(Apparently this blog post has a similar title as Amanda’s post last week. But I promise the contents are totally different.)

With the election going on so intensely, the idea of how closely Facebook (and similar social-networking websites) and politics are connected today comes to my mind once again. Candidates use these websites to launch their campaigns; users follow/like certain candidates to update themselves with election news; some advertisements encourage users to vote during the presidential election. All these are vivid examples of how social-networking websites are used by various parties to achieve various objectives related to politics.

In fact, this phenomenon is not unique to the US only; it has become global. Election candidates from many European countries, South-East Asian countries and South American countries are using Facebook and alike to promote their campaigns; during the Arab Spring, people in numerous Arabian countries used Facebook to organize political protests which eventually overthrown some dictatorships; Facebook users from Myanmar and Thailand disclosed (secretly) the chaotic situations in their countries during political upheavals and asked for help. In all the cases above, Facebook is treated as an important pathway (sometimes the only way) to disseminate information. And it makes no surprise that social-networking websites, instead of traditional media forms, are chosen to undertake this task: the cost is low, the rate of diffusion is very high, and total blockage is extremely difficult.

People tend to think of the relationship between politics and social-networking websites as a mutually beneficial one: the websites help certain groups achieve their political goals and, during the process, increase their own user recognition and user count. Moreover, in the cases like the Arab Spring, the social website (namely Facebook) itself has been brought under the spotlight and has become the topic of interest: many people seemed to care more about the involvement of Facebook in the series of events rather than the events themselves. Indeed, both sides benefit from such ‘cooperation’. But their relationship is not that simple: politics, in many cases, could be the roadblock for social-networking sites.

One famous (probably infamous) example is the total ban of Facebook in China. There is a lot of anti-China information being disseminated through Facebook and the Chinese government insists that letting Chinese people have access to such information could be a potential cause of political instability. Putting the validity of this argument aside, there are actually two points we could take away from this statement: first, social-networking websites could be so powerful that they sometimes pose a threat to governments; second, when politicians sense a threat from Facebook and alike, they will immediately turn their back against those websites. And despite the immense, immaterial power of Facebook (the “country of all countries”, as I have argued before), it still has to bend its knees when it comes to state laws and regulations that restrict its operation. Similar obstacles have been met in Iran, Pakistan and so on.

The nature of Facebook determines that it could not afford to censor certain information in order to fit the taste of one particular country, though this could bring billions’ worth of business to the site in countries like China. Just take the precedent of Google: in order to operate in the mainland, its Chinese site had to apply censors to a list of keywords (which are constantly updated by the government) and its service was closely monitored by the government (there were cases of government hackers breaking into Gmail accounts of political dissidents in China). Although Google made a huge fortune from China, it decided to quit the mainland market in 2010 because of the tight political controls which greatly affected the normal operation of the site. Those controls happened to a search engine, and they could happen to social-networking sites as well.

So the relationship between social-networking websites and politics is a complicated mix of love and hatred. When there is mutual benefit to be gained without hurting the other side, the two really work pretty well; but as long as one side senses a potential threat to its own interest, their sweet relationship breaks rapidly.