How to bypass Internet censorship? – Social networks

Social media is often a target because there's great potential in it. You can organize action using a social network and you can also as somenone who is far removed from political turmoil, you can see what people are doing. They can tell you about it in their own words. There is also danger in social networks because it is a fantastic way for an authoritarian regime to find information on a lot of activists all at once simply by coursing somebody, by torturing them for a password. So there is a lot of potential in social networks but going forward there needs to be an awareness that there are plenty of dangers. Last night the intelligence minister of Iran was talking, and most of what he said was about social networks. They are afraid of social networks. Because they don't give you the possibility to make social networks in the real world, but when you make them in cyberspace and they have sensible consequences in the real world, it is very natural that they are afraid of it. So one thing we know is that people really like social networks. So they often want to use circumvention in order to reach their favorite social network when its blocked. This is often one of the core motivations. So people say: "Well I wasn't really accessing a lot of foreign Web sites, so I don't really care, but they blocked Facebook! Now I really need circumvention, to get to Facebook." Something like that. So it's often a motivation for people to use circumvention in the first place. It is not the Internet, it is not Facebook, it is not Twitter that is overthrowing dictators in the middle east. But the Internet changed the society, globalized the world. And this is the miracle of a generation that was supposed before as politically supine but now toppled at least two dictators in less than two months. So this is the miracle of technology. Of course the technology is so effective. And if Internet was not invented I think that it didn't happen now. It would have taken much more time to raise this amount or awareness in a country that is full of tension. I don't like to call it a Twitter- or a Facebook- or an online-revolution. The leader of the revolution is not Mark Zuckerberg. But he is influential. The social network that he has made is very much influential, either for organizing people and also raising awareness among people. When the government in Egypt shut down its Internet access completely for all ISPs of the country, people used other means to access to the Internet like satellite connection or dial-up connection to other countries. Or they even used fax machines to send out information to international media. Social networks like Twitter and Facebook are important tools for a revolution like the one that happened in Egypt, but they're still just tools. I think personally that the Internet is changing the world. Especially in the countries that totalitarian governments are ruling.