Is Twitter Really a Tool for Democracy?

Iran is the latest proof for cyber-utopists that the Internet is our best hope for global democracy and progressive politics. Bloggers are deep in the debate about whether Twitter is responsible for organizing the street protests in Tehran, or merely reporting them [2]. But there are some Twitter doubters [3] out there, and I add myself to their ranks.

If Twitter is the face of democracy, who, exactly, does it represent? In Iran, like many developing countries, most of the Internet users are affluent, young urbanites. The poor, the illiterate, the less urbane are not online, and this muddies the picture. I don’t know about Twitter’s effect in Iran, but Guatemala’s own recent Twitter coup is case in point.

See Double X's gallery of photos from Guatemala [4].

An online video and a single Tweet incited tens of thousands of Guatemalans to participate in the biggest demonstrations of their 13-year-old democracy. This video shows lawyer Rodrigo Rosenberg [5] just before he was shot in the head while riding his bicycle on Mother’s Day in Guatemala City. “If you are watching this message,” he says calmly, “it is because I was assassinated by President Alvaro Colom.” He then accuses the president, the first lady, and others of signing off on murder, corruption, and the laundering of public funds through a government bank for personal gain and to expense narco-traffickers.

A twitterer (“tuitero”) who saw the video urged people to withdraw their money from corrupt banks and was arrested. Outraged crowds took to the streets to demand the president resign. Guatemala was hailed as another victory for democracy by technology.

But the president has plenty of supporters, although they are not likely to be online. They are mainly poor farmers and workers from the rural areas. The vast majority are Mayan Indians who rely heavily on benefits from the president’s social programs. Many are illiterate and only speak K’iche’, the most common native spoken language there–not the Spanish, much less the English, used on Twitter and Facebook.. Their concerns are mainly subsistence-related and do not easily feed a first, let alone a “Second Life."

During the country’s brutal 36-year Civil War, military governments fought left-wing guerrillas and destroyed Mayan populations who were said to harbor them. The war ended in 1996 and left at least 250,000 dead. Colom lost several relatives during Guatemala’s dirty war and vowed to stop the “mano dura” or “firm hand” approach of his running mate Perez Molina, a former army general who once took on the insurgency. Once elected, Colom focused on creating jobs and addressing the country’s dire poverty.

We still don’t know whether Mr. Rosenberg was murdered by opponents of the left who wanted to overthrow Colom, or if he was killed precisely as the video suggests, by Colom’s own allegedly crooked inner circle. What we do know is that Colom is a center-left democrat whose social and tax programs have rattled the country's conservative elite.

Had I not come to know something about the situation on the ground in Guatemala City, Rosenberg’s posthumous testimony surely would have had me swearing that the president is an enemy of the People and the Ideal, plus a crook and a murderer. But the web, although it has a bracing immediacy, doesn’t tell the whole truth. If those most traumatized by a legacy of violence and poverty aren’t yet able to participate in the debate, can we really say that the ’net has a democratizing effect? Particularly when, as in countries like Guatemala, the concerns of the unvoiced are in direct conflict with the political agenda of the cyber community?

The hard evidence is neither as thrilling nor as immediately available as an 18-minute viral video. In 2005, reams of mildewing police documents were discovered in a warehouse, roped in sloppy heaps and stacked from floor to ceiling. The 80 million documents include the mundane, from traffic tickets and driver’s license forms but also spy and interrogation logs revealing decades of state-sponsored kidnapping and killing. There are hundreds of rolls of film and videos, along with snapshots of unidentified bodies, detainees, and informants. The files were tossed into file cabinets marked “disappeared,” “assassins,” and “special cases.” In 2007, the president opened the archives. Someone may have filmed the event but nobody bothered to put it up on YouTube. But the opening of the archives could arguably have a much greater democratizing effect in Guatemala than the any Twitter-fueled protests.