The Net Delusion - Evgeny Morozov [118]
El Ghazzali’s case is not unique; there is a rapidly growing network of other occasional single-issue activists working on reforming Morocco. Thanks to the Internet, many of them are able to register their disagreement with various policies of their government and find like-minded individuals inside the country, in the diaspora, and elsewhere in the Arabic-speaking world who may assist in campaigning. Predictably, the government is not thrilled, making every effort to obstruct such activism, especially if it involves profanity or humor. The proliferation of such online initiatives may not always be terrifically effective from a policy-planning perspective—everything else being equal, charges of slacktivism are inevitable—but the real contribution of Facebook groups to the democratization of Morocco may lie in pushing the boundaries of what can and cannot be said in this conservative society rather than mobilizing street protests. (To label any Facebook activity as extremely useless or extremely useful just because it takes place on Facebook would thus be an obvious case of Internet-centrism; what may be destructive in the context of Belarus, a society with a much more open, even if still state-manipulated, public sphere, may actually be quite useful in the context of the more socially conservative Morocco.)
One day in 2010 El Ghazzali logged onto Facebook and discovered that his group was gone, along with the list of its more than 1,000 members. It was not obvious how the Moroccan government could be involved—unless, that is, they had friends in Palo Alto, California, where Facebook’s headquarters are located. It turned out that Facebook itself had deleted his group, and it did not bother to give El Ghazzali any explanation or even warn him about what was coming.
When he emailed the company demanding an explanation, his own profile on the site was deleted as well. When a few days later several prominent international bloggers stood up for El Ghazzali and the story got media attention in the West, Facebook restored the banned group but still did not explain its motivation for the original blocking. El Ghazzali himself was not so lucky: He had to create a brand-new Facebook account for himself, since his original account was not restored.
Such (relatively) happy endings are rare; most similar cases do not attract the kind of attention to push Facebook and other intermediaries to rein in their bureaucratic excesses. Had it not been for the international attention that El Ghazzali’s case had received, he, like many other activists before him, would have had to rebuild his online campaign from scratch. One can’t easily accuse Facebook of any legal wrongdoing—after all, it is a private company and can do whatever it wants to. Perhaps, for reasons of their own, Facebook executives did not want to be seen as taking sides in Morocco’s secularism debate; alternatively, the deletion of El Ghazzali’s group was simply the result of a human error, of someone mistaking his group for a quasi-revolutionary collective asking for the overthrow of the Moroccan government (since Facebook didn’t issue a press release, we will never know). What is clear is that, contrary to the expectations of many Western policymakers, Facebook is hardly ideal for promoting democracy; its own logic, driven by profits or ignorance of the increasingly global context in which it operates, is, at times, extremely antidemocratic.
Were Kafka to pen his novel The Trial—in which the protagonist is arrested and tried for reasons that are never explained to him—today, El