Politicians Are Terrified of Social Media

Here are some bits from a good post on Washington's blog:

The most liberal part of the country - the San Francisco Bay Area - is taking a page from Egyptian dictator Mubarak's playbook.

As leading free speech organization Electronic Frontier Foundation reports:

This week, EFF has seen censorship stories move closer and closer to home — first Iran, then the UK, and now San Francisco, an early locus of the modern free speech movement. Operators of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART) shut down cell phone service to four stations in downtown San Francisco yesterday in response to a planned protest.

And...

According to these young men, the moment they knew they had won was the day Mubarak’s government shut off the Internet and blocked cellphone communications. When people could no longer get updates about what was happening in Tahrir Square, they had to come out of their homes and see for themselves, tripling the size of the protests in one fell swoop.

The global plutocracy is terrified of dissent. In some places, the war on dissent is being fought with bullets. In others, the war on dissent targets social media and mobile communications, while repressing and deceiving communities of struggle. It’s already happening.

Corruption and the arrogance of power are everywhere. When I look at the "shaping" of the upcoming presidential election in the US between Tweedle-dee and Tweedle-dum choices, I'm not surprised that a small but significant chunk of the populace is "disaffected". The elites are controlling the money, the media, and the politics and the social pressure is building. It is that old cliche: you can fool all the people some of the time and some of the people all the time, but you can't fool all the people all of the time.

When you have such a tiny portion of the society sucking up all the wealth and working so hard to keep control, you create the perfect situation for popular revolt.