Social media empowered authoritarian retrenchment rather than democratic dissent

Evidence

The tech industry dismissed Morozov as a crank. In 2013 he complained that Silicon Valley was a “Teflon industry”: “No matter how much dirt one throws at it, nothing seems to stick.” But by 2016, his words seemed prescient. The Arab Spring had largely ended with authoritarian retrenchment. The Iranian Green Movement, ubiquitous on YouTube, had fizzled. Social media platforms, far from empowering dissidents, cracked down on activists’ accounts while regimes like Saudi Arabia deployed “troll armies” to suppress dissent. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 490

Categorization

• XREF: Reverses the 2010-era tech-internationalism claim often paired with soft power arguments; relevant to the reader’s counter-case that each era reads its own signature wrong from insufficient distance. — connects to: US policy promoted social media as democratization tools regardless of outcomes — Vincent Bevins, If We Burn: The Mass Protest Decade and…, 294