Code Silence from Libya

Hearsay is going to become the biggest problem for mankind, due to the growing influence of social media. Nobody knows what is true or false when twittered, facebooked, wikileaked. We cannot check the correspondence between real and virtual. In true life you meet somebody, look him or her in the face and decide whether you trust the person or not. In fact we don’t even know for sure if our virtual friends exist for real. We can only deduct, check the Internet for more info and follow our gut feeling. The same goes for you, dear reader, you don’t know for sure whether I exist or not. Maybe I am somebody’s avatar.

But we do develop some kind of intuition on what is true and what is not, while using the social media. When browsing on the Arab Revolution you encounter messages that look sincere. And since everybody leaves traces, you can search deeper into the messenger and find this person trustworthy, or not.
On twitter we have seen messages of scared, but brave Libyan civilians who wanted nothing more than freedom. Links to youtube showed blurred short movies of Tripoli at war, a dictator crashing on his own people. Sirens and gunshots companied the phone recorded images.
The people calling out to the world were obviously not prepared to become freedom fighters, since their profiles are traceable. They show photos of children and homes, give information about jobs. In short, anyone who is looking for the identity of opponents of the Gaddafi regime can easily find them. This makes them trustworthy but endangers them as well. If I can find this much information on a person, any dictators’ intelligence is capable of doing so.
In the beginning of March the Tripoli bloggers fell silent. White letters written on a black sheet screamed without a sound: ‘Code Silence’.
It lasted two weeks before the international community finally decided Libya had had enough Gaddafi terror. Now the war is complete and out in the open. But the Libyan tweeters are still not heard from. Meanwhile the International Community of Tweeters keeps looking for them on the Internet. Today I encountered a Chicago tweetmate who sent a promising message about one of the Tripoli freedom fighters: ‘Yes, someone talked to him on 10th of March, he was safe then. No news after.’
I don’t know who is this woman from Chicago. We never met until today I retweeted her message. I don’t know whom she talked to that spoke to the Tripoli tweeter. I can only hope the message is true and the guys in Libya are still at large and safe.

All names and personal information are deleted from this blog on May 8th 2011

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