Is "Social Media" Really Powering Revolutions?

[Dreadnaught]

I too am getting a bit tired of these hyperbolic claims that revolutions in Iran and Egypt are being fueled by social media more than the obvious conditions these people live through each day.

<Excerpt>

Perhaps the most revealing window into America’s media-fed isolation from this crisis — small an example as it may seem — is the default assumption that the Egyptian uprising, like every other paroxysm in the region since the Green Revolution in Iran 18 months ago, must be powered by the twin American-born phenomena of Twitter and Facebook. Television news — at once threatened by the power of the Internet and fearful of appearing unhip — can’t get enough of this cliché.

Three days after riot police first used tear gas and water hoses to chase away crowds in Tahrir Square, CNN’s new prime-time headliner, Piers Morgan, declared that “the use of social media” was “the most fascinating aspect of this whole revolution.” On MSNBC that same night, Lawrence O’Donnell interviewed a teacher who had spent a year at the American school in Cairo. “They are all on Facebook,” she said of her former fifth-grade students. The fact that a sampling of fifth graders in the American school might be unrepresentative of, and wholly irrelevant to, the events unfolding in the streets of Cairo never entered the equation.

The social networking hype eventually had to subside for a simple reason: The Egyptian government pulled the plug on its four main Internet providers and yet the revolution only got stronger. “Let’s get a reality check here,” said Jim Clancy, a CNN International anchor, who broke through the bloviation on Jan. 29 by noting that the biggest demonstrations to date occurred on a day when the Internet was down. “There wasn’t any Twitter. There wasn’t any Facebook,” he said. No less exasperated was another knowledgeable on-the-scene journalist, Richard Engel, who set the record straight on MSNBC in a satellite hook-up with Rachel Maddow. “This didn’t have anything to do with Twitter and Facebook,” he said. “This had to do with people’s dignity, people’s pride. People are not able to feed their families.”

No one would deny that social media do play a role in organizing, publicizing and empowering participants in political movements in the Middle East and elsewhere. But as Malcolm Gladwell wrote on The New Yorker’s Web site last week, “surely the least interesting fact” about the Egyptian protesters is that some of them “may (or may not) have at one point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one another.” What’s important is “why they were driven to do it in the first place” — starting with the issues of human dignity and crushing poverty that Engel was trying to shove back to center stage.

Among cyber-intellectuals in America, a fascinating debate has broken out about whether social media can do as much harm as good in totalitarian states like Egypt. In his fiercely argued new book, “The Net Delusion,” Evgeny Morozov, a young scholar who was born in Belarus, challenges the conventional wisdom of what he calls “cyber-utopianism.” Among other mischievous facts, he reports that there were only 19,235 registered Twitter accounts in Iran (0.027 percent of the population) on the eve of what many American pundits rebranded its “Twitter Revolution.” More damning, Morozov also demonstrates how the digital tools so useful to citizens in a free society can be co-opted by tech-savvy dictators, police states and garden-variety autocrats to spread propaganda and to track (and arrest) conveniently networked dissidents, from Iran to Venezuela. Hugo Chávez first vilified Twitter as a “conspiracy,” but now has 1.2 million followers imbibing his self-sanctifying Tweets.

This provocative debate isn’t even being acknowledged in most American coverage of the Internet’s role in the current uprisings. The talking-head invocations of Twitter and Facebook instead take the form of implicit, simplistic Western chauvinism. How fabulous that two great American digital innovations can rescue the downtrodden, unwashed masses. That is indeed impressive if no one points out that, even in the case of the young and relatively wired populace of Egypt, only some 20 percent of those masses have Internet access.

That we often don’t know as much about the people in these countries as we do about their Tweets is a testament to the cutbacks in foreign coverage at many news organizations — and perhaps also to our own desire to escape a war zone that has for so long sapped American energy, resources and patience.

</excerpt>

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/opinion/06rich.html

[Loki]

I don't think it's because of Western chauvinism; it's because most American reporters are deluded egotists who are obsessed with Twitter (and to a lesser extent, Facebook) as it allows them to feel important.

[Ziggy Stardust]

Well ... powering is a bit strong a word to use. It certainly helps.

[Dreadnaught]

Even if the Internet is blocked and no one really uses Twitter?

I do agree with you Loki, reporters are disproportionately obsessed with Twitter. Last stat I saw was that 92% of Americans don't use it. Facebook is much more mainstream, but it's more walled-off so reporters can't just lazily do a Facebook search to see someone's status updates and report on their findings as a "trend".

[agamemnus]

92% of Americans use Twitter?

...

No wonder the economy is in the dumps.

[wiggin]

I do think Twitter's effect is overstated, but I should point out that plenty of Egyptians were using Twitter throughout the demonstrations (mostly those with cell phone access through proxies), and these were far more effective at communicating than blogs and the like, which are hard to update quickly using workarounds.

I do think it's being blown out of proportion to its real impact, though. More broadly one could make a very convincing argument that the internet in general and much freer promulgation of information damaging to the regime (including non-internet sources like AJ) has had a much more profound impact over the last 5 years or so which really laid the groundwork for the upheaval. Cases of police torture/abuse, rampant corruption in the justice system, crooked elections, ruthlessly suppressed demonstrations, and more have been circulating and gaining currency on the internet in a way that would likely have been much more difficult in previous decades.

I don't want to push the metaphor too far, but look at the promulgation of dissident information in the Soviet Union - it relied on extremely low tech means (samizdat mostly) and took a very long time to circulate to large groups of people. Recent changes in information architecture makes it much easier to disseminate this kind of destabilizing and damning evidence... and it come with pictures and video, to boot.

[Hazir]

Well, here we have the same economic conditions for the people and the same dictatorship, it is not that strange to assume those millions sitting in their internet cafes day in day out came up with some naughty ideas about democracy and the likes.

Not much unlike how in the West aspriring extremists get their inspration from the net.

[Hazir]

And really what was the last time you watched a regular broadcast? Or pick up a newspaper that wasn't a freebie?

[Dreadnaught]

92% of Americans use Twitter?

...

No wonder the economy is in the dumps.

Whoops! 92% of Americans don't use Twitter. And the numbers are of course lower worldwide.

[Ominous Gamer]

Whoops! 92% of Americans don't use Twitter. And the numbers are of course lower worldwide.

92% of American adults don't use twitter, according to a landline based Pew Research survey that starts recording at 18 years old. Just like so many other social networking devices, its the bored teens that carry it. The same research also showed that those under 30 (a solid age for your average protesting group) are twice as likely to use twitter when compared to the next age bracket.

I wonder what the real numbers are for the rest of the developed world. China heavily bans outside social media sites, yet 92% (hey, a popular number) of the population is reported to use them. Compared to America's 76%. The Chinese are also at least twice as likely to use chats and blogs.

[agamemnus]

That's not surprising. Asians don't talk much; typing fills the void.

[Dreadnaught]

92% of American adults don't use twitter, according to a landline based Pew Research survey that starts recording at 18 years old. Just like so many other social networking devices, its the bored teens that carry it. The same research also showed that those under 30 (a solid age for your average protesting group) are twice as likely to use twitter when compared to the next age bracket.

I wonder what the real numbers are for the rest of the developed world. China heavily bans outside social media sites, yet 92% (hey, a popular number) of the population is reported to use them. Compared to America's 76%. The Chinese are also at least twice as likely to use chats and blogs.

Nielsen audience measurements (which aren't based on telephone surveys, but basically on an elaborate system of audience panels) also suggests that Twitter under-indexes for youth populations-

http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/...eled-by-youth/

Though I do wonder if the developing may over-index for some reason due to the mobile capabilities. Still, I highly doubt it. To me a lot about Twitter just smacks of a coastal techie hipster/media craze. And I still don't even see it that often.

[Hazir]

Well Chinese censors aren't taking any chances. Look for Egypt online there and you won't get any returns pertaining to yhe unrest.

Also what you guys don't get is that if 20% or more of your under 25 population is jobless with nothing on their hands but the internet (as is the case in the middle east) the net is used in different ways than in any part of the US.

[Flixy]

Twitter always seemed overrated, I am in the 'hot' demographic for it but I hardly know anyone who uses it. But I do imagine it would be very different in the middle east, yeah.

[GGT]

Well Chinese censors aren't taking any chances. Look for Egypt online there and you won't get any returns pertaining to yhe unrest.

Also what you guys don't get is that if 20% or more of your under 25 population is jobless with nothing on their hands but the internet (as is the case in the middle east) the net is used in different ways than in any part of the US.

True. I'd say the internet in general can and will feed revolutions / uprisings. This is, after all, The Information Age.

[Hazir]

I sure as hell get better information from twitter than from any mainstream news channel. AJE is a good second. With twitter i get news as it happens in Egypt from people I know I can trust and who know what they are talking about.

[Dreadnaught]

Twitter always seemed overrated, I am in the 'hot' demographic for it but I hardly know anyone who uses it. But I do imagine it would be very different in the middle east, yeah.

Agreed. But arguably Web access there is more expensive. More people have mobile phones, but are data plans really cheap enough in countries like Egypt where folks survive on a few dollars per day?

[Dreadnaught]

FEBRUARY 10, 2011

Twitter as Tech Bubble Barometer
By SPENCER E. ANTE, AMIR EFRATI And ANUPREETA DAS

As Internet valuations climb and bankers and would-be buyers circle Silicon Valley in an increasingly frothy tech market, many eyes are on one particularly desirable, if still enigmatic, target: Twitter. Discussions with at least some potential suitors have produced an estimated valuation of $8 billion to $10 billion.

Executives at both Facebook Inc. and Google Inc., among other companies, have held low-level talks with those at Twitter Inc. in recent months to explore the prospect of an acquisition of the messaging service, according to people familiar with the matter. The talks have so far gone nowhere, these people say.

But what's remarkable is the money that people familiar with the matter say frames the discussions with at least some potential suitors: an estimated valuation in the neighborhood of $8 billion to $10 billion.

This for a company that, people familiar with the matter said, had 2010 revenue of $45 million—but lost money as it spent on hiring and data centers—and estimates its revenue this year at between $100 million and $110 million.

"Are these prices justifiable based on financial multiples? No," said Ethan Kurzweil of venture capital firm Bessemer Venture Partners. But these start-ups are building social services and have lots of data about their users and "the market is valuing that mightily right now."

A Twitter spokesman declined to comment on its finances, valuations and interest by other companies. Google and Facebook also declined to comment.

Twitter, which started selling ads last spring against its business of allowing users to send messages of no more than 140 characters, is just one of many tech targets being batted about as valuations climb. In December, when it got $200 million in new venture capital, Twitter was valued at $3.7 billion.

But since then Facebook raised $1.5 billion in a financing that valued the social network at $50 billion, up from $10 billion in mid 2009. Online-coupon provider Groupon Inc. rebuffed a $6 billion takeover offer from Google and set plans for a 2011 public offering—a prospect that had bankers rushing to Groupon's Chicago headquarters in recent weeks to make pitches. And just this week, AOL Inc. agreed to pay $315 million to buy the Huffington Post—about 10 times the news and commentary website's 2010 revenue.

These rich valuations have led other start-ups to explore public offerings, bankers said. Internet music service Pandora Media Inc., for instance, plans a $100 million public offering, while business-networking website LinkedIn Corp. filed last month to go public, with a likely valuation of about $2 billion, according to people familiar with the matter.

The growing valuations also reflect a psychological shift among some entrepreneurs who are opting to remain independent and grow their businesses instead of selling early for a quick return. Twitter co-founder Evan Williams and current Chief Executive Dick Costolo have already both sold companies to Google.

Both Google and Facebook have discussed buying Twitter in the past and have kept their lines of communication open, people familiar with the matter said. One of these people said companies including Facebook and Google have expressed "latent interest" in an acquisition.

On Wednesday, venture-capital firm Andreessen Horowitz said it had bought more than $80 million of Twitter shares through exchanges for private-company stock. A spokeswoman for Andreessen Horowitz declined to say what percentage of Twitter those shares represent.

Twitter's revenues and valuation have risen even as the company continues to work on ways to translate its more than 200 million registered users into a profitable business. Twitter, which was created in 2006, introduced advertising into its service last year.

One of the new Twitter ad services, called Promoted Trends, has been selling out its inventory every day, said one person familiar with the matter. The other two ad products, Promoted Tweets and Promoted Accounts, are also doing brisk business, this person said.

Despite the high valuations, Twitter's executives and board are continuing to work on building a large, independent company. People familiar with the situation said the company believes it can grow into a $100 billion company.

To do that, Twitter has been hiring engineers and increasing its work force to more than 350, up from 100 in January 2010. Twitter has also been building an executive team, appointing Mr. Costolo, a former Google executive, as CEO last year.

Twitter also hired Adam Bain, a former Fox Interactive Media president, to be its president of global sales in August. He has built a sales team of more than 20 people, a spokesman said.

"The company is having great ad-sales momentum right now, but we still think they need to do something big to increase usage and get more people seeing and interacting with tweets," said Debra Aho Williamson, an eMarketer analyst. "Most of their advertisers are just experimenting at this point; the challenge will be to get those advertisers to come back and buy more," she said.

Write to Amir Efrati at amir.efrati@wsj.com and Anupreeta Das at anupreeta.das@wsj.com

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...029279426.html

$8-10 billion valuations? What a bubble.

[Hazir]

Agreed. But arguably Web access there is more expensive. More people have mobile phones, but are data plans really cheap enough in countries like Egypt where folks survive on a few dollars per day?

Look at the twitter traffic in Egypt before and around jan 25, there is an incredible spike when the protests get on the way. İt jumps five times higher than usual. People outside the US aren't paying to recieve calls or messages. İn a country like Egypt most young people will have a prepaid card.

Also, you could have noticed that a lot of people use facebook in a twittery way though it has nothing of the flightiness of Twitter. As people get more paranoid about what they publish they may prefer twitter.

[Dreadnaught]

Where did you see this?

I can believe that Twitter traffic has gone up relatively speaking, but that doesn't mean a lot of people in Egypt are using Twitter in the first place.

[Hazir]

Sorry, that is buried in a mountain of 150 topics containing 350 messages each. There are about 14,000 known Egyptian twitter users. There probably are more in reality.

[GGT]

The ripple across the middle east seems to show that.....even when dictatorial regimes try to cut internet access, or ban international tele-journalists.....images, texts and tweets WILL sneak out. If the revolutionaries know the world is watching, even our limited watching might keep their efforts going.

[Ominous Gamer]

I think its a little more complicated than that