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Comment by Tyrannosaurs | Hacker News Reader

Let's not overplay this. Twitter and Facebook played a part in what happened, but in both countries the internet was either shut down or heavily restricted during the key phases of the uprising.

The thing which stopped the worst abuses of power against the people was the presence of the global media in countries where the west had significant financial and political interests.

The broad sweep of technology available these days (from reporters with satellite phones to twitter, to the ability anyone has to send photos across the world in seconds) may present future genocides, but Twitter and Facebook are just one small part of the picture.

But does anyone believe that Twitter would have stopped Darfur? People know what's happening there and it's still happening so I'm dubious as to how a communication tool would have changed that.

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> Let's not overplay this. Twitter and Facebook played a part in what happened, but in both countries the internet was either shut down or heavily restricted during the key phases of the uprising.

The fact that governments shut down the net is evidence IN FAVOUR of the net's importance in revolutions.

> The thing which stopped the worst abuses of power against the people was the presence of the global media in countries where the west had significant financial and political interests.

Not really. The West has significant interests in China and Libya, but that didn't prevent the Tiananmen Sq massacre, or Gaddafi's recent massacres.

The most important factor is whether the army will fire on the people. They refused to obey orders to in Egypt, and Mubarak's rule was no longer viable.

It's in favour of the potential but the fact that the relevant networks were shut down by the governments in power shows that ultimately they can be relatively easily counteracted.

That of course will change as the cost (to business and vital infrastructure) of disabling the internet and cellular networks increases.

For instance in the UK police use the regular cellular networks for mobile data, shutting them down would impact both police and protesters.

China's a special case - they're simply too powerful for the west to control and have been for some time. Libya is run by a madman who isn't open to reason. So yes you're right but the interest in and importance of the country to the west is a factor, even if it's not the only one.

The airplane, the machine gun, dynamite, radio, lasers, the telephone and cable television have all had similar claims made about them. I would copy and paste it if I could, but the beginning of this chapter of What Technology Wants has a lot of similar sounding quotations: http://books.google.com/books?id=_ToftPd4R8UC&lpg=PP1...

Obviously its not just Facebook and Twitter, but those global media you refer to are getting their leads from and even literally reporting tweets and Facebook stuff for a large portion of their broadcasts.

Even simpler: did telephones stop the genocide of WWII?

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