Technology is neutral

I have been writing a lot about the internet lately, primarily as a result of Secretary Clinton’s speech last week on internet freedom. It’s important to recall, however, that technology is typically neutral. Whether it is good or bad for democracy is a function of who uses it and for what purposes. Recent violence in Nigeria makes this clear:

Text messages that urged people to murder and then burn their victims’ bodies helped stoke inter-religious violence in central Nigeria that killed hundreds of people last week, police and rights activists said overnight.

Rights activists have identified at least 145 texts that circulated on mobile phones in the central city of Jos, the epicentre of four days of Muslim-Christian clashes that authorities said killed 326 people.

“The messages helped escalate the violence in Jos in that some of them instructed people on how to kill, dispose of and burn bodies,” said leading rights activist Shehu Sani.

The texts were aimed at “spreading rumours and inflaming tensions”, said Mr Sani, who heads a coalition of 32 Nigerian civil and human rights groups called the Civil Rights Congress.

One of the messages seen by AFP read: “War, war, war. Stand up … and defend yourselves. Kill before they kill you. Slaughter before they slaughter you. Dump them in a pit before they dump you.”

Moreover, this is not an isolated incident. For example, people used SMS’s for similar purposes following Kenya’s flawed election in 2007.