New communications media are not necessarily an unmitigated benefit for democracy activists, analysts suggest. The purported role of Twitter in recent mobilizations in Moldova and Iran has been over—hyped, a recent U.S. Helsinki Commission briefing in Washington heard.
“The key is not only to employ effective technologies but to pair the technologies with strategies and approaches that are developed for the political environment in which the technologies are being used,” said Chris Spence, chief technology officer at the National Democratic Institute.
The same technologies are also available to authoritarian regimes and employed by them with increasing effectiveness and sophistication.
“It’s a mistake to believe that these governments wouldn’t be able to manipulate these new public spaces with their own propaganda,” said Evgeny Morozov, a researcher at Georgetown University. “Whether it is actually a threat or not doesn’t even matter.”
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