Twitter Can Start a Party but Can’t Keep It Going
by Noah Feldman
Social media is the new forum for free speech -- and its suppression. Whether coordinating large protests in Cairo and Tunis or flash mobs in Birmingham and London, social media have proved in recent months that they are capable of disturbing business as usual.
Governments, in response, are selectively shutting down sites such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube to block unwanted activity. The lonely pamphleteer -- the subject of classic First Amendment protection -- has become the many-friended user.
The latest deployments of this fast-changing technology form a pattern. There are certain things that, so far, social media seem to do very well. One is coordination. Coordinating large numbers of people to do exactly the same thing at the same time is notoriously difficult. So long as the activity is relatively simple -- say, show up and protest the government --the new social media drastically reduce the costs of coordination.
In a sense, this coordination is the political analogue to holding a big party. All people need to know is when and where the party is. When they show up, the party will by definition be in full swing. If they come, the party is a success. If they don’t, the party fails.
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