Tweeting hazards

In the aftermath of Osama bin Laden’s killing, much has been made of the role of the social media. The news of the death was “broken” by a tweet much before it was officially announced by POTUS (President of the United States). Then, Sohaib Athar, an IT consultant who happens to live next to the enclosed mansion where Bin Laden

was hiding and eventually shot, achieved instant stardom because he began tweeting when he saw and heard helicopters and kept tweeting throughout the operation.
The social media is being referenced in all big stories of late. Facebook and Twitter were hailed as the key force multipliers during the Tahrir Square demonstrations in Egypt, though that might be giving them too much credit. In our own small burst of public protest in Delhi, the connected generation patted itself on the back for having used Facebook to spread the word.
So now unless the revolution is tweeted and Facebooked (to say nothing of YouTubed), it is not a revolution.
Mr Athar’s tweets are somewhat generalistic and make sense only if you know the whole story. By reading his tweets it is clear that he had no idea what was going on: “GO away helicopter — before I take out my giant swatter:-/”, followed by “A huge window shaking bang here in Abbottabad Cantt. I hope its not the start of something nasty:-s”. He didn’t know half of it.
Let’s try an alternate scenario. What if a smart young tech-savvy guy was watching the whole thing from his window, figured out that it was an assault and noticed that the soldiers did not seem Pakistani. What if he tweeted and the denizens of the mansion got to know of it. It is conceivable that the operation could have been compromised if not botched. Then how would the US authorities have reacted?
In this interconnected world, this is not a remote possibility. There was no telephone or Internet line to the Bin Laden hideout, which is good thinking for someone paranoid, but there would be enough people around who could be monitoring the social media and could have tipped off the target — it is not entirely inconceivable.
A totally unconnected story that also points to the implications of tweeting something in advance comes from Canada. Elections in the vast country were held earlier this week and the government had put a ban on tweeting results. In a country of five time zones, this made absolute sense, since results on the east coast would be out even as voting was going on in the west. But this ban was defied by some and anyone who was interested in the results could check out the tweets. So far no action has been taken but it is almost certain the authorities will not take it lightly.
We began by thinking of tweets etc. as fun media, and even when member of Parliament Shashi Tharoor first got a rap on the knuckles (for being jokey about government policy) and then lost his job following a tweet (by Lalit Modi) no one took it seriously. But governments worldwide are not as sanguine; they are taking note of the ability of the social media to spread information, which has been compounded by the portability offered by devices such as mobiles and iPads.
Tweeting and posting messages on Facebook or videos on YouTube in real time is a double-edged sword. Where we see transparency, governments think of breach of secrecy. If Mr Athar had given away any detail that was even remotely classified, he would be facing suspicion if not intense interrogation right now. Today we can chuckle over his messages like “there goes the neighbourhood” because the eventual outcome was successful.
Nor is confidentiality the only concern governments have. All kinds of new laws are being put in place without people being fully informed. India’s already strict cyberlaws have now been further beefed up with new regulations that prohibit anything that is “hateful”, “blasphemous”, “harassing” and “disparaging”, whatever that means. In practical terms, even satire and gentle fun can be considered a criminal activity, to say nothing of anything that offends any community or leader. And we know how touchy people can be. It is a fact that often comments online border on the libellous, but there is a need to balance freedom of speech with sensible curbs. Throw “secrecy” into the pot and we will have a set of laws that could effectively change the way we operate online. Then posting messages on Twitter or Facebook will not be fun anymore.

Sidharth Bhatia is a senior journalist and commentator on current affairs based in Mumbai