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Arianna Huffington, True Patriot . . . . . . and Mark Zuckerberg's Best Friend

Arianna Huffington, in her Sunday RoundupThis week, told us breathlessly that the recent continuing riots in London once again demonstrated the power of social media, for good and for bad. She tells us that rioters used BlackBerry Messenger to organize their mayhem, but (one account on) Twitter has drawn throngs of people ... to restore ravaged neighborhoods. However, her statements are at odds with the UK government, who stated flatly that Facebook and Twitter were almost entirely the media used to organise the riots. Secondarily, they had mobile phones used for timely tactical messaging. But the US media quickly changed this from "mobile phone" to "Blackberry". Why not iphone? Because Blackberry is Canadian and iphone is American?

Are we to believe that all the teen-age and young twenty-something hoodie delinquents had enough money to buy Blackberries? If they did have the money, they would have bought iphones. A Blackberry isn't cool when you're 19 years old, unless you're a rich drug-dealer kid who needs message encryption. David Cameron, the UK Prime Minister, was not looking to ban Blackberries or indeed any mobile phone, but rather to restrict access to Facebook and Twitter because they were the prime media. But according to Ariana, the Blackberries were used "to organize their mayhem", while Twitter was used "to restore ravaged neighborhoods", and Facebook was nowhere to be found in her sanitised version of events. What an interesting spin. Ms. Huffington sounds positively Tea-Partyish neocon in her assessment. The UK is renowned worldwide for its gutter journalism, but only in America do we have this level of dishonest propagandised ideological spin. Ms. Huffington totally avoided (with deliberation aforethought, we would have to say) any mention of Cameron's insistence that these (American) social media would be restricted in the future and that Facebook and Twitter would be responsible for censoring themselves to prevent their future use in these circumstances. It would seem she also had no stomach for dealing with the broader implications of the story, that being the restrictions on "freedom" and forcible censorship on some kinds of expression. Ariana, you're a true patriot, a genuine American - and a typical US media maven. Prologue I don't know if any readers paid much attention during the recent UK riots, while Prime Minister Cameron was telling the world that Facebook and Twitter would be heavily self-censored from that point forward, to prevent their being used again to destabilise his country. But very soon after his initial pronouncements, the US media tone changed and it wasn't Facebook and Twitter that were responsible as revolutionary tools, but instead it was "mobile phones". And then just as quickly, the reference to mobiles disappeared and the operative term became 'Blackberry". And forever after, in all US media reports, it was Blackberries that were responsible for all the trouble. THe motivation was clearly political, but it would be interesting to know who said what to whom, to make those transitions appear so widely and seamlessly at virtually the same instant. Copyright 龙信明。 2010-2012. All rights reserved. Permission is granted to post this text on non-commercial community internet sites, provided the oritinal source (www.bearcanada.com) is stated, and the URL is posted to the original article. The content must remain intact and this copyright note displayed.