Banning Social Media?

It's kind of hard to believe that anyone in the "free world" is seriously entertaining the concept of setting limits on FaceBook and Twitter.

"Free speech is central to our democracy, but so is public safety and security," said Ivan Lewis, the shadow secretary of culture in the House of Commons, according to London's Guardian newspaper. "We support the government's decision to undertake a review of whether measures are necessary to prevent the abuse of social media by those who organize and participate in criminal activities."

Well...let's not even talk about the much touted role of social media during the Arab Spring. Brits are, of course, expected to behave better than those rowdy Arabs, and besides they have no good reason to question their government. But I digress.

I can't begin to imagine how they'd implement measures "to prevent the abuse of social media" that would be effective against "those who organize and participate in criminal activities" like those we've been witnessing in London over the last week or so, but measures that would not also cripple those who want to get the hell out of the way of those activities, or who want to engage in legitimate activities. There are three possible approaches they could be meditating: (1) shut down the entire social media infrastructure (e.g. shut down access to FaceBook altogether) or (2) maintain a targeted list of those known to "organize and participate in criminal activities", and just shut down their access or (3) identify criminal activities in progress and shut them down. None of these are very good.

Option 1 shuts down access for the good guys (which is most people), too. And in the middle of a crisis that includes people trying to find out about and avoid the riot (I mean criminal activity) hot-spots. Option 2 involves (a) a massive game of Whack-a-Mole, (b) massive surveillance generally considered incompatible with a free society and (c) stifling free expression for a lot of people accidentally swept up. Option 3 suffers from the same weaknesses as Option 2, with slightly better aim at the mole, but would need to be done real-time. And FaceBook says it does Option 3, anyway.

I can't see Option 1 being put into practice. Social media information is simply too useful, including to governments. However, I am sorry to say I can easily imagine governments, (including those in the "free world") attempting some variation of Option 2 and Option 3, where "criminal activities" are more and more loosely defined over time. FaceBook will become incredibly convenient for facilitating McCarthy-like witch hunts, and in fact, rather than shutting down sites associated with undesired activities, I see them governments monitoring them as honeypots. Especially when armed with subpoenas for FaceBook logs of users' friending histories.

None of this is to say that I think we should do nothing, and sit back and allow riots to take place freely. I just don't think limits on social media are a useful response. Would we shut down email, too? How about cell phone service?

Technology is always a double-edged sword.

Just saying.

Edited to add (8/14): Rebecca MacKinnon has a much more articulate analysis of how bad an idea this is.