Tuesday, February 02, 2010

Golpe De Estado 2.0

As I was chopping up the pumpkin for tonight's dinner I got to thinking, as you would, just how long it will be before someone tries to use Facebook to organise a military coup? The inspiration for this line of thought came from this page - which has been publicly disowned by the PP. Not because it advocates a military coup, but because it uses their logo. Then I started thinking how the owners of Facebook would react to such an event, somehow I suspect they would be quite proud. General Pinochet has added you as a friend in Facebook.....

2 comments:

Tom said...

I reckon it's difficult to organise a military coup in that way... but on the other hand, plenty of military people are probably on FB already.

Anyway, these sorts of tools are already being used to foment political activism: Twitter in Iran, for example. I wouldn't be surprised if right-wing Venezuelans turned out to be using FB or Orkut to try to organise another of their failed coups.

Graeme said...

Yes, I can see that it may not be the perfect tool for the job, there are more confidential alternatives - Islamist terrorism seems to make extensive use of the web. The military uprising in Portugal that led to the downfall of the dictatorship began with the signal of a song played on the radio. I wonder what the 21st century equivalent of that will be?