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I wonder why Zuckerberg (and the people behind Twitter) weren't as equally blamed when the Arab Spring started. As far as I remember both FB and Twitter were heralded as pinnacles of democracy back then by some of the same journalists who now decry how "social media is helping spread bullshit facts".

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It's the double-edged sword with a lot of tech and you see it also with Tor and Wikileaks.

It's great when it's being used against your opponents but you hate it when it's being used against your own side.

I don't understand this. AFAICT, parent is implying it's meaningful to compare Middle Easterners sharing information about protests and violence, and Westerners sharing unverifiably truthy HuffPo/Breitbart/whatever articles.

It's true that both of those examples boil down to 'humans digitally sharing information', but the circumstances surrounding both the humans and the information are so different as to make this kind of reductive comparison useless.

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