet model of selling
expensive oil to buy cheap wheat stopped working. As a result, the Kremlin was forced to secure loans from the West,
loans that would have been put at risk had the government intervened militarily in the affairs of non-Russian states. In
1989, one could argue, the ability of citizens to communicate, considered against the background of macroeconomic
forces, was largely irrelevant.
But why, then, did the states behind the Iron Curtain not just let their people starve? After all, the old saying that every
country is three meals away from revolution turned out to be sadly incorrect in the twentieth century; it is possible
for leaders to survive even when millions die. Stalin did it in the 1930s, Mao did it in the 1960s, and Kim Jong Il has
done it more than once in the last two decades. But the difference between those cases and the 1989 revolutions was
that the leaders of East Germany, Czechoslovakia, and the rest faced civil societies strong enough to resist. The
weekly demonstrations in East Germany, the Charter 77 civic movement in Czechoslovakia, and the Solidarity
movement in Poland all provided visible governments in waiting.
The ability of these groups to create and disseminate literature and political documents, even with simple
photocopiers, provided a visible alternative to the communist regimes. For large groups of citizens in these countries,
the political and, even more important, economic bankruptcy of the government was no longer an open secret but a
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public fact. This made it difficult and then impossible for the regimes to order their troops to take on such large
groups.
Thus, it was a shift in the balance of power between the state and civil society that led to the largely peaceful collapse
of communist control. The state's ability to use violence had been weakened, and the civil society that would have
borne the brunt of its violence had grown stronger. When civil society triumphed, many of the people who had
articulated opposition to the communist regimes -- such as Tadeusz Mazowiecki in Poland and VáclavHavel in
Czechoslovakia -- became the new political leaders of those countries. Communications tools during the Cold War
did not cause governments to collapse, but they helped the people take power from the state when it was weak.
The idea that media, from the Voice of America to samizdat, play a supporting role in social change by strengthening
the public sphere echoes the historical role of the printing press. As the German philosopher Jürgen Habermas argued
in his 1962 book, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, the printing press helped democratize
Europe by providing space for discussion and agreement among politically engaged citizens, often before the state
had fully democratized, an argument extended by later scholars, such as Asa Briggs, Elizabeth Eisenstein, and Paul
Starr.
Political freedom has to be accompanied by a civil society literate enough and densely connected enough to discuss
the issues presented to the public. In a famous study of political opinion after the 1948 U.S. presidential election, the
sociologists Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld discovered that mass media alone do not change people's minds; instead,
there is a two-step process. Opinions are first transmitted by the media, and then they get echoed by friends, family
members, and colleagues. It is in this second, social step that political opinions are formed. This is the step in which
the Internet in general, and social media in particular, can make a difference. As with the printing press, the Internet
spreads not just media consumption but media production as well -- it allows people to privately and publicly
articulate and debate a welter of conflicting views.
A slowly developing public sphere, where public opinion relies on both media and conversation, is the core of the
environmental view of Internet freedom. As opposed to the self-aggrandizing view that the West holds the source
code for democracy -- and if it were only made accessible, the remaining autocratic states would crumble -- the
environmental view assumes that little political change happens without the dissemination and adoption of ideas and
opinions in the public sphere. Access to information is far less important, politically, than access to conversation.
Moreover, a public sphere is more likely to emerge in a society as a result of people's dissatisfaction with matters of
economics or day-to-day governance than from their embrace of abstract political ideals.
To take a contemporary example, the Chinese government today is in more danger of being forced to adopt
democratic norms by middle-class members of the ethnic Han majority demanding less corrupt local governments
than it is by Uighurs or Tibetans demanding autonomy. Similarly, the One Million Signatures Campaign, an Iranian
women's rights movement that focuses on the repeal of laws inimical to women, has been more successful in
liberalizing the behavior of the Iranian government than the more confrontational Green Movement.
For optimistic observers of public demonstrations, this is weak tea, but both the empirical and the theoretical work
suggest that protests, when effective, are the end of a long process, rather than a replacement for it. Any real
commitment by the United States to improving political freedom worldwide should concentrate on that process --
which can only occur when there is a strong public sphere.
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THE CONSERVATIVE DILEMMA
Disciplined and coordinated groups, whether businesses or governments, have always had an advantage over
undisciplined ones: they have an easier time engaging in collective action because they have an orderly way of
directing the action of their members. Social media can compensate for the disadvantages of undisciplined groups by
reducing the costs of coordination. The anti-Estrada movement in the Philippines used the ease of sending and
forwarding text messages to organize a massive group with no need (and no time) for standard managerial control. As
a result, larger, looser groups can now take on some kinds of coordinated action, such as protest movements and
public media campaigns, that were previously reserved for formal organizations. For political movements, one of the
main forms of coordination is what the military calls "shared awareness,"the ability of each member of a group to not
only understand the situation at hand but also understand that everyone else does, too. Social media increase shared
awareness by propagating messages through social networks. The anti-Aznar protests in Spain gained momentum so
quickly precisely because the millions of people spreading the message were not part of a hierarchical organization.
The Chinese anticorruption protests that broke out in the aftermath of the devastating May 2008 earthquake in
Sichuan are another example of such ad hoc synchronization. The protesters were parents, particularly mothers, who
had lost their only children in the collapse of shoddily built schools, the result of collusion between construction
firms and the local government. Before the earthquake, corruption in the country's construction industry was an open
secret. But when the schools collapsed, citizens began sharing documentation of the damage and of their protests
through social media tools. The consequences of government corruption were made broadly visible, and it went from
being an open secret to a public truth.
The Chinese government originally allowed reporting on the post-earthquake protests, but abruptly reversed itself in
June. Security forces began arresting protesters and threatening journalists when it became clear that the protesters
were demanding real local reform and not merely state reparations. From the government's perspective, the threat was
not that citizens were aware of the corruption, which the state could do nothing about in the short run. Beijing was
afraid of the possible effects if this awareness became shared: it would have to either enact reforms or respond in a
way that would alarm more citizens. After all, the prevalence of camera phones has made it harder to carry out a
widespread but undocumented crackdown.
This condition of shared awareness -- which is increasingly evident in all modern states -- creates what is commonly
called "the dictator's dilemma"but that might more accurately be described by the phrase coined by the media theorist
Briggs: "the conservative dilemma,"so named because it applies not only to autocrats but also to democratic
governments and to religious and business leaders. The dilemma is created by new media that increase public access
to speech or assembly; with the spread of such media, whether photocopiers or Web browsers, a state accustomed to
having a monopoly on public speech finds itself called to account for anomalies between its view of events and the
public's. The two responses to the conservative dilemma are censorship and propaganda. But neither of these is as
effective a source of control as the enforced silence of the citizens. The state will censor critics or produce
propaganda as it needs to, but both of those actions have higher costs than simply not having any critics to silence or
reply to in the first place. But if a government were to shut down Internet access or ban cell phones, it would risk
radicalizing otherwise pro-regime citizens or harming the economy.
The conservative dilemma exists in part because political speech and apolitical speech are not mutually exclusive.
Many of the South Korean teenage girls who turned out in Seoul's Cheonggyecheon Park in 2008 to protest U.S. beef
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imports were radicalized in the discussion section of a Web site dedicated to Dong Bang Shin Ki, a South Korean boy
band. DBSK is not a political group, and the protesters were not typical political actors. But that online community,
with around 800,000 active members, amplified the second step of Katz and Lazarsfeld's two-step process by
allowing members to form political opinions through conversation.
Popular culture also heightens the conservative dilemma by providing cover for more political uses of social media.
Tools specifically designed for dissident use are politically easy for the state to shut down, whereas tools in broad
use become much harder to censor without risking politicizing the larger group of otherwise apolitical actors. Ethan
Zuckerman of Harvard's Berkman Center for Internet and Society calls this "the cute cat theory of digital activism."
Specific tools designed to defeat state censorship (such as proxy servers) can be shut down with little political
penalty, but broader tools that the larger population uses to, say, share pictures of cute cats are harder to shut down.
For these reasons, it makes more sense to invest in social media as general, rather than specifically political, tools to
promote self-governance. The norm of free speech is inherently political and far from universally shared. To the
degree that the United States makes free speech a first-order goal, it should expect that goal to work relatively well in
democratic countries that are allies, less well in undemocratic countries that are allies, and least of all in
undemocratic countries that are not allies. But nearly every country in the world desires economic growth. Since
governments jeopardize that growth when they ban technologies that can be used for both political and economic
coordination, the United States should rely on countries' economic incentives to allow widespread media use. In other
words, the U.S. government should work for conditions that increase the conservative dilemma, appealing to states'
self-interest rather than the contentious virtue of freedom, as a way to create or strengthen countries' public spheres.
SOCIAL MEDIASKEPTICISM
There are, broadly speaking, two arguments against the idea that social media will make a difference in national
politics. The first is that the tools are themselves ineffective, and the second is that they produce as much harm to
democratization as good, because repressive governments are becoming better at using these tools to suppress
dissent.
The critique of ineffectiveness, most recently offered [2] by Malcolm Gladwell in The New Yorker, concentrates on
examples of what has been termed "slacktivism,"whereby casual participants seek social change through low-cost
activities, such as joining Facebook's "Save Darfur"group, that are long on bumper-sticker sentiment and short on any
useful action. The critique is correct but not central to the question of social media's power; the fact that barely
committed actors cannot click their way to a better world does not mean that committed actors cannot use social
media effectively. Recent protest movements -- including a movement against fundamentalist vigilantes in India in
2009, the beef protests in South Korea in 2008, and protests against education laws in Chile in 2006 -- have used
social media not as a replacement for real-world action but as a way to coordinate it. As a result, all of those protests
exposed participants to the threat of violence, and in some cases its actual use. In fact, the adoption of these tools
(especially cell phones) as a way to coordinate and document real-world action is so ubiquitous that it will probably
be a part of all future political movements.
This obviously does not mean that every political movement that uses these tools will succeed, because the state has
not lost the power to react. This points to the second, and much more serious, critique of social media as tools for
political improvement -- namely, that the state is gaining increasingly sophisticated means of monitoring,
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interdicting, or co-opting these tools. The use of social media, the scholars Rebecca MacKinnon of the New America
Foundation and Evgeny Morozov of the Open Society Institute have argued, is just as likely to strengthen authoritarian
regimes as it is to weaken them. The Chinese government has spent considerable effort perfecting several systems for
controlling political threats from social media. The least important of these is its censorship and surveillance
program. Increasingly, the government recognizes that threats to its legitimacy are coming from inside the state and
that blocking the Web site of The New York Times does little to prevent grieving mothers from airing their
complaints about corruption.
The Chinese system has evolved from a relatively simple filter of incoming Internet traffic in the mid-1990s to a
sophisticated operation that not only limits outside information but also uses arguments about nationalism and public
morals to encourage operators of Chinese Web services to censor their users and users to censor themselves.
Because its goal is to prevent information from having politically synchronizing effects, the state does not need to
censor the Internet comprehensively; rather, it just needs to minimize access to information.
Authoritarian states are increasingly shutting down their communications grids to deny dissidents the ability to
coordinate in real time and broadcast documentation of an event. This strategy also activates the conservative
dilemma, creating a short-term risk of alerting the population at large to political conflict. When the government of
Bahrain banned Google Earth after an annotated map of the royal family's annexation of public land began circulating,
the effect was to alert far more Bahrainis to the offending map than knew about it originally. So widely did the news
spread that the government relented and reopened access after four days.
Such shutdowns become more problematic for governments if they are long-lived. When antigovernment protesters
occupied Bangkok in the summer of 2010, their physical presence disrupted Bangkok's shopping district, but the
state's reaction, cutting off significant parts of the Thai telecommunications infrastructure, affected people far from
the capital. The approach creates an additional dilemma for the state -- there can be no modern economy without
working phones -- and so its ability to shut down communications over large areas or long periods is constrained.
In the most extreme cases, the use of social media tools is a matter of life and death, as with the proposed death
sentence for the blogger Hossein Derakhshan in Iran (since commuted to 19 and a half years in prison) or the
suspicious hanging death of Oleg Bebenin, the founder of the Belarusian opposition Web site Charter 97. Indeed, the
best practical reason to think that social media can help bring political change is that both dissidents and governments
think they can. All over the world, activists believe in the utility of these tools and take steps to use them accordingly.
And the governments they contend with think social media tools are powerful, too, and are willing to harass, arrest,
exile, or kill users in response. One way the United States can heighten the conservative dilemma without running
afoul of as many political complications is to demand the release of citizens imprisoned for using media in these
ways. Anything that constrains the worst threats of violence by the state against citizens using these tools also
increases the conservative dilemma.
LOOKING AT THE LONG RUN
To the degree that the United States pursues Internet freedom as a tool of statecraft, it should de-emphasize anticensorship
tools, particularly those aimed at specific regimes, and increase its support for local public speech and
assembly more generally. Access to information is not unimportant, of course, but it is not the primary way social
media constrain autocratic rulers or benefit citizens of a democracy. Direct, U.S. government-sponsored support for
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specific tools or campaigns targeted at specific regimes risk creating backlash that a more patient and global
application of principles will not.
This entails reordering the State Department's Internet freedom goals. Securing the freedom of personal and social
communication among a state's population should be the highest priority, closely followed by securing individual
citizens' ability to speak in public. This reordering would reflect the reality that it is a strong civil society -- one in
which citizens have freedom of assembly -- rather than access to Google or YouTube, that does the most to force
governments to serve their citizens.
As a practical example of this, the United States should be at least as worried about Egypt's recent controls on the
mandatory licensing of group-oriented text-messaging services as it is about Egypt's attempts to add new restrictions
on press freedom. The freedom of assembly that such text-messaging services support is as central to American
democratic ideals as is freedom of the press. Similarly, South Korea's requirement that citizens register with their
real names for certain Internet services is an attempt to reduce their ability to surprise the state with the kind of
coordinated action that took place during the 2008 protest in Seoul. If the United States does not complain as directly
about this policy as it does about Chinese censorship, it risks compromising its ability to argue for Internet freedom
as a global ideal.
More difficult, but also essential, will be for the U.S. government to articulate a policy of engagement with the private
companies and organizations that host the networked public sphere. Services based in the United States, such as
Facebook, Twitter, Wikipedia, and YouTube, and those based overseas, such as QQ (a Chinese instant-messaging
service), WikiLeaks (a repository of leaked documents whose servers are in Sweden), Tuenti (a Spanish social
network), and Naver (a Korean one), are among the sites used most for political speech, conversation, and
coordination. And the world's wireless carriers transmit text messages, photos, and videos from cell phones through
those sites. How much can these entities be expected to support freedom of speech and assembly for their users?
The issue here is analogous to the questions about freedom of speech in the United States in private but commercial
environments, such as those regarding what kind of protests can be conducted in shopping malls. For good or ill, the
platforms supporting the networked public sphere are privately held and run; Clinton committed the United States to
working with those companies, but it is unlikely that without some legal framework, as exists for real-world speech
and action, moral suasion will be enough to convince commercial actors to support freedom of speech and assembly.
It would be nice to have a flexible set of short-term digital tactics that could be used against different regimes at
different times. But the requirements of real-world statecraft mean that what is desirable may not be likely. Activists
in both repressive and democratic regimes will use the Internet and related tools to try to effect change in their
countries, but Washington's ability to shape or target these changes is limited. Instead, Washington should adopt a
more general approach, promoting freedom of speech, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly everywhere.
And it should understand that progress will be slow. Only by switching from an instrumental to an environmental view
of the effects of social media on the public sphere will the United States be able to take advantage of the long-term
benefits these tools promise -- even though that may mean accepting short-term disappointment.
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[1] http://us.penguingroup.com/nf/Book/BookDisplay/0,,9781594202537,00.html
[2] http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell
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