Policymakers and media in 2011 treated social networks themselves as the revolutionary force.

Evidence

“The Che Guevara of the 21st Century is the network,” wrote Alec Ross, the officer in charge of digital policy in Hillary Clinton’s State Department, in 2011 in NATO Review. In the Brazilian press, the coverage was not so different: “In North Africa, a new form of popular mobilization is trading in weapons for cellular phones,” declared a report broadcast that year by the Globo network. “The Facebook Revolution allows individuals to construct the very facts that they are narrating. Nothing will stop it.” — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn, 300

Categorization

• DEFINE: Rich archival example of ‘the Facebook Revolution’ techno-optimist framing Bevins will systematically dismantle across the book.
• SEED: The specific quote ‘The Che Guevara of the 21st Century is the network’ from a State Department official is a tight anchor for an essay on how US power projected its own digital ideology onto foreign protest movements.