The downside of the Web

Former Obama campaign aide Sam Graham-Felsen, who just took a job developing online tools for the new Alliance for Youth Movements, a tech-company backed organization aimed at empowering young activists, writes that the political web can be too easy to romanticize:

While experts often credit the Internet as the major factor that lifted Obama to the presidency, it's also true that the Internet nearly brought the campaign down. For every megaphone the Internet provides to truth-tellers and democratic organizers, it also elevates con-artists, hate-mongers, violent extremists, and most troublingly, government authorities who aim to crush free expression.

Foreign Policy's Evgeny Mozorov has written extensively about how the Internet helps strengthen the grip of autocracies. He describes how the Iranian government has been identifying Green Movement activists in photos through crowd-sourcing, using activists' Facebook accounts to target and arrest collaborators, and seeding fake blog posts and video clips to spook and fragment activists. Mozorov mocks the "techno-utopians" who preach that the proliferation of online and mobile tools will inevitably usher in social progress.

Having spent nearly two years closely observing the ups and downs of the Obama campaign, I have no illusions about the Internet's capacity to do harm. Viral misinformation about Obama presented major problems for us: it seemed like everyone had an aunt or cousin who had received an email warning them that Obama was a crypto-Muslim.