I tried to post this on the blog...

A few points...

This sentence kind of stuck out for me...

The Arab Spring demonstrated how social media can congregate its users digitally, then quickly shift to directing or influencing some form of focused physical mass or swarm.

That seems to suggest that "social media" have a degree of agency and even consciousness beyond that of their users, an idea that I suspect requires a little cautious examination.

Examinations of decentralized, leaderless forms of organization, whether or not they are enabled by social media, need to look not only at the undoubted power these entities have to produce agitation and disruption, but also at the extreme difficulty they have in structuring an aftermath to agitation and disruption. An amorphous, leaderless mass is difficult to counter and can bring a government down - particularly if that government is already regarded as expendable by its own military and other key internal elements - but unlike a "traditional" hierarchical resistance, there's often nobody to step into the breach, leaving a vacuum that may be filled by players with agendas very different from those that started the movement (such as the army (as in Egypt), or potentially any number of extremist elements). This deficiency needs to be understood and anticipated by those within the movement and those who would seek to leverage the movement.

While observation of social media could provide invaluable insight to the intelligence community or to UW operators, I suspect that we need to be very careful about any proposed attempt to proactively manipulate social media to achieve an outcome desired by an external party. We're often dealing with rapidly evolving youth subcultures in foreign lands, and an effort (for example) to pose as a local is likely to be quickly busted, potentially with adverse unintended consequences. Even people who are fundamentally on the same page as us may not take kindly to being manipulated.

Above all we have to remember that social media are a tool, not to be confused with the people using the tool. Revolutions happened before social media; people enable their revolutions with the tools they have available. Where the will is there and the moment is right things will happen with or without the social media. If the will isn't there and the moment isn't right social media alone will not produce revolution or anything else. Social media have the capacity to move the will and the moment, but they are not in themselves the will and the moment, and they are only one part of the process creating the will and the moment. We do not want to confuse the tool with the user, or with the job.