The importance of Twitter in current political revolutions was the topic of discussion on stage at the CTIA mobile and wireless convention today in Orlando, Florida.

Two very different opinions were voiced.

Kenneth Roth, executive director of Human Rights Watch:
“I’ve traditionally been a fan of Google News, but I now consider Google News slow,” he said. “You used to read the New York Times for news, now you read it for analysis of things you already know about. If you just follow the right people on Twitter, you hear about things reported from on site in real time.”
“Human rights standards are now relatively established and no one wants to be known as a mass murderer. No one even wants to be known as a torturer of political prisoners. But we know that there’s a gap between what governments say and what they do. That gap is where we find our power. We shame those governments. Our capacity to do that is based on wireless technology. The more real-time we can respond to government actions, the more power we have to influence them. That real time capacity is based on wireless technology.”

Human Rights Watch:
http://www.hrw.org/

CTIA (International Association for the Wireless Telecommunications Industry)
http://ctia.org/

See also: “Rights Watchdog Says Mobile Web Would Have Changed Nazi Germany”
http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/rights_watchdog_says_mobile_web_would_have_changed.php

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