Close Twitter and Facebook? There’s no point…

There are times when I wonder if this carpetbagger government is simply extraordinarily stupid, or whether they are just power-mad. Or both.

Take Louise Mensch, for example. There she is, in the Guardian (and on TV last night), supporting Cameron’s insane call for a shutdown of social networks and calling for a “temporary shutdown” of  Twitter. I’ve no idea how tech-savvy Shiny Dave is (Blair, his hero, was hopeless), but Mensch is to be found on Twitter, a lot, so should know better.

One of the most prolific tweeters of those I follow, currently, is Merseyside police (copy-cat riots reached the next street a few days ago, so I find it’s useful to be kept informed in real time). Many, if not most, police forces are also using Twitter as a communications medium, both disseminating and seeking information and, this morning, in the case of Greater Manchester police, shooting themselves in the foot with this:-

Tweet has since been deleted. It is all over Twitter, so surely it can be considered in the public domain?

So, regardless of the millions of people who find Twitter a very useful medium (I’m housebound most of the time – Twitter provides a useful  link to the world outside, plus a few friends I’ve made on there), the police clearly find Twitter useful. Why would Cameron – and Mensch – if either had the brains god gave a gopher, what to screw with that?

Early last week, Twitter was blamed for the spread of the riots. Then the Blackberry secure messaging system was blamed, and now the finger of blame is pointing squarely at Twitter and Facebook again – but it’s bullshit.

For a start, the medium is not responsible for the message. If the rioters where posting each other letters**, or making phone calls, nobody would dare suggest shutting down the Royal Mail, or BT (no matter to whom you pay your phone bill, the infrastructure is owned and operated by BT). So why pick on Twitter and Facebook, especially as the police clearly find the former useful?

**Yes, I know letters lack immediacy – just making a point!

And what excuse could there be for interfering with the bulk of Twitter’s  legitimate traffic? Or Facebook’s. There are no national security issues at stake, just (not to trivialise it at all), a few local disturbances. That does not warrant a major shutdown of two of the most popular networks in the world.

Mensch equates the shutdown of Twitter and Facebook with road-closures during a riot, demonstrating that she has the technological acumen of a boiled egg. It’s not just a case of flicking a switch and isolating, say, Tottenham, for example, as easily as you could with road closures. The Web is just a tad more complex than that. I’m not even sure it would be technically possible to isolate even the UK and leave the rest of the world connected.

Anyway, the social networks are not the problem, any more than Blackberry is, but this government seems too dumb to understand that the medium is not responsible for the message, any more than you can blame rivers for fish.

Indeed, they seem unable to distinguish the message from the medium, assuming that if they close the medium – Twitter, say – the message would go away. No, it would not, it would simply move to another medium, like email, IM, or SMS. Any bugger can walk into Tesco or Sainsbury’s and walk out again with a cheap, pre-paid mobile within minutes of Twitter and Facebook being taken down (if it should happen). All you need do to activate it is feed it money – you don’t even need to register it.

No matter what you do, short of triggering a massive EMP, you cannot stop people communicating electronically. It’s not possible, there are just too many options. You cannot, a la South Park, track down “The Internet” and pull the plug!

The electronic communications genii is out of the bottle, and there is no putting it back. The Internet was conceived in the US to run entirely on local telephone networks, in that way, it was hoped, it would survive a nuclear exchange that might well take out the massive, transcontinental trunk lines. I’ve always felt that was a bit too optimistic, but it can surely withstand Cameron and his toady, Mensch.

Mensch says “I don’t have a problem with a brief temporary shutdown of social media just as I don’t have a problem with a brief road or rail closure. If short, necessary and only used in an emergency, so what. We’d all survive if Twitter shut down for a short while during major riots.” (The Guardian)

A colossally dumb statement. Closing a road just means deploying a few portable barriers and a diversion sign – takes seconds. You can’t simply press some gigantic “OFF” button and silence Twitter and Facebook. It’s likely to be technically challenging to shut down individual regions, if it can be done at all.

And if you shut down Twitter, people could die. A few months ago I got involved in a trans-Atlantic campaign to track down a woman in England who had posted a suicide note online in the US, before she topped herself. We did it, too.

I strongly suspect that shutting down Twitter and Facebook in areas of the UK would mean shutting them down across all of the UK, maybe even shutting down entirely, and wouldn’t the rest of the world be seriously pissed off if that happened!?

There’s the question of legality. Both Twitter and FB are based in the US and American based companies are pretty much immune to British law, as was discovered during the super-injunction cluster-fuck. So Cameron can fume and fret all he likes, I don’t believe he has a legal leg to stand on. He might get co-operation if he asks nicely, but he won’t, he’ll demand and is quite likely to be told to go fuck himself.

He’d like to shut down the Blackberry secure message system too, but that is surely fraught with danger as there is no “Blackberry network” as such. Like all mobes, users are contracted to a variety of networks who, I suspect, would strongly resist any attempt to force them into breach of contract.

Such contracts undoubtedly have a “force majeure” clause, but it’s unlikely that they could be invoked as this isn’t a revolution, or a civil war, much though the more deranged outposts of the Web might like to see it that way. It’s relatively minor-league civil disorder. One major outbreak in Tottenham, followed by a whole bunch of copy-cat outbreaks – not war, not revolution, just crime – looting, arson and vandalism for its own sake. I doubt there is a single person tossing petrol bombs who is politically motivated.

However, we have no such contracts with Twitter and Facebook, as they’re freebies, and if it’s possible to shut down their UK node(s), would they? Personally, I doubt it. The ill-will it would cause would be massive and, with the emergence of Google+ might see a massive defection.

Twitter could, though, as it has in the past, suppressed troublesome hashtags, and I doubt most would have a problem with that, although some legitimate users would use the same hashtags if discussing the matters to which they applied. I think that’s the safest way to go, though, and infinitely preferable to shutting Twitter down. Don’t know if FB has a system similar to hashtags, though (I have an account, but it’s unused – it’s only used these days to log into certain blogs and websites).

There’s one last thing to be considered, which makes shutting down Twitter and Facebook, even Blackberry, utterly pointless, and that’s the existence of Instant Messaging apps, they’re out there, they’re free or cheap, and you can be sure the people Cameron is trying to target will be fully aware of them.

You can totally shut down Twitter, Facebook and Blackberry Messaging, but you can’t – you simply cannot, ever, shut down every possible IM app, and mobile network, so why not just forget the whole crackpot, unethical, utterly futile idea?