“No dictators have been toppled via Second Life” reminds us Evgeny Morozov of the OSI’s Information program. Second Life is one of the social media platforms used in the recent phenomenon of networked protest. Networked protest can be traced back to the French riots of 2005 and blog posts urging people to “burn the cops,” as well as the Hungarian riots in 2006, which relied on blogs to enlist supporters and disseminate an audio recording of the prime minister admitting government corruption. The Hungarian protesters even came up with something they called Interactive Riot Walkthrough to offer “virtual tours” of Budapest as it burned. Greek riots this January left a memorial space in Second Life (you probably need to download the free software to visit it) to commemorate the death of the 15 year old Alexandris Grigoropoulos taken down by a police bullet.

The reverberations of the Greek anti-establishment riots which followed the murder circulated wildly through the social media. Twitter, Facebook and Youtube helped organise solidarity protests in Istanbul, Madrid, Copenhagen, Sofia and so on. The buzztag on Twitter in January was “griots” or Greek riots.

The near-colour revolution in Moldova in April followed the example. The Moldovan Twittertag was #pman. Type #pman in Twitter and you will get a series of liberal anti-communist comments in Romanian. Two months earlier you would have seen calls for a peaceful flashmob gathering with candles in Chisinau’s main square - Piata Marii Adunari Nationale - what pman stands for. Today’s search on this tag yields references to a similar tag for Iran: Enqelab sq. Not surpisingly, radio Free Europe called the Moldovan uprisings a “Twitter revolution.”

Looking back to the most recent colour revolution in Europe: the Ukrainian Oragne revolution, the technological progress is obvious. A Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society study recalls that “By September 2004, Pora [the opposition’s youth movement] had created a series of stable political networks throughout the country, including 150 mobile groups responsible for spreading information and coordinating election monitoring, with 72 regional centers and over 30,000 registered participants. Mobile phones played an important role for this mobile fleet of activists. Pora’s post–election report states, ‘a system of immediate dissemination of information by SMS was put in place and proved to be important.” It took less organisation and time for this spring’s networked protests to happen.

Morozov, however, warns against cyber-optimism in an essay on democracy and the internet. In fact the brutally falsified election results and foreign money flowing to the democratic opposition played a large part in Ukraine. Moldova, on the other hand, is still in a political impasse. Morozov also warns that authoritarian regimes can be equally as effective in using the social media for propaganda, oftentimes very subtly. The internet does not necessarily mean democracy. Access to it does not automatically lead to political awareness and activism. Morozov’s essay has quite a sobering-up effect.

by a stubborn cyber-optimist