'Internet freedom doesn’t guarantee real freedom'

The internet is widely believed to foster democracy — the revolution in Tunisia where people drove out their authoritarian president, Ben Ali, was largely organised through online platforms. In 2009, the US State Department directed Twitter to postpone a scheduled maintenance (which would have resulted in an outage of the service) so that Iranians protesting against an unfair election could voice their dissent.

However, while the Tunisian uprising had the desired result, imagine if the president had remained in power. “He would have used all the information posted on social networking sites to crack down on everyone who opposed him. This happened in Iran in 2009,” says Evgeny Morozov, a visiting scholar at Stanford University and author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side Of Internet Freedom.

In an interview with DNA, Morozov talks about how the internet can be liberating, but at the same time can also disengage youth from politics. “We all know that there is plenty of highly entertaining content on the internet... This content is much more popular than the politicised reports about human rights abuses and the like. There is this tendency to glamourise all internet users in China, Russia and Iran as dissidents, which I think is unhelpful.”  Here are excerpts from the interview:

One of the chief points you make is that the internet can be used by authoritarian regimes as well, and hence the internet doesn’t always promote democracy. But isn’t that the case with any technology? It always depends on how it is used...
If you look at some of the early speculations about the impact of the internet on authoritarian states, most people thought that it would simply unseat all of the world’s dictators: they could either let it in and then suffer from political liberalisation or they could try to block it and suffer immense cost to their economy. The idea that dictators will be able to use the Web to strengthen their grip on power rarely occurred to internet theorists.

Dictators have learned to use the Web to produce suave propaganda. Many, like in Russia or China, train bloggers to defend the government’s positions); some use cyber-attacks to exert psychological pressure on dissidents; progressive Saudis who created an online forum to discuss philosophy — a subject banned in the kingdom — only to slowly disintegrate under the burden of cyber-attacks; some use social networking sites for surveillance; for instance, in my own native Belarus, the secret police — still known as KGB — are known to go through profiles of activists that are posted to social networking sites.

The other thing to keep in mind is that if dictators do benefit from the Web, then we have to acknowledge that internet freedom does not automatically yield real freedom — and it may actually undermine it.

Do you feel the recent Tunisian protests could have happened without technology that helped in organising these protests?
The reality is that no one knows whether such protests could have really happened without the internet. We do know that protests and revolutions used to happen in the pre-internet era, even though gaining the ability to control communications systems has always been a high priority for most revolutionaries. In 1918, Lenin even wrote that “socialism without the postal service, the telegraph... [is] nothing but empty words”.

Without the internet, the scale of the protests in Tunisia would have been much smaller. But the role that the internet plays in fomenting protest is just one of the many roles that it plays in authoritarian states. We also need to examine what happens between protests. It very well may be that social media makes protest more effective, but it’s also possible that it’s making it less likely in the long term — this is where we really need to consider how governments are likely to benefit from the internet as well. Consider what would have happened in Tunisia if Ben Ali had stayed in power: he would have used all the information posted on social networking sites to crackdown on everyone who opposed him. This happened in Iran in 2009.

How can one counter an authoritarian regime’s attempt to control the internet and thwart online conversations?
Authoritarian regimes increasingly control the internet by non-technological means. If in the past they mostly blocked certain URLs, now they also try to fully own ISPs or blogging platforms and often, regime-supporting oligarchs agree to purchase those.

They flood blogs with their propaganda. In China, there is the so-called 50-cent party — a loose collective of bloggers who are trained and often compensated by the government to promote government positions online. They launch cyber-attacks on bloggers and publishers they do not like.

All of those require separate approaches; some of these approaches — to better identify propaganda outlets used by the governments — may actually backfire, as they will lead to more surveillance. The first operating principle here should be “Do No Harm”.

What about democratic nations? What role has the internet played in promoting greater, non-institutionalised dialogue among the people?
The impact of the internet on democratic states is a very complex question. As the democratic states tend to have a more vibrant public life than authoritarian states, there are many more processes that the internet can potentially influence. It definitely creates more opportunities for debate and dialogue, but there are many other aspects that should make us pause and think about it a bit harder. For example, the relationship between the erosion of privacy and citizenship is something we probably want to understand better.

I also have concerns about the future of representative democracy; since the internet allows for a more direct democracy, I fear that it may prevail in the long run — even though I’m not sure it’s the best possible political model. The very conception of representative democracy assumes that the politician has some autonomy in making the decision on how to vote. When the public can easily exert pressure on the politician by means of social media, this autonomy disappears. In some sense, it becomes a competition of which lobbyist has more effective online campaigners.

You talk about how TV with American content helped pacify the East Germans. How do you see this playing out as far as the internet is concerned?
We all know that there is plenty of highly entertaining content on the internet. Based on my own observations in Belarus and Russia, this content is much more popular than the politicised reports about human rights abuses and the like. There is this tendency to glamourise all internet users in China, Russia and Iran as dissidents, which I think is unhelpful. So I think we need to be prepared that the internet may also disengage a lot of young people and push them away from politics.

In India, we see the rise of what is now called Facebook activism. Basically you have young people signing on to causes, commenting on the state of affairs. There’s no concrete action to follow this up...
This is something I call “slacktivism”. I have nothing against Facebook groups and petitions but I’d rather see people signing them also join some offline political movements and campaign for change in the real world as much as they do in the virtual world.

Sometimes, there are overlaps, of course, but we need to make sure that we don’t just raise a generation of Facebook activists who don’t dare challenge the authority in the real world thinking that their online contribution is enough. Once again, this is not to minimise the importance of online tools but I feel very often protesters opt for the easiest possible solution (which is, of course, online) instead of opting for something more radical.