Social media will thus be co-opted when possible, silenced when deemed necessary and with the proliferation of fake news may not even be trusted. In other words, for anyone expecting social media to help foster the next "Springtime" of revolution – to paraphrase Shakespeare – this is very much the winter of disconnect. In addition to the outage of social media, Turkey has also blocked hundreds of thousands of websites permanently. However, at the same time China – which has copied other Western technologies in recent years – also created Weibo, a national social media service. Swapping the Electronic FliesMany regimes have also realized that merely silencing social media only goes so far.

Source: Forbes October 15, 2019 02:59 UTC