This article was posted on Passport, a blog run by Foreign Policy Magazine, and it takes a very clear stance on the Cameroonian’s government decision to ban Twitter Mobile SMS posts. Scholars and news media are frequently citing the critical role that Twitter played in facilitating the Orange and Iranian Revolutions and, even more recently, in the ongoing protests in Egypt. This story provided an interesting case study for governments that wish to quell homegrown revolutions and raised questions about the new form of online activism. In the end, through the use of quotations, it argued that banning SMS Twitter will be an ineffective way of quieting protestors or government critics.
While this article did not give a lot of background information on Twitter’s revolutionary capacity, it cited a blogger, Dibussi Tande, from Cameroon, who described the use of SMS Twitter updates in the Tunisia protests. Tande’s blog won the 2008 Black Weblog Awards for Best International Blog. It also cites Evgeny Morozov, author of The Dark Side of Internet Freedom: The New Delusion, to argues against the Cameroonian government’s adoption of this ill-conceived policy. While I appreciated the research that went into this brief Passport post, I think it would have been nice for the Foreign Policy editors to take more a clear position on the Cameroonian government’s decision to block mobile twitter.
No comments:
Post a Comment