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Crisis control: The stupidity of silencing social media

When protesters took to the streets earlier this year in Tunis, Cairo and Benghazi, the teetering autocrats in charge acted swiftly. They shut down the Internet and mobile connections in an effort to wipe out the opposition’s lines of communications and stop the Facebook-fueled revolution before it could rock the palace gates. The effort proved fruitless, as many of us in the West confidently predicted. With Gaddafi’s dramatic fall in recent days, these despots have now all been swept from power, the first victims of an out-of-touch, gerontocratic ruling class felled by the power of youth and technology and social media. With this in mind, why did Britain’s Home Office think then that blocking or reducing the public’s access to Facebook, Twitter and Blackberry Messenger (talk about out of touch!) during times of urban rioting would make the streets of the UK any safer? Luckily, cooler heads prevailed. There will be no freeze of Facebook during the 2012 Games. Twitter will not be toppled by MI5 the next time hoodies take to the streets

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Crisis control: The stupidity of silencing social media