It's Not Twitter or Facebook, It's the Power of the Network
Just as it was during the recent uprisings in Tunisia, the role of social media in the recent upheaval in Egypt has been the subject of much debate since the unrest began on Thursday. Daily Show host Jon Stewart on Friday poked fun …
Context & Ripple Effects
A year before Cairo's streets filled, GigaOM had already argued that journalists treating social media as the story itself was a sideshow, and the same argument is resurfacing now that Egypt's unrest has revived the question. When Tunisia's uprising unfolded earlier in January 2011, the role of Twitter and Facebook was equally contested; the Egypt coverage has hardened the split between those who credit specific platforms and those who credit the underlying network of people they connect.
Jon Stewart's Friday-night mockery of the 'Twitter did it' framing gave the skeptic side a popular voice, and GigaOM's own line lands with the skeptics: what mattered was the power of the network, not either brand. That the New York Times ran its own version of the story the same weekend signals this has moved past tech commentary into mainstream framing of the events.
First-order effects
- Twitter and Facebook are being recast in public debate from protagonists into infrastructure — attention shifts from whether they caused the unrest to how governments and journalists should treat connectivity during it.
- Media outlets covering Egypt face an immediate editorial choice between the platform-attribution narrative Stewart ridiculed and the network-level framing GigaOM and the Times are pushing.
Second-order effects
- Governments confronting domestic unrest can draw the operational lesson that the lever is network access itself rather than any single company, raising the salience of shutdowns and pressure on carriers and service providers.
- The platforms gain a new category of scrutiny: whatever their share of credit for the uprisings, both are now visibly entangled in state politics, inviting demands that they take positions or restrictions they did not seek.
Third-order effects
- If the network-not-platform framing holds across successive upheavals, the durable policy question becomes control of connectivity — who can switch it off, and under what authority — rather than content moderation at any one service.
- Social platforms' political legitimacy gets defined by how they behave when states contest access, setting a precedent for how the next generation of communications tools will be judged.
The trend: Political analysis of social media is shifting from crediting individual platforms to treating the connective network itself — and who controls access to it — as the consequential actor.