Goodbye, flashmobs?
Much has been made of how mobile technology has enhanced our ability to organize and protest. However, most accounts of mobile activism understate the inevitable risks (e.g. having the government monitor all your movements by tracking the whereabouts of your mobile phone) and overstate the difficulty of blocking/filtering mobile technology (e.g. governments – with the ...
Much has been made of how mobile technology has enhanced our ability to organize and protest. However, most accounts of mobile activism understate the inevitable risks (e.g. having the government monitor all your movements by tracking the whereabouts of your mobile phone) and overstate the difficulty of blocking/filtering mobile technology (e.g. governments - with the tacit help of mobile network operators - can automatically filter our text messages they do not like based on keywords).
Much has been made of how mobile technology has enhanced our ability to organize and protest. However, most accounts of mobile activism understate the inevitable risks (e.g. having the government monitor all your movements by tracking the whereabouts of your mobile phone) and overstate the difficulty of blocking/filtering mobile technology (e.g. governments – with the tacit help of mobile network operators – can automatically filter our text messages they do not like based on keywords).
Of course, it’s easy to trick the censors and, for example, spell the text messages backwards or use allegories and metaphors to express dissent. But what the advocates of mobile activism fail to understand is that such initiatives are hard to scale, because, regardless of its contents, the size of a mobile campaign (i.e. how many text messages with the same text have been exchanged in a given period of time) is a strong predictor of unruly activities. To that end, the governments would try to cluster messages that are gaining in popularity and try to block them from spreading further and, of course, block individual phone numbers from distributing too many messages.
This is already happening in China:
Mobile phone users sending text messages to large groups of people at one time may lose their SMS (short message service) for up to 24 hours; a policy intended to prevent spam but took ordinary users by surprise when they sent group messages over the New Year holiday.
Shanghai-based Xinmin Evening News reported the policy Sunday after the paper’s hotline received complaints from readers whose mobile text message service became dysfunctional after sending group messages.
A China Mobile user surnamed Liu told the paper that he sent a "Happy New Year" message to 60 people over the holiday, and discovered his SMS was blocked afterwards.
The customer service center told him that the service has been blocked due to "too frequent message sending" and that restoration of service would take up to 24 hours.
According to the customer centers of three major telecom operators in China, a computerized monitoring system has been installed to reduce commercial spam messages.
What’s more interesting is that the mobile companies are explaining their activities as a "war on spam" (which is, probably, a legitimate explanation). The thing is that it’s hard to organize an SMS flash-mob without engaging in such spam – so the authorities may have found a way to limit the effectiveness of mobile activism.
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