[freshhawk]

I think you are putting too much faith in the ability of facebook-like services to do useful things like the organization and communication that happened in the arab spring protests.

It's entirely possible this was a one time event. I wouldn't trust these services (especially facebook) not to cooperate fully with whoever is in power for censorship/identification purposes. If they don't cooperate they'll just be blocked anyway.

Surely the newness of this type of communication created these one-to-many communication freedoms, but I doubt it's accurate that these freedoms were/are anything but temporary.

That's not even counting the disagreement over how much of the communication was actually done on american social platforms vs existing text message infrastructure.

I agree that Moglen at least gets close to a absolutist position on this kind of thing (and Stallman is a good example of a similar position) but I don't accept that the positives of any contribution to Arab Spring style protests outweigh the negatives of literally informing on yourself and your friends to a private commercial surveillance network (which is indeed the literal truth even if I used Moglen's inflammatory language).