Sosyal Medya Bizi Tahrir Meydanı’ndan Nasıl Donald Trump’a Getirdi?

North Carolina University at Chapel Hill’den tekno-sosyolog Zeynep Tüfekçi, MIT Tech Review dergisinin son sayısında bir zamanlar demokrasiyi ileriye taşıması ve bireyleri güçlendirmesi beklenen sosyal medya platformlarının, Arap Baharı ve Barack Obama’nın seçilmesi gibi tarihsel olaylara aracılık etmekten, Trump gibi otoriter eğilimleri olan bir emlak baronunun ABD başkanı olmasını sağlayan platformlara nasıl dönüştüğünü anlatıyor. Aşağıda Zeynep Tüfekçi’nin “How social media took us from Tahrir Square to Donald Trump” yazısını bulabilirsiniz. 1. The euphoria of discovery As the Arab Spring convulsed the Middle East in 2011 and authoritarian leaders toppled one after another, I traveled the region to try to understand the role that technology was playing. I chatted with protesters in cafés near Tahrir Square in Cairo, and many asserted that as long as they had the internet and the smartphone, they would prevail. In Tunisia, emboldened activists showed me how they had used open-source tools to track the shopping trips to Paris that their autocratic president’s wife had taken on government planes. Even Syrians I met in Beirut were still optimistic; their country had not yet descended into a hellish war. The young people had energy, smarts, humor, and smartphones, and we expected that the region’s fate would turn in favor of their democratic demands. Back in the United States, at a conference talk in 2012, I used a screenshot from a viral video recorded during the Iranian street protests of 2009 to illustrate how the new technologies were making it harder for traditional information gatekeepers—like governments and the media—to stifle or control dissident speech. It was a difficult image to see: a young woman lay bleeding to death on the sidewalk. But therein resided its power. Just a decade earlier, it would most likely never have been taken (who carried video cameras all the time?), let alone gone viral (how, unless you owned a TV station or a newspaper?). Even if a news photographer had happened to be there, most news organizations wouldn’t have shown such a graphic image. At that conference, I talked about the role of social media in breaking down what social scientists call “pluralistic ignorance”—the belief that one is alone in one’s views when in reality everyone has been collectively silenced. That, I said, was why social media had fomented so much rebellion: people who were previously isolated in their dissent found and drew strength from one another. Digital connectivity provided the spark, but the kindling was everywhere. PETER MACDIARMID | GETTY IMAGES Twitter, the company, retweeted my talk in a call for job applicants to “join the flock.” The implicit understanding was that Twitter was a force for good in the world, on the side of the people and their revolutions. The new information gatekeepers, which didn’t see themselves as gatekeepers but merely as neutral “platforms,” nonetheless liked the upending potential of their technologies. I shared in the optimism. I myself hailed from the Middle East and had been watching dissidents use digital tools to challenge government after government. But a shift was already in the air. During the Tahrir uprising, Egypt’s weary autocrat, Hosni Mubarak, had clumsily cut off internet and cellular service. The move backfired: it restricted the flow of information coming out of Tahrir Square but caused international attention on Egypt to spike. He hadn’t understood that in the 21st century…