Thoughts on Revolution, State Aid and Liberation

Technologies*

Christian Christensen

Department of Informatics and Media, Uppsala University, Sweden

ABSTRACT
The terms Twitter Revolution and Facebook Revolution gained currency
during the so-called Arab Spring which began in early 2010. It was then that
representatives of the conservative Swedish coalition government began to
make increasingly overt statements regarding the role of social media in the
uprisings in North Africa, and the desire of the administration to offer not only
political, but also material support to Net activists working in the region. In
this paper, I will discuss a number of the ways in which the Swedish government
addressed and rationalised such support, and I will expand on the conclusions
reached in a study conducted on the discourse surrounding technology and
social change present in Swedish policy documents and political speeches.
Of particular importance to the study was the question of the extent to which
the Swedish government utilised what is called a liberation technology
perspective on the use of social media in the service of democratic change.

INTRODUCTION

During the summer of 2009 I, along with many others, followed the Iranian
national elections and subsequent protests (primarily) via social media such as
Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.1 In terms of international media exposure, the
contrast between the Iranian student uprisings of 1999 and the anti-
Ahmadinejad protests of 2009, against the president of Iran, was stark. The
volume of dissident information and images flowing out of Iran in 2009 would
have been unthinkable a decade earlier, and the interplay between activists using
social media in Iran and international media outlets suggested that media
scholars would have to begin to rethink some fundamental paradigms and
theories in relation to, for example, news production, distribution and

*This article is based on a presentation to the annual conference of the Committee for
International Affairs, entitled Democratisation and New Media, which took place at the Royal
Irish Academy, Dublin, 25 November 2011.
1
Christian Christensen, Iran: networked dissent?, Le Monde Dipliomatique, July 2009,
available at: http://mondediplo.com/blogs/iran-networked-dissent (15 August 2012).

Authors e-mail: christian.christensen@im.uu.se

Irish Studies in International Affairs, Vol. 23 (2012), 3745.
doi: 10.3318/ISIA.2012.23.37
38 Irish Studies in International Affairs

exhibition; not to mention the very notion of who is a journalist/reporter, and

what is a news organisation.
Little did we know at that time, of course, that three years later long-
standing regimes in Egypt and Libya would fall, and the role of social media
(again, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube) would be at the very forefront of our
thinking about dissent, activism and political change. The terms Twitter
Revolution and Facebook Revolution were coined during this period, gaining
particular momentum during the so-called Arab Spring which began in early
2010. It was then that representatives of the conservative Swedish coalition
government began to make increasingly overt statements regarding the role of
social media in the uprisings in North Africa, and the desire of the
administration to offer not only political, but also material support to Net
activists working in the region. In this paper, I will discuss a number of the
ways in which the Swedish government addressed and rationalised such
support, and I will expand on the conclusions reached in a study conducted
on the discourse surrounding technology and social change present in Swedish
policy documents and political speeches. Of particular importance to the study
was the question of the extent to which the Swedish government utilised what is
called a liberation technology perspective on the use of social media in the
service of democratic change.2

LIBERATION TECHNOLOGY AND TECHNOLOGY DISCOURSE

Before delving into the specifics of the Swedish case, it might be worthwhile to
(very briefly) introduce some general conceptual parameters. The original study
was theory-driven, using the following inter-related theoretical areas as the
epistemological and analytical foundations: (1) liberation technology;
(2) technology discourse; and (3) technological constructivism. These three
areas were chosen because they provided intellectual frameworks for the
analysis of how the Swedish state, and those who are funded by the Swedish
state in the realm of Net activism, define and operationalise the relationship
between technology, information and emancipation; and, in addition, how
these definitions and operationalisations could potentially impact on broader
social understanding(s) of the affordances of social networking technologies.
To begin, the term liberation technologies comes from the work of Larry
Diamond, who writes that:
Liberation technology is any form of information and communication
technology (ICT) that can expand political, social, and economic freedom.
In the contemporary era, it means essentially the modern, interrelated forms
of digital ICT*the computer, the Internet, the mobile phone, and countless
innovative applications for them, including new social media such as
Facebook and Twitter.3
These ICTs, Diamond continues, allow citizens to report news, expose
wrongdoing, express opinions, mobilize protest, monitor elections, scrutinize
government, deepen participation, and expand the horizons of freedom.4
Clearly, ideas about the emancipatory potential of such technologies must
2
Christian Christensen, Discourses of technology and liberation: state aid to Net activists in
an era of Twitter revolutions, Communication Review 14 (3) (2011), 23353: 250. (Please note
that portions of this current essay present and discuss the findings of this 2011 paper, and, thus,
there is some content overlap.)
3
Larry Diamond, Liberation technology, Journal of Democracy 21 (3) (2010), 6983.
4
Diamond, Liberation technology, 70.
 CHRISTENSEN*Thoughts on Revolution, State Aid and Liberation Technologies 39

originate somewhere, and this is where the concepts of technology discourse,

technology as discourse and technological constructivism come in. Political
statements and policy play an important role in discursively framing our
understanding of technology, and these statements are often laudatory in
nature and part of a process through which technologies achieve a central role
in contemporary societies.
Fisher has noted that there is a prevailing assumption about technology:
namely that a new technology enables a new society, and, thus, that
technology makes society. This discourse, in turn, is defined as inherently
transparent and unproblematic: to propose the emancipatory power of digital
technology, for example, is not seen as the proposition of a subjective opinion,
but simply the presentation of fact.5 And, as Diamond notes, technology as
discourse is not simply a reflection of the centrality of technology in the
operation of modern societies; instead, it plays a constitutive role in their
operation, and enables precisely that centrality. In this way technology
discourse is a projection of social realities, through which transformations of
political, economic and social nature are filtered.6 In order to account for the
various stakeholders involved in the process of technology discourse, the
broader theory of technological constructivism is helpful. In this version, as Bela
Mody et al. write, technological constructivism suggests that technology and its
uses are shaped by human agents. Since technology has no inevitable outcomes,
citizens and their governments are not consigned to the role of passive
observers of technological development.7 In this variant of constructivism,
states and other stakeholders (in addition to users) all play roles in shaping the
understanding and application of technology.

CONTEXTUALISING SWEDISH AID TO NET ACTIVISTS

With these central theoretical areas in mind, I would now like to present a brief
discussion of the context surrounding recent statements of support from
the Swedish government for Net activism in North Africa and beyond.
The Swedish minister for international development cooperation, Gunilla
Carlsson, spearheaded a move to channel Swedish foreign aid to Web activists
and bloggers in an effort to foster democratic debate and break down social and
political barriers to Web use. In an opinion piece published in the Swedish
tabloid Expressen, Carlsson, who had roughly US $20 million at her disposal
for aid in relation to freedom of speech and democracy, made note of the
importance of the role social media such as Facebook and Twitter had played in
spurring hopes for democratic change in Tunisia. In the piece (entitled Net
activists are the new democracy righters), Carlsson argued that Swedish
international aid needed to take into account the rapid spread and use of social
media in the service of global democratic change and the expansion of freedom
of speech rights:
In this digital reality new demands and challenges are being placed upon
traditional political areas. International aid is one political area which is at
the forefront of the need for change*not least due to the information and
5
Eran Fisher, Contemporary technology discourse and the legitimation of capitalism,
European Journal of Social Theory 13 (2010), 22952: 230.
6
Fisher, Contemporary technology discourse, 231.
7
Bela Mody, Harry Trebing and Laura Stein, The governance of media markets,
in L. Lievrouw and S. Livingstone (eds), Handbook of new media (2nd edn, London, 2006),
40514: 410.
40 Irish Studies in International Affairs

communication revolution currently taking place in low-income countries.

An important part of this challenge has to do with how information and
communication technologies can be used as tools in the fight for freedom
and against oppression. The importance of social networks*such as Twitter
and Facebook*for hopes of democratic change in Tunisia is a good
example.8
Carlsson subsequently invited groups and individuals to submit proposals for
projects to the Swedish government website, from which the most innovative
and promising were to be selected and discussed.
While Carlssons statements on Net activism were the most widely reported
on the subject (unsurprisingly, given the parallel events in Tunisia, Egypt and
elsewhere), there are a number of possible temporal points from which to begin
an analysis of the nature of the discourse on technology pervading Swedish
politics. The year 2008 serves as a useful starting point for the purposes of this
essay, however, as this is the year that the current Swedish coalition government
(re-elected in 2010) initiated new policy guidelines regarding foreign aid in
relation to support for freedom of expression in general, with specific
provisions for the support of Internet freedom and access. In 2009, and rooted
in the 2008 Freedom from oppression: government communication on Swedish
democracy support,9 the administration decided to supplement and strengthen
Swedens support to democracy, human rights and rule of law worldwide by
passing the Special Initiatives for Democratisation and Freedom of Expression
(20092011),10 which were intended to strengthen democracy and freedom of
expression and requests for support to assist private individuals, groups and
civil society organisations working for democratisation and freedom of
expression.
The original 2009/2010 budget of 100 million Swedish crowns in support of
freedom of expression was increased to 150 million in 2011, and central to this
policy was the notion of leveraging informational and communication
technologies in the service of freedom of speech and democratisation; in an
Annex to the Special Initiatives for Democratisation and Freedom of
Expression (20092011),11 the first overt mention of the use of social media
was made. The techno-centric nature of Swedish aid and foreign policy
initiatives in recent years is, however, nothing new. As Alan Greenberg noted
in his Organization for Economic Development and Co-operation (OECD)-
sponsored evaluation of Swedish foreign aid programs, Sweden has been a
powerful advocate for the integration of ICT use in virtually all areas of
development work since the late 1990s;12 and, as James Pamment wrote,
8
Gunilla Carlsson, Nataktivister ar nya demokratikamparna [Net activists are the new
democracy fighters], Expressen. Available at: http://www.regeringen.se/sb/d/14190/a/159459
(15 August 2012).
9
Swedish Ministry for Foreign Affairs, Freedom from oppression: government communica-
tion on Swedish democracy support (Stockholm, Article no. 08.077). Available at: http://www.
sweden.gov.se/content/1/c6/11/62/71/5013cca7.pdf (15 August 2012).
10
Swedish International Development Agency, Annex to Government Decision UF2009/
27888/UP. Strategy for Special Initiatives for Democratisation and Freedom of Expression,
20092011 (Stockholm, 2009). Available at: http://www.sida.se/Global/About%20Sida/S%C3%
A5%20arbetar%20vi/Strategy%20for%20special%20initiatives%20for%20democratisation%20and
%20freedom%20of%20expression,%202009%E2%80%932011.pdf (15 August 2012).
11
Swedish International Development Agency, Annex to Government Decision UF2009/
27888/UP.
12
Alan Greenberg, Sidas support to information and communications technologies (ICT) for
Development Department for Infrastructure and Economic Cooperation (Stockholm, 2008),
Swedish International Development Coordination Agency, 5.
 CHRISTENSEN*Thoughts on Revolution, State Aid and Liberation Technologies 41

Swedish public diplomacy was (and is) heavily rooted in establishing Brand
Sweden as marked by openness, sharing, authenticity and innovation, with a
great deal of emphasis placed upon bolstering Swedens reputation as a global
leader in communications technologies.13
There have been a range of studies looking at discursive constructions of the
promotion of ICTs by Swedish administrations. Interestingly, while these
studies looked at the promotion of ICTs at the domestic level in Sweden (as part
of the Information Society movement), they point to a number of factors
relevant to Swedens current push for Net activism in North Africa and
beyond. Two results emerge from this research which are of central importance
to this essay. First, Patrik Hall and Karl Lofgren note that policy discourse in
Sweden was more than just a simple prescription for future action, it is actually
part of the creation of values and norms on the part of policy-makers, who are
engaged in a production of visions.14 Second, Hall makes the important
observation that the Swedish promotion of ICTs contains an inherent contra-
diction: while the use of digital technologies has been promoted by Swedish
administrations as part of a global, borderless society, the Swedish welfare
state is awarded a key role in constructing Sweden as the superior ICT-nation of
the world. Thus, the discourse manages to combine fashionable ideas about
globalization and the new economy with integrative national policies from
the (perceived) Swedish past.15

DECONTEXTUALISATION, POLITICAL ECONOMY AND BRAND SWEDEN

The linkage of support for Net activism by the Swedish government in 2010 and
2011 and of Sweden being on the cutting edge of technology, to the ongoing
belief in social media as technologies of liberation, had a clear impact on
the discourse emerging from the Swedish Foreign Office in Stockholm. In this
second half of my essay, I would like to address what I consider to be the three
primary conclusions of my earlier study, and to now expand upon those
conclusions and offer some insights as to how recent events in, for example,
Egypt and Libya might raise interesting new questions for media and
communications scholars and international policy-makers alike.

Issue 1: The decontextualisation of technology

Perhaps the most pointed conclusion reached in my earlier study was that
the discourse forwarded by the Swedish government*primarily via
Foreign Minister Carl Bildt and Minister for International Development
Cooperation Gunilla Carlsson*was that, true to standard versions of both
liberation technology views and technology discourse, the administration took
an extremely uncritical view of social media. That is to say, social media were
described in carefully framed terms wherein the social function of technology
is seen as inherently positive. Perhaps the clearest example of this came when
Carlsson said:
13
James Pamment, The limits of the new public diplomacy: strategic communication and
evaluation at the US State Department, Foreign & Commonwealth Office, British Council,
Swedish Foreign Ministry and Swedish Institute, unpublished PhD thesis, Stockholm University,
Sweden (2011), 177.
14
Patrik Hall and Karl Lofgren, The rise and decline of a visionary policy: Swedish ICT-
policy in retrospect, Information Polity: The International Journal of Government & Democracy in
the Information Age 9 (3/4) (2004), 14965.
15
Patrik Hall, Throwing discourses in the garbage can: the case of Swedish ICT policy,
Critical Policy Studies 2 (1) (2008), 2544: 27.
42 Irish Studies in International Affairs

In my view, these tools are technologies of liberation, symbols of a world that

has irreversibly changed. That is at least in urban areas: for those who have
access to electronic devices; for those, who can read and write. . .ICTs are key
to increased transparency worldwide. The Internet fosters freedom of speech
on a global scale as the largest and potentially most inclusive communication
arena that has ever existed. Those who want to exclude their populations
from this arena must be trembling with fear at this human development.16
For those who followed the events in North Africa (and beyond) over the past
two years, these sentiments are certainly nothing new, or surprising. Social
media such as Twitter and Facebook were held up (in news stories and by
politicians) as key tools in activist battles with authoritarian regimes. Access to
digital technology was seen as the near equal to freedom of speech and freedom
of the press, and the entire Arab Spring phenomenon was wedded in the
popular imagination to the expanded and effective use of social media amongst
young, educated, urban democracy-fighters in Tehran, Cairo and Tripoli.
The problem, however, was that this particular view of technology was,
as I put it, de-contextualised. Or, to use another term I provided as an
alternative, technology was discursively re-contextualised in order to slot
neatly into the liberating role it had been ascribed. As I wrote:
the technology discourse emanating from the Swedish Foreign Ministry since
the summer of 2009 has been firmly in the liberation technology camp:
Internet and social media have, time and time again, been held up as key
tools in the fight for the emancipation of oppressed citizens in authoritarian
regimes, as well as engines for social organization and change.17
This is not to say that technology did not serve an extremely important, and in
certain cases absolutely essential, role in the events I discuss above, but rather
that the technology discourse forwarded by the Swedish government took the
default position of technology to be positive, and that negative uses of digital
technology (including social media) for the purposes of, for example, repression
and surveillance, were de facto painted as perversions of the true function of
such technologies, rather than as the very widespread and potentially harmful
practices that they were later shown to be. As the Arab Spring wore on, a
number of activists and bloggers in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya were arrested and
tortured, often as the result of sophisticated (and sometimes unsophisticated)
surveillance tactics utilised by authoritarian regimes. As the world found out in
2009, Iran*a country often held up as being traditional to the point of anti-
modern*has one of the most advanced national digital surveillance structures
in the world. As authors such as Evgeny Morozov have pointed out, our
understanding of the Internet as a tool of liberation must be tempered with the
realisation that authoritarian governments have been far from neo-luddite in
their utilisation of digital technologies for the purposes of maintaining power.18

Issue 2: Draining the political economy from social media

Topics noticeably absent from Swedish political discourse on social media and
the Arab Spring in recent years were those of ownership and financing. This is
16
Gunilla Carlsson, speech at the headquarters of the League of Arab States, Cairo (April
2011). Available at: http://www.regeringen.se/sb/d/14187/a/165911 (15 August 2012).
17
Christian Christensen, Discourses of technology and liberation: state aid to Net activists in
an era of Twitter revolutions, Communication Review 14 (3) (2011), 23353: 250.
18
Evgeny Morozov, The net delusion: how not to liberate the world (London, 2011).
 CHRISTENSEN*Thoughts on Revolution, State Aid and Liberation Technologies 43

an example of how technology discourse is influenced as much by what is not

said or written as by what is. Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are all either
large, global corporations, or part of such corporations, each with a vested
interest in profit maximisation. The lack of reflection on the part of the Swedish
government regarding the implications of private, corporate control over large
volumes of sensitive information is an indication of the extent to which neo-
liberal ideologies have come to dominate in the realm of media and
communications*even in a country with firm social democratic roots such
as Sweden. In his work on the political economy of the Internet, Jones writes:
the idea that the Internet is a neutral space on which all sides can compete is
hopelessly utopian and that social media outlets held up as defenders of
freedom of speech are corporations that can eject users at will and restrict the
kinds of groups or communicative exchanges that occur within [their]
boundaries.19
While the Swedish government, along with other national administrations
and a good portion of the international media, trumpeted the value and efficacy
of social media in the face of authoritarian repression, the longer-term
implications of private ownership of social media tools upon longer-term
democratic development remain cloudy. As I wrote in 2011, by ignoring their
ultimate raison detre (shareholder profit), the commercial nature of these large
global corporations is drained and replaced with a far more sanitised,
democratic, altruistic discursive vision of technology and social media.20
The move in January 2012 by Twitter to adjust its censorship policy in order
to take into account national regulatory regimes, for example, is a reminder that
social media, while pitched as borderless global communications systems, still
operate within autonomous nation-states, and still must yield to the will of
national law-makers. Similarly, the example of a subsidiary of the mobile
telephone operator Telia (whose majority shareholder is the Swedish state),
collaborating with authoritarian regimes in order to rationalise the surveillance
of political activists, is another indicator that the power of digital media flows
in two directions, and that corporate interests can often override democratic
aspirations.21

Issue 3: Net activism and Brand Sweden

One of the more interesting issues to emerge from the study of Swedish
technology discourse was the way in which support for Net activism during the
Arab Spring uprisings provided a very neat dovetail for the Swedish admin-
istration: linking Swedens global position as a technological innovator with the
countrys reputation as a supporter of human rights and a diplomatic
facilitator. This is part of what scholars such as James Pamment have discussed
in relation to Brand Sweden: an active attempt on the part of the Swedish
government to market Sweden as technologically advanced, and to pitch the
country and Swedishness via online/social media.22 The most famous (current)
example of government-sponsored Brand Sweden in action is the @Sweden
19
Johnny Jones, Social media and social movements, International Socialism 130 (2011).
Available at: http://www.isj.org.uk/index.php4?id722&issue 130 (26 September 2012).
20
Christensen, Discourses of technology and liberation, 249.
21
Swedish telcom giant Teliasonera caught helping authoritarian regimes spy on their
citizens, available at: https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2012/05/swedish-telcom-giant-teliasonera-
caught-helping-authoritarian-regimes-spy-its (15 August 2012).
22
Pamment, The limits of the new public diplomacy.
44 Irish Studies in International Affairs

Twitter account, where regular Swedish citizens are given control of the
account for one week, supposedly without restrictions.
One factor worthy of consideration in the Swedish case*and one that is
relevant to many administrations around the world which aggressively push
ICT agendas*is that the liberation technology discourse forwarded by the
Swedish government in relation to the Arab Spring served a broader economic
and political purpose: namely, to support Swedens position as a global leader
in ICTs, as well as to provide a logic for the state aid for Net activism under
offer. In other words, the uniform, uncritical position taken by the Swedish
administration regarding the role and use of social media in the Arab Spring is
part of a self-promoting closed circle which includes: foreign aid to activists and
other ICT-related projects, support for private and state-owned Swedish ICT
and telecommunications companies, Swedish international diplomacy and,
finally, the brand of Sweden itself. For the Swedish administration to openly
question the efficacy of social media, or to engage in lengthy discussions about
the role of ICTs in surveillance and repression, would have been an exercise in
political self-harm. And, of course, this would apply to other countries that
have both foreign policy and economic interests invested in a positive portrayal
of ICTs.
As a relevant side-note to this issue, at the 2011 Internet and Democratic
Change conference held in Stockholm, I had a conversation with a young
blogger who was actively involved in the democratic movement. When our
conversation moved toward the widespread interest in the use of social media in
the North Africa protests, this activist told me that she felt that there was an
element of neo-imperialism in the way in which technology was being promoted
as the key to the regional uprisings (as if prior to Twitter there had been no
dissent or organisation). In other words, a pride in the fact that Western
technologies had helped to emancipate (or were in the process of emancipating)
the masses in Egypt, Tunisia and Libya, thus creating a modern-day White Mans
Burden. As a media and communications scholar, this pointed analysis struck me
as a relevant factor in understanding (at least in part) the enormous volume of
popular discourse surrounding the use of Facebook, YouTube and Twitter.

CONCLUSION: FROM OVERTHROW TO DEMOCRATISATION?

In this final section I would like to raise four admittedly broad points for
consideration in relation to the issue of state aid for Net activists. In order to do
so, it would help to present how I concluded my paper on Swedish aid for Net
activists:
. . . the celebratory nature of the technology discourse discussed in this article
begs the question of where this type of discourse (and related policy) will lead
in five, ten or fifteen years. Although it has been posited that exposure to
various forms of Western popular culture paved the way for the fall of the
Soviet Union 20 years ago, one would do well to ask what the commercial
media outlets involved in the spread of dissident pop culture in the late 1980s
and early 1990s have subsequently contributed to postcommunist democ-
racy . . . an unquestioning push for the use of highly commodified social
media such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube on the part of a state actor
should cause researchers to raise fundamental questions regarding the
increasingly blurred lines among policy, development aid, technological
determinism, and commodification.23
23
Christensen, Discourses of technology and liberation, 250.
 CHRISTENSEN*Thoughts on Revolution, State Aid and Liberation Technologies 45

I would like to reiterate the first point I raised above: on the longer-term
implications for the type of discourse and aid promoted by the Swedish
government. What is most interesting in this case is the fact that the Net
activism aid, triggered by the Arab Spring, was very much linked to freedom of
speech and democracy in authoritarian countries. Over the past twelve months,
however, a number of long-term dictatorships have collapsed, thus raising the
issue of what the role of social media*and, by association, the aid given to Net
activists*will be in the post-authoritarian phase. Clearly, when the Swedish
government instigated the Net activism aid idea, it seemed unlikely that regimes
such as Hosni Mubaraks in Egypt would fall so quickly. The question,
therefore, is how foreign aid geared toward operations in authoritarian regimes
can be utilised if and when those regimes fall. And, in turn, what are the
significant differences (and similarities) between social media use for the
purpose of instigating regime change, versus longer-term democratic organisa-
tion and development?
Second, the striking lack of discussion in Swedish circles of the political
economy of large-scale social media points to an essentially uncritical view of
private control of communications tools and the data that flows through/across
them. While the short-term security and surveillance implications of private
social media became apparent during and after the Arab Spring, the longer-
term implications are less clear, particularly as social media companies
accumulate ever-more highly personalised information about users. The fact
that the Swedish state pushed the use of social media (using Facebook by name,
for example) is perhaps unproblematic in comparison to the repression suffered
by citizens living under authoritarian regimes, but, in the long run, the private
control of data in these countries should be a point of concern for those
involved in the democratisation process.
Linked to the question of political economy is the issue of the multiple roles
that states have in enabling or repressing Net activism. The Swedish state is a
classic case in point, as it is involved in providing material support for Net
activism, but is also part-owner of telecoms operator TeliaSonera, as well as
acting as a de facto lobbying arm for Swedish corporations (such as Ericsson)
operating at the global level.24 As discussed earlier, and in the case of both
TeliaSonera and Ericsson (whose activities enabling potential surveillance in
Syria were called into question), these various state roles can lead to dissonant
messages in relation to advocating global social change. What happens, for
example, when national economic interests clash with more altruistic foreign
aid goals?
Finally, the longer-term social and political effects of pushing social media
use are, of course, not yet known. The relative strengths and weaknesses of ties
produced via online organisation; the importance of the interplay between
social media use, face-to-face communication and other forms of mediated
communication; the impact of radical differences in terms of access to
technology and social capital within individual nation-states; and, the potential
long-term positive or negative impacts of social media use on individual or
collective political engagement. These are all issues that begin to gain
importance in light of state actors advocating and funding the use of social
media for the purposes of democratic change.

24
Radio Sweden, Syrian regime uses Ericsson technology, available at: http://sverigesradio.se/
sida/artikel.aspx?programid 2054&artikel 4822609 (15 August 2012).