Internet? Who needs internet? The tech giants have teamed up to let Egyptians tweet the revolution, despite the country’s shutdown of internet and mobile phone service.
Last week Mubarak’s government shut down internet and cell phone service across Egypt, hoping that going dark on technology would disrupt the protesters’ ability to organize.
While Egypt’s internet shut-down stirred fears in America about the implications of Joe Liebermann’s proposed internet kill switch, it didn’t quell the massive protests demanding Mubarak’s ouster, as is evident today in the reported 2 million people gathering in Cairo.
Nevertheless, while the U.S. has remained outwardly neutral, hesitating to take sides in the conflict, Google and Twitter have thrown their support unambiguously behind the Egyptian people, launching a joint service to restore communication technology while internet and cell service are turned off. So what is this fancy new technology? Land lines, of course.
Reuters reports, “The service allows people to dial a telephone number and leave a voicemail. The voicemail is automatically translated into an audio file message that is sent on Twitter using the identifying tag #egypt.” Google announced its workaround technology in a blog post titled “Some weekend work that will (hopefully) enable more Egyptians to be heard.”
While the service is allowing Egyptians’ voices to be heard on the world stage, the service does appear to fall short of actually allowing Egyptians to communicate with each other. The messages are posted from voicemail to Twitter, but there’s still no way for Egyptians to read those tweets and thus use social media to inform and organize each other.
Still, it’s admirable that the tech giants have taken a stance on the side of individuals over governments. Reuters reports a source said Google “was not taking sides in the crisis in Egypt, but was simply supporting access to information.” Providing access to information in defiance of a government’s wishes, however, is taking sides.
The Google/Twitter joint service is valuable precisely because there is a world outside of Egypt where information can circulate freely. In China, where Twitter and Facebook are banned and the word “Egypt” is being censored from the Chinese social media that exists online, the new Google/ Twitter service is useless.
All this supports the notion that information censorship—especially an “internet kill switch”—is a major threat to basic, universal human freedom. Which makes me feel great about the article Death and Taxes writer DJ Pangburn published recently, simply called “Fuck You, Joe Liebermann.”
Google lists the numbers for the Twitter service as: +16504194196 or +390662207294 or +97316199855.
