Abstract
This article responds to Crosscurrent articles (Treré et al., 2020) published in this journal by positing the potential usefulness of Disconnection for Protection (D4P) for calming unrest and managing volatile times. We first use a vignette from Ambon, Indonesia, to illuminate the need for D4P to throttle the spread of mis/disinformation during a communal violence and then discuss the existing repertoire of disconnections. Building on this, we propose temporal/spatial context, information flow, externality, and motivation as constitutive elements of D4P. We elaborate on their terms and conditions and suggest research directions at the end.
Keywords
This article responds to Crosscurrent articles (Treré et al., 2020) published in this journal by positing the potential usefulness of Disconnection for Protection (D4P) for calming unrest and managing volatile times. We first use a vignette from Ambon, Indonesia, to illuminate the need for D4P to throttle the spread of mis/disinformation during a communal violence and then discuss the existing repertoire of disconnections. Building on this, we propose temporal/spatial context, information flow, externality, and motivation as constitutive elements of D4P. We elaborate on their terms and conditions and suggest research directions at the end.
In September 2011, civil conflict broke out again in Ambon after violence from 1999 to 2004. Misinformation exacerbated violent potentials, as fear traveled quickly from one location to the other. For example, Christians living in Galala received messages over short-messaging service (SMS) that Muslims in Kebon Cengkeh would attack them. The Christians panicked and prepared for immediate self-evacuation. But the attack did not materialize. Kebon Cengkeh was asleep while Galala was terror-stricken. The misinformation stirred the already muddy situation that the Ambonese people faced daily. One community shared such unverified information to alert its members about the possible harm another community could inflict. There seemed no harm attached to such an altruistic ‘just-in-case’ motive of sharing information. But in a volatile time, it precipitated the hate and fear that one community had of the other. SMS, together with Blackberry Messenger and Facebook, expedited the spread of misinformation in Ambon when the opportunity to verify the truth was limited and the gravity of making decisions in critical and intense situations was high. The majority of Ambonese at that time ignored potential falsehood in the information they received. The spread of such misinformation impeded the effort to build peace as tension between the two communities persisted.
When community tension escalated, as many Ambonese remembered, the Internet and mobile phone connections were slower than usual. In places close to violence-prone areas there was even no connection. Sari (30) said, ‘During the conflict, sending messages was very difficult. Telkomsel [the only telecommunication provider company then] was really slow. I think that was because the government tried to slow down the spread of [conflict] provocations that were often circulating via SMS’. Another Ambonese, Raj (27), said, ‘If we [the Ambonese] used the technology wisely, the provocations could have been stopped easier. The government particularly could stop them faster given its power [to control the Internet]’. Both Sari and Raj indicated that Internet disconnection in that specific period would have helped curbed misinformation. Internet connection had become a conduit for misinformation, impeding the effort to reweave the torn social fabric once shared between different communities.
Internet disconnections
In general, Internet disconnections embody resistance, repression, and lifestyles (Kaun and Treré, 2018). It is present in the cycle of connection and reconnection (Lim, 2018) and materializes the agency that one exercises to resist the perpetual pressure to stay connected (Natale and Treré, 2020). There is no doubt that disconnection can be an act of repression as those in power cut off the Internet to maintain power and limit the agency of those without to fight back (Lim, 2020). Such has appeared in Ecuador, India, Iraq, Sudan, and Togo over the period of 2018–2020. Internet blackouts are means for the state to control civic unrest, blockade journalists from accessing unfavorable information, and mask human rights violations (O’Brien and Micek, 2020). As switching off the Internet can be an effective means for covering up oppressions, state actors frequently make a unilateral decision to impose it whenever convenient. The rhetoric to buttress the decision often revolves around national security, safety, stability, and sovereignty (Marchant and Stremlau, 2020).
In other words, the nature of disconnection stems from whether it is involuntary, in the sense of being compelled, or voluntary from the point of view of the user. The above-mentioned country-scale Internet shutdowns illuminate forced disconnections. Being unable to connect to the Internet because of poor infrastructure is involuntary in nature, too (Warschauer, 2003). Access to the Internet should be a right rather than a privilege, where widening access, narrowing technological divides, and improving digital inclusion are a few discourses pertaining to socio-cultural impacts of information communication technologies (Hesselberth, 2018). In contrast to involuntary disconnection, a voluntary disconnection represents an intentional decision by the user to disconnect from the Internet. Digital minimalism (Newport, 2019) and self-regulated disconnection (Light, 2014) epitomize just that. These types of disconnection materialize the privilege embedded in the users’ social, economic, and cultural capitals as reflected in their ability to exercise controls over when and how they want to (dis)connect from what and whom (Bucher, 2020).
Disconnection for protection (D4P)
This article adds Disconnection for Protection (D4P) to the above repertoire of Internet disconnections. Broadly, D4P manifests the intention to alter undesirable situations resulting from the Internet connection. Take an example of parents’ decision to disallow children from playing online games after 6 PM. While that might be seen as a draconian parenting, it can keep the children from spending too much time online and to redirect them to finishing schoolwork. Similarly, disconnecting the Internet for a certain amount of time can help decelerate the spread of misinformation and prevent the public from basing their decisions on it. This kind of disconnection is bound by motivation, expected outcomes, and externalities. Succinctly, D4P stems from a motivation to prevent undesirable situations from occurring and its enactment can result in positive and negative externalities. Against that consideration, the decision whether to maintain the state of disconnection or to resume connection is made.
The decision to enact D4P will likely create polarizing views between the proponents of freedom and the proponents of stability and safety. In an autocratic system, where support for the government may be high, citizens are likely to accept the official line that D4P is meant for disarming harm and promote common good. By comparison, in a democratic society and in an ecosystem where trust in government is low, D4P is seen as disruptive and a poor reaction to unmanageable situations. Thus, the Internet disconnection is repression, which can lead to resistance, instead of safety and stability. Given such a complexity, interrogating the motivation for D4P and its intended and unintended effects are critical before enacting it to dismantle latent chaos in unsettling times.
D4P must be exercised based on the urgent need to redress problems potentially escalating if D4P is not deployed. The courts could be used as a safety check. After the first 3–5 days, the D4P order must be reviewed and approved by the court; stakeholders from the public can give their views at that time. De-politicizing the problem is key to keeping the deployment from becoming an entry point for repressive acts. D4P in this understanding is a matter of governance, in which both the government, civil society, and other related entities aim to synergistically minimize the emergence of political speculations and commentaries that can trigger controversies against the immediate need to solve the problems. In a concrete example, the need to save lives is the base for deploying D4P instead of the intent to politicize the problems in hand and the means to solve them.
The enactment of D4P should be to mitigate the damage that a connectivity can bring during volatile times. While useful for activists and ordinary citizens to organize social movements and to facilitate activists to maintain post-movement solidarity (Rohman, 2019a; Rohman & Pitaloka, 2020), mobile phones and social media, together with other offline and online platforms, are also among the carriers of misinformation, populism, and hateful speech (Flew and Iosifidis, 2019). Despite the twofold effects of internet connection, in most cases asking users to stop accessing such Internet-based platforms is almost impossible given that the benefit of staying connected is bigger than otherwise. To complicate the matter, being in an intense situation at the brink of violence and having a limited time to seek truth in the messages received from such platforms, one is likely to forward the messages in the attempt to alert others. For many people, panic and haste to self-evacuate from potential dangers impede the ability to think clearly. As a result, misinformation spread widely. Left unchecked, chaos and violence are likely to follow (Rohman & Ang, 2019).
In response, government cuts off, or throttles, the Internet connection. In the early development of Internet governance studies, scholars have posited that the connection can create chaos, therefore a functioning system of governance is required to regulate both the intended and unintended consequences of the Internet, where the regulation can be interpreted as constraining and enabling to long-term Internet development (Ang, 2005). The merit of this assertion holds to date, particularly given the rapid development of algorithms, facial recognition tools, and other technologies threatening the online sphere (Sunstein, 2017).
State and other malicious actors have even weaponized such technologies to sow social polarization and discord, promulgate misinformation, disinformation, and other forms of lies, and crackdown on activism (Benkler et al., 2018). These ramifications of connection have marked global Internet governance discussions, where how to make the Internet just and safe for diverse users and to balance power relations between civil society, private and public sectors are among the lingering, debatable discourses (Denardis, 2020). In a disruptive event like violence surrounded by a spread of misinformation, D4P can be the last resort to restore order as misinformation blurs the boundary between facts, opinions, and lies, and dampens citizens’ ability to make critical decisions in volatile situations and limited times (O’Connor and Weatherall, 2019).
The above understanding requires citizen support when the existing governance system faces problems and disruptive events. Figure 1 shows support for the governance system in eight Southeast Asian countries, which politically range from democratic, hybrid democratic, to autocratic. Numbers of political parties representing citizens’ interests in the countries vary from one to dozens, for example, Vietnam and Indonesia, respectively. Freedom of speech and expressions are between minimally existent and relatively free. Economically, the eight countries are low, middle, and upper incomes.
Citizens’ support for the existing system of governance in eight Southeast Asian countries.
While socio-economically and politically different, most citizens of these countries indicate high support for their current political system. For example, most Indonesians (81%) in a democracy with the largest Muslim population in the region, support (Strongly Agree and Agree) the existing system of governance. The same inclination also appears in Vietnam (93%), the most populous socialist country in the same region, as well as in low-income countries such as Cambodia (69%) and Myanmar (74%). In very broad terms, such support indicates high trust in the government to resolve problems with tools and technologies that are more likely to work, including a proportional and measurable enactment of D4P.
Constitutive elements of D4P
The vignette from Ambon, Indonesia, mentioned at the beginning of this article indicates that halting the circulation of misinformation leading to violent events was the expected outcome of D4P. As mobile and Internet users were unable to hastily share misinformation with one another, potential violence shrunk, allowing peacebuilding processes to continue. D4P in that sense is a power exercised in the attempt to redress the problems affecting public in a given time and space (Giddens, 1984). The progress resulted from D4P becomes the primary consideration to resume connection. Blocking off the Internet in a particular location where, for example, misinformation would escalate precarious, adversarial relationships between different communities into violence until the situation became more conducive for dialogs would mitigate the risk of outsiders from taking advantage of the unsettling condition. The disconnection is a measurable effort to isolate an incident in one area potentially affects the other. Metaphorically, this is on par with a lockdown of a virus-infected area for a certain period of time in the attempt to protect unaffected areas. With that in mind, the following sections elaborate on constitutive elements of D4P and their terms and conditions.
Temporal/spatial context
Timing and duration, as a temporal context (Solomon, 1997), inform the enactment of D4P. The issue of timing is the question of the appropriate time to disconnect the Internet in response to the foreseen damage and the gravity of maintaining order. Who has the privilege to define when it is right to put D4P in place and for how long are the questions preceding its enactment. Putting the political contestations possibly arising from it aside, a well-informed governance will carefully enact D4P as there is a strong belief that the benefit of disconnection will counteract its cost. The duration of D4P thus is dependent on the progress that the first enactment can yield. Crucial to this is the notion of check and balance on the government’s capability to be accountable. The risks of abuse, evidence tampering, and human rights violation in a period of disconnection can be mitigated, therefore. A functioning check and balance mechanism can help neutralize the negative, unintended outcomes of the Internet dormancy.
The timing of the enactment is immediate given the urgency of ordering chaos. Different entities share information and coordinate with one another to collaboratively manage the emergency time (Sonnenwald, 2006). In this manner, the collaboration team consists of informed individuals with the capacity to achieve both the expected outcomes and minimize the negative externalities of D4P. Hence, incompetence that leads to complacency of the people behind D4P can be prevented. When the spread of misinformation is fully understood will exacerbate adversarial relationships between different communities and terminating the Internet is deemed to be the only viable option left, then the timing of D4P is justifiable. A tardiness in imposing D4P to this critical time to some extent could lead to casualties and domino effects, where unaffected areas would be affected; and an isolated violent event would scale up. In this specific situation, enacting D4P is the last resort for disarming potential chaos.
Coupled with D4P’s temporal context is the spatial context (Savolainen, 2009; Tuan, 1979). It materializes in the zoning approach to mitigating risks and negative externalities. For example, if misinformation is affecting two villages, then switching off the Internet connection of the whole city, or country, can be a symptom of repression. A proportional zoning approach can be less repressive if its enactment is based on a clear objective to break the circulation of misinformation and to trace from whom and where it began to spread with further embellishment and distortion. In this understanding, D4P is strictly for halting the spread while on-the-ground efforts for mitigating risks are in motion. The synchronicity between D4P and on the ground remedies potentially accelerates order to return, shortening the state of disconnection in the affected area. A hybrid of online and offline approaches to managing volatile events like communal violence is advocated (Treré, 2019). D4P is a way of ‘throttling’ the escalation of latent chaos precipitated by Internet connection and to allow offline responses to de-escalate ongoing chaos. If performed right, then the potential of disconnection to become a repression tool can be minimized; its potential to become a tool of order can be optimized.
Information flow
While D4P is in place, citizens of the affected area can still access legacy media and media workers have the privilege to access the affected area for reporting purposes. When the Internet is down, local media can be the primary source of information given their understanding to the local context and emotional proximity with the locals (Aldridge, 2007). To some extent, the local media in this circumstance seems to be trustworthy as their reporting on violent events, for example, embeds their depth and breadth of the history, the gravity of the issue being disputed, and the identity that adversaries negotiate and defend. In such reporting, there is an underlying assumption that the local media reports are not meant to feed the bias that its audience has on the other. Its local proximity can make the local media a reliable source of information but also prone to be weaponized to instigate adversarial sentiments.
Thus, granting access to non-local media and empowering the local media are equally important to provide audience with accurate, diverse information during the period of D4P. National, international, and networked media have the ability to reach to a wider audience, making them a force for monitoring the Internet connection and mitigating the risk of local media from amplifying local biases. Given the local knowledge of the local media and the ability of non-local media to reach a wider audience, collaboration between them in reporting on the Internet dormancy is suggested for building conducive conditions to bring order back without compromising objectivity and transparencey in the reporting (Rohman, 2019b). The local media can feed the non-local one with the local contexts, hence preventing inaccurate and incomplete information from being broadcasted widely. The non-local media, in return, reports transparently potential abuses arising in the Internet-dormant period, if any. These two ways of collaboration afford D4P to become a tool to tame potential chaos.
Negative externalities
Like any enactments of policies and regulations, D4P will generate negative externalities (Cornes and Sandler, 2003). Incomplete information is being used to base the decision to disconnect the Internet and failures in communicating the imperfect condition that leads to the disconnecting measure are founts for negative externalities. Imperfect information stems from the rush to disconnect the Internet, demonstrating an incompetence in grasping a full understanding of the unsettling situation. An Internet disconnection that seems to be an act of repressions originates from governments’ inability to collect necessary information in critical times. Shutting down the Internet is chosen because it is believed to be an easy response to volatile situations when in fact it should be the last resort. As the decision is poorly informed, various acts of repressions follow as the need to mask the incompetency ensues. The matter becomes more complicated as politics interfere subsequently.
Negative externalities arise from failures to communicate reasons for D4P to the public, particularly in an ecosystem where trust in the government is low and ideas pertaining to human rights, freedom of speech and expression are championed. The fact that most mainstream media have been predisposed to adopt a stance against perspectives nuanced by pragmatic, autocratic approaches has popularized the view that switching of the Internet is simply an act of tyranny. Consequently, the view that in the right context, switching off the Internet can be viable for canceling chaos is unpopular; the positive outcomes of Internet disconnection are minimally acknowledged. Doubt, distrust, and discredit are attributed to the positive outcomes when being communicated to public, considering the government’s bad records in handling crises and maintaining public trust (Gregorio and Stremlau, 2020). As a result, the benefits of D4P are often attacked by its opponents as misinforming public, which reinforces the existing view that the government is inherently incompetent and untrustworthy.
That view is deeply rooted in the fact that in all political systems, maintaining power is as important as serving citizens. One might even say that staying in power is more important than making effective public policies (Parkhurst, 2017). In this vein, D4P hovers around the need to handle unwanted situations and to exercise power. The Internet disconnection period is susceptible to abuse. Malicious actors can take advantage of it to campaign for hatred of the other without being monitored and spread negative sentiments attacking the government’s credibility without being fact-checked. The government, as noted earlier, can misuse the dormancy to silence critiques and tamper evidence. Preserving favorable public opinions and staying in power fuel the decision to switch off the Internet. Inability to manage negative externalities will counteract the positive outcomes potentially resulted from enacting D4P in disruptive events.
Motivation
It is worth emphasizing that D4P is about managing power for a common good, especially when the ramifications of the Internet connection to precarious situations and disruptive events are foreseeable. While there is skepticism about the government’s power to disconnect the Internet, it is also possible to ensure that that power is used properly for mitigating the risk coming out of perpetual connection in volatile times. Amid the power, the government often grapples with balancing the need to serve the public and meet the administrative requirements and the politics surrounding the actions taken to respond to disruptive events (Raadschelders, 2003). In such dynamics, clashes between those three aspects of governance are possible to occur. Disproportionally weighing on politics, in combination with the incompetence of navigating the other aspects, tends to lead to abuse of power, as many human rights defenders have raised in response to the rise of Internet shutdowns in many countries.
D4P is also about the effects that directly and indirectly follow its enactment during disruptive events. It is not meant to cover up negligence, incompetence, nor to repress. Rather, it is about doing the right thing in the attempt to mitigate potential chaos. While it is a reaction to a conflict, or other forms of disruptive events, D4P is a calculated act, differentiating it from politically motivated acts. Hence, communicating the reason, scope, and duration is imperative for controlling the negative externalities and leveraging the positive ones.
Citizens, primarily the affected ones, need to be prepared. The state supplies adequate information as to for how long, what would happen, and what authorities would do during the Internet dormancy. D4P is not about switching off the Internet whenever it is convenient and without a calculated timeline. It is about risk management, in which how it is done by whom, for how long, when, and with what effects are clearly defined. News agencies can still access the disconnected areas. Press conferences to inform the citizens and wider audience on challenges and progresses should continually be held. Civil society can raise questions and critiques. Independent parties can monitor the progress achieved through D4P, suggesting when is right to resume Internet connection. As authorities remain open to performing such two-ways of communication, public trust in the ability of the system to neutralize potential chaos through D4P holds. In short, while the Internet may be off, the non-Internet-based information sources are kept on. This way, citizens’ rights to information are protected and critiques remain open. The Internet disconnection is thus shifted away from potentially being abused for repression.
As noted earlier, that happens as a collective goal to solve problems and make the goal free from politics informs the deployment of D4P. In volatile situations, the greater members of the society need an effective governance than performative political debates, which, to large extent, suggest inefficient, costly democratic processes in response to an unsettling event. While the role of civil society is critical in ensuring that the enactment of D4P by the government does not lead to a repression, it also needs to put the collective goal to solve problems before the agenda to mobilize support and create political opportunities.
Conclusion
This article has added Disconnection for Protection (D4P) to the existing repertoire of disconnection as oppression, resistance, and lifestyle (Kaun and Treré, 2018). Table 1 recaps the constitutive elements of D4P. The key point is that D4P is an exercise of the government’s power to switch off the Internet in a particular area for a certain period of times in response to disruptive events such as violence and dangerous, hateful speech. This exercise of power remains open to monitoring as non-Internet media and its workers can still directly access the affected area, and ensure that citizens’ rights to use, seek, and share information during the Internet dormancy are not violated. That way, the latent potential of wrongdoings arising from the enactment of D4P can be dismantled.
Constitutive elements of D4P.
With the above elements in mind, studies pertaining to Internet disconnections can interrogate the overarching question of who has the power, how much, with what effect, where, and for how long. Governments hold the power to shut down the Internet. Whether the power needs decentralizing or distributing to the hand of different parties and how such an arrangement can be an effective governance is a work in progress. Hence, the attempt to promulgate the idea that all attempts to disconnect the Internet by governments are repressive needs reassessing, as well as the damage and benefit that connectivity potentially brings about to unsettling situations (Hassanpour, 2014). Labeling Internet shutdowns as repression should be done with wary and based on a holistic comprehension to the complexity of reasons for disconnection and the severity of unsettling situations in hand.
Haste in the labeling can affect the trajectory of Internet disconnection studies. So far, liberal democratic values have been dominant whereas the pragmatic intention behind the disconnection remains to be overlooked. Given that, the inflection point where a pragmatic response to unsettling situations such as D4P can shift into a repression is worth investigating. In such an endeavor, the Internet disconnection is considered as a center-left phenomenon. Thus, the pragmatic consideration that the authorities use to disconnect the Internet, its cost and benefit to the greater members of the society, and its consequences to democratic practices and governance can be unfolded holistically. Long term, that approach can foster strong, functioning collaboration between state actors, private actors, media, and civil society when the need to handle pressing problems arises.
