Opinion Twitter scares

The US Agency for International Development (USAID) is alleged to have set up a Twitter-like service in Cuba to topple the Communist government. That’s a hoot, though not half as rich as the CIA plot to make Fidel Castro’s beard fall out in public by doctoring his boot polish. That happened in 1975, when governments had a finer taste for the politics of the bizarre. Now, USAID has clarified that its service was simply a project to broaden democracy through discussion. How deathly boring.

Besides, it appears that the US Department of State had run a similar project in Af-Pak, that USAID operates another programme for the youth in Kenya, and projects in Nigeria and Zimbabwe are in the works. But the fears that these can be used to topple governments seem exaggerated. Revolutions happen only when citizens desperately want them. The Arab Spring was not triggered by social media, but by dissatisfied citizens who used it to organise and agitate in ways earlier impossible. The owners of social media networks are so decisively outnumbered by users, who generally hold diverse opinions, that it is almost impossible for them to take control of the discourse. In the 20th century, US charities were suspected to be brainwashing the world by supporting abstract painters and classical dancers. Suspecting internet platforms is the 21st century version of the same phobia.

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However, the owners of social media can mine the data traversing their networks to arrive at political intelligence and expose patterns in citizen behaviour that are of strategic value. But apart from this, whether the US government should build Twitter-like networks in foreign parts is something that need not preoccupy anyone except the American taxpayer.