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Twitter's Stone, Clearwire's Stanton talk transformative power of tech

March 24, 2011 — 11:33am ET | By Jason Ankeny

ORLANDO, Fla.--Social media and mobile technologies are reshaping how citizens in oppressed nations are disseminating and sharing information, effectively revolutionizing the act of revolution, said Human Rights Watch Executive Director Kenneth Roth during Thursday morning's keynote panel here at CTIA Wireless 2011.

Roth--joined onstage by Twitter co-founder Biz Stone and Clearwire chairman and CEO John Stanton, who also chairs Trilogy International Partners, which invests in wireless technologies in emerging markets, stated that mobile communications were instrumental to recent uprisings in the Middle East.

"Visibility is dangerous--the government can arrest a revolution's leaders, stick them in jail and decapitate the movement," Roth said. "Social media has made possible a leaderless revolution. Once the revolution is underway, it allows for incredible, quick action among participants. It all happens without the typical leadership a government would want to attack."

Mobile messaging services also enable users to communicate in real time either in one-on-one dialogues or one-to-many broadcasts, Stanton noted. "SMS represents an opportunity to connect people. It's very difficult to control or restrain what I might send you in text," Stanton said. "Mobile devices can empower individuals, and ultimately, that is more powerful than governments."

The growing diversity of communications platforms also makes it increasingly difficult for governments to quell revolution by blocking network access, Stanton said, adding that in many countries military and police troops rely on the same networks, essentially forcing governments to keep services up and running. Roth agreed: "We never lost touch with [Human Rights Watch] people in Egypt," he said. "Something always worked. It's not so simple to shut off information any more."

Stone said that the simplicity and accessibility of communicating via SMS was one of the earliest use cases outlined during Twitter's formative stages. "We believed that by creating a network on top of SMS, we could enable people in the remotest of places to connect to real-time information," he said. "It's like an Internet over SMS--there are 5 billion phones worldwide, which is even more powerful than the 2 billion people on the Internet."

Stone was nevertheless quick to reject moderator/CNBC anchor Michelle Caruso-Cabrera's suggestion that Twitter itself is the fuel behind the wave of citizen uprisings. "I think about Twitter like a flock of birds in flight--their action looks complicated and choreographed, but it's actually simple communication among individuals in real time, behaving like they're one organism," Stone said. "No one in their right mind would say sending a tweet is an act of activism, but it's one of the tools people can use."