Dictators in the Age of Instagram : The New Yorker - 1 views
www.newyorker.com/...s-in-the-age-of-instagram.html
policy culture US crisis syria news assad instagram internet information spread autonomy internet law technology knowledge language bias
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“So, you want to be a dictator?”
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Too bad you’re living in this century. “It is tougher to lead an authoritarian regime in the face of democratic ideals, free speech and globalized media.
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Snyderwine puts forth complex mathematical formulas that show a dictator how to stay in power with cost-benefit analyses of revolutions that take into account factors like bribes and the number of active revolutionaries killed.
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“The Dictator’s Practical Internet Guide to Power Retention,” is a compilation of tips, gleaned from the experiences of leaders in China, Singapore, Russia, Iran, Pakistan, and other countries, that illustrate just how brutal the modern, connected world can be for a tyrant.
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n Syria, President Bashar al-Assad has proved canny online. Blackouts have shut down the Internet at various moments in the past two years
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The state news agency blamed one blackout, in May, on “a malfunctioning fibre-optic cable,” but it was not lost on many that it was timed near a vote on a U.N. resolution on Syria.
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Does it matter if this is a kind of misinformation? What does a social-media company do when a user known to be attacking civilians is blasting out feel-good content?
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But she explained that, generally speaking, if a user created content that promoted violence, Instagram would remove it and possibly disable the user. Schumer stressed the importance of the context of the image in making those calls—a caption might make an image threatening, for instance—but also said that “context” is generally limited to content on the site.
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And yet, even within that complex framework, what does it mean to follow a man strongly suggested to be a war criminal, to have a virtual shrine to a dictators’ glory that can fit in our pockets?