By Washington’s Blog

The most liberal part of the country - the San Francisco Bay Area - is taking a page from Egyptian dictator Mubarak's playbook.

As leading free speech organization Electronic Frontier Foundation reports:

No person shall conduct or participate in assemblies or demonstrations or engage in other expressive activities in the paid areas of BART stations, including BART cars and trains and BART station platforms.

This week, EFF has seen censorship stories move closer and closer to home — first Iran, then the UK, and now San Francisco, an early locus of the modern free speech movement. Operators of the Bay Area Rapid Transit system (BART) shut down cell phone service to four stations in downtown San Francisco yesterday in response to a planned protest.

It's not just cell phones.



For example, the Pentagon is trying to manipulate social media for propaganda purposes. And the government is trying to censor any suggestions on the web and other media that powerful people might actually be acting in their own interests (and not necessarily in the interests of the little guy).



And in Britain, the government is blaming the protests in that country on social media (here are the two real causes).



But as professor of media psychology Ann Rutletdge writes in a post entitled, "Social Media Did Not Cause the London Riots":

Social media is just a tool. It’s a powerful one, but a tool nonetheless. It can be used in good ways and bad ways, just like a hammer or a baseball bat.

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Social media is an easy target. When you’re a politician, it’s great to have something to blame that can’t vote. Prime Minister Cameron almost immediately offloaded the blame onto social networking sites for fueling the riots and hinted at intervention. “When people are using social media for violence, we need to stop them.”

UK Home Secretary, Theresa May, is scheduling meetings with Facebook, Twitter and Research In Motion (RIM) to “discuss their responsibilities in this area.” Suggestions have ranged from banning suspected rioters from social media networks to the wholesale shutdown of social media in times of unrest without regard to individual freedoms in order to “catch the bad guys.” The key unanswered question is who gets to decide who’s a ‘troublemaker’ or what’s ‘unrest.’

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We should learn from history, as well as from current societies that we do not want to emulate. Can anyone say “China” or “McCarthyism”?

Beyond rights violations, any government that thinks they can totally suppress information flows is kidding themselves. Even if it were possible, shutting down social media will not stop anything. In countries where people do not have easy Internet access or rights like freedom of speech, resourceful, persistent, and effective citizens continue to find ways around Great Fire Walls and information blackouts. Suppressing information these days is like holding a balloon under water. It will absolutely pop up somewhere else.

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Social media may have accelerated the pace of information travel, bringing groups together faster, but it did not put bricks and fire bombs into the hands of the looters. Social media did not create the anger or sense of powerlessness against authorities. It did not create the heightened emotions of the group, crowd leaders, the adrenalin that comes from a sense of danger and risk, the lack of empathy for others, or the sense of no consequences. Emotion may be contagious, but social media is not.

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The real danger from these events is ... the wholesale liquidation of personal freedoms as a solution to deal with fear. When people are scared, they are willing to surrender individual rights to whomever tells them they can “fix” the problem. Whenever we give away our power so that we no longer have access or due process, we are on a slippery slope indeed.