Social media: Egypt’s quandary

The uprising in Egypt has provoked the familiar “realism-versus-idealism” foreign policy debate in many Western capitals, as diplomats and politicians struggle to balance their ideological sympathy for the protesters with fears of chaos and the threat of a future anti-Western and anti-Israel policy from Cairo if the people do win.

What we have paid less attention to is that the demonstrations have forced some of the world’s hottest technology companies to engage in a very similar debate. The conclusions these technorati end up drawing may be as significant as the verdicts of Western governments. And this new intellectual battleground is a further sign that in the age of the internet and the global economy, foreign policy doesn’t belong just to professionals or to states anymore.

The quandary Egypt poses for technology companies – particularly the power troika of Google, Facebook and Twitter – goes far beyond the classic corporate social responsibility concerns that have become as much a part of standard operating practice at big multinationals as filling out expense reports.

On one hand, the Egyptian revolt and the ways in which it has been facilitated by the internet is the apotheosis of hacker culture and its worldview. That is the powerful conviction of the digerati, that they are on the side of freedom, small ‘d’ democracy and of doing good in the world. This is a self-image that is easy to mock – that Google pledge to “do no evil” makes a pretty juicy target for satirists – but it is also deeply felt. 

I have listened to Larry Page, soon to become Google’s chief executive, earnestly tell a group of rapt technology executives that his central motivation is to make the world a better place. He offered some examples that would have made Mother Teresa proud: the heart attack victims whose lives have been saved by Google searches; the car crash deaths that might be averted if Google eventually figures out how to create a self-driving automobile.

Of course, nowadays nearly all companies offer a version of this vow of virtue, but it is probably much easier to say and believe if you are a Googler than if you sell sugary drinks or package credit derivatives.

Egypt has helped confirm this view of technology companies being on the side of angels. For example, Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who helped organise the protests, was jailed and has emerged this week as an important face of a movement looking for leaders. Before that, there was the much-publicised workaround that Google and Twitter technologists devised to help evade the Egyptian government’s communications crackdown.

And although it has recently become trendy for some Western observers to warn that ascribing too central a role to the internet and social media is the latest version of self-centred Orientalism, the Arab street, judging by all those handmade pro-Facebook placards and graffiti, seems pretty keen on advertising its affection for the world’s most popular social media site.

Business models
All of which sounds like a PR dream come true. As Adrian Chen noted on Gawker, the edgy blog which is itself a product of technorati culture, “the amount of positive press generated by Egypt’s uprising for the site could only be greater if Mark Zuckerberg had parachuted in and started beating back riot police himself.”

On the other hand, the problem for technology companies in many parts of the world is that doing good – or even doing no evil – is very much in the eye of the beholder. The views, and the self-interest, of twenty-something programmers in Silicon Valley, or in Bangalore, India, are unlikely to coincide with those of eighty-something dictators. And that clash can spell trouble for firms primarily intent on building a global business.

“Facebook is trying to expand into China, so it is hard for them to take the side of the protesters,” said Evgeny Morozov, author of The Net Delusion, a newly published contrarian book that argues that the internet will not necessarily make the world a freer, better place.
“They don’t want to be considered the digital equivalent of Radio Free Europe,” he explained. “If they take the side of the protesters, their global business model will come under pressure.”

Morozov is pretty certain that in this conflict between “the hacker ethos” and “the capitalist ethos,” it is the hackers who will have to compromise. But even if Morozov is right that technology company shareholders and executives – like any others – care overwhelmingly about maximising global profits, he may be underestimating the expectations users and employees have of companies whose founding premises are the empowerment of the individual and the democratisation of information.

Facebook, in particular, has been blasted by the internet’s emerging punditocracy for failing to adapt its no-pseudonyms policy to the needs of democracy activists in authoritarian regimes who, for obvious reasons, can’t use their real names.

As Jillian C York, a researcher and activist who works at Harvard’s Berkman Centre for Internet and Society, recently demanded on her blog: “I, for one, would like to see Facebook abandon this policy. It is, for lack of a better word, inane in light of how the platform is used globally. Facebook should listen to their users and accommodate their needs.”

Facebook has a sophisticated policy team that understands these concerns. But they are also worried about weakening the ‘real names only’ policy, which is crucial to the power of the platform, by administering a policy that permits some people to have pseudonyms and not others.

Richard Edelman, the boss of the public relations firm that carries his name, works with businesses around the world. In his firm’s annual survey of which institutions people trust, technology companies are near the top. “Technology companies are seen as legitimate forces for good,” Edelman said.

That halo brings many benefits. But as technology emerges as a force for real good in some of the grimmest parts of the world, that reputation may force technology firms to stick with their idealism even if realism might be better for the bottom line.

“There is a higher expectation of technology companies than of any others,” Edelman said. “There would be a lower expectation of resource companies, for instance. It is why, ultimately, Google walked in China.”
We used to say that Western missionaries came to do good, and ended up doing well. Technology firms could find themselves forced to do good, even if it sometimes means doing badly.