“There is now a menace which is called Twitter. The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society.”

And that, dear readers, is how Turkey’s Prime Minister Tayyip Erdogan feels about the recent, social media-fuelled protests that erupted in Istanbul last weekend. In an interview published by Bloomberg, Erdogan goes on to blame the main opposition Republican People’s Party for fanning the flames of the revolt.

Erdogan was bemoaning the fact that thanks to social media, gone are the days when an authoritarian leader could just send out the heavy mob (riot police) with their batons to chase any dissent away from the streets. Repressive force, coupled with overwhelming control of the mass media, used to be all it took to convince the silent majority of citizens that any troubles were being caused by a minority of extremist troublemakers.

But things are different now. These days, social media is every bit as powerful as TV and newspapers, allowing normal people to upload thousands of images and hours of video footage onto the net, keeping people informed of the true nature of the protests and leaving governments with little room to distort the truth. As a result, no one believes Erdogan anymore when he tries to pins the ‘extremist’ tag on thousands and thousands of protesters – people can see for themselves that it’s not just a ‘small group’ that’s protesting, and henceforth, they can’t all be extremists.

It’s amazing how authoritarian politicians like Erdogan can manage to keep a straight face when they dismiss any form of popular protest as the work of ‘opposition extremists’, ‘armed gangs’ or ‘drug-fuelled terrorists’ (as Gaddafi labeled Libyan protesters). What’s even more disconcerting is that, unlike previous dictators who have followed this track, Erdogan actually claims to be leading a democratic nation.

Hence, Erdogan’s comments about Twitter are in essence a rejection of the democratic principles he supposedly stands for. Lest we forget, Twitter is never the source of political discontent, rather it’s just a vehicle for advertising and communicating it. What with the absence of official state media coverage of the protests, it’s no surprise that Twitter and other social media sites become the best means for demonstrators to tell the world their side of the story.

Fact is, Twitter is not a menace to society. What is a menace to society are all the mindless distractions in the world today – braindead reality TV shows, wall-to-wall advertising of consumer products, stupid celebrity gossip, junk food, Britney Spears, video games, Gangnam Style, materialism, keeping up with the Jones’s, however you want to depict it – these are the real menaces, the things that distract people from actively participating in their society.

Twitter on the other hand is quite the opposite – a medium that encourages people to speak and be heard, and to take an active part in the decision making that affects their lives. When Erdogan calls Twitter a “menace”, what he really means is that it’s a menace to HIM. Without it, the Turkish people would have been indifferent to the protests raging around them and continued pursuing whatever mindless distractions rule their lives, rather than actually trying to make the world they live in a better place.

Thanks to Twitter, people have already woken up to what’s going on, and now Erdogan is going to have to come to terms with it by actually listening to those who put him in power.

Image courtesy of Fredo & Pid’Jin