Twits on Twitter, I Saw It on the Internet It Must Be True Dept. 3
At SFGate, Paul Viviano, long-time foreign correspondent, cautions against taking twits as revealed–or revealing–truth.
For the older generation of Middle East correspondents, including me – I covered Egypt periodically for 30 years, half of them at The Chronicle – there was something glaringly amiss with this picture. Cairo isn’t Egypt, not by a long shot, and secular-minded young people with social networking accounts aren’t more than a tiny segment of the national population.
Facebook penetration in North America surpassed 50 percent of the total population in 2011. In Egypt, it stood at 5.6 percent.
Read the rest, and, the next time twits light up the sky, reach for several grains of salt.
August 19, 2013 at 5:42 pm
Not even one mention of Wael Ghonim. Tsk. The haves are always ready to mistake the high class tech urine for lemonade because the story is always initially so wonderful. Isn’t it great that you don’t have to do anything but upload a video to YouTube or have a Facebook page. Take that, tyranny! Egypt is another failed state and social networking has demonstrated it’s not relevant to the establishment of democracy, even here. However, it provides a nice airtight chamber where people can breathe their own fumes over and over.
August 19, 2013 at 5:46 pm
Similarly, the people on social media in the pro left who think Glenn Greenwald and the Snowden papers will bring down the US national security megaplex. We just saw a ham-handed lesson on how impressed the powers are with the deterrence factor. Stamping your foot in social media, heh, that’ll do it.
August 19, 2013 at 6:56 pm
I would say it’s analogous to the belief of some on the left who think that they can hold their breath while voting for the Ralph Naders of the world until (to paraphrase Bob Cesca) something something something ideological purity!
The Republican Party has become 99.99% ideologically pure (and needs its mouth washed out with Ivory soap to boot, but that’s another story). As ugly as the legislative sausage factory may be, ideological purity is far worse.