The Wrong Way to Weaponize Social Media

BorgiaPope writes: NYU's Clay Shirky, in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, calls the U.S. government's approach to social media "dangerous" and "almost certainly wrong," as in its favoring Haystack over Freegate. The Political Power of Social Media claims that the freedom of online assembly — via texting, photo sharing, Facebook, Twitter, humble email — is more important even than access to information via an uncensored Internet. Countering Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker, Shirky looks at recent uprisings in the Philippines, Moldova, and Spain to make his point that, instead of emphasizing anti-censorship tools, the U.S. should be fighting Egypt's recent mandatory licensing of group-oriented text-messaging services.