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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