Rabbi Abraham Cooper is the Associate Dean of the Los Angeles-based Simon Wiesenthal Center and Museum of Tolerance, a leading Jewish human rights organization with over 400,000 members. As a global activist for human rights for over 30 years, Rabbi Cooper is closely involved in producing exhibitions for the Center's acclaimed Museum of Tolerance and supervising its annual report on digital terrorism and hate. We've asked him to share his personal perspectives on freedom of expression and how people around the globe can leverage digital technologies to promote tolerance.


"Who knows," said Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio, when he received the 2008 Nobel Prize for literature, "if the Internet had existed at the time, perhaps Hitler's criminal plot would not have succeeded — ridicule might have prevented it from ever seeing the light of day." Considering that the courageous pro-democracy demonstrations in Iran were inspired and empowered by the social networking revolution, it seems appropriate to ask the more than 300 million people using Facebook whether the dramatic events in Iran make the French writer a prophet in his own time.

There's no denying that cyber-freedom is limitless. Just ask blogger Xeni Jardin, who visited a remote Guatemalan village without televisions or telephone landlines. Yet, at a nearby Internet café, a village elder absorbed the news of Barack Obama's victory and declared, "If a black man can enter the 'Casa Blanca,' maybe a Mayan person one day can become President of Guatemala."

Today, online activists have enacted many changes via social networking through tools like email petitions, virtual town meetings and online organizing — from Ukraine's cell phone driven "Orange Revolution" protesting corruption in the presidential election to South Korea's "mad cow" protests against tainted meat imports that were orchestrated by text-messaging teenagers.

Going back in history, it's possible to imagine digital technologies — from websites to cell phones to Facebook and Twitter — making a real difference. Imagine if these options were available to Soviet dissidents and refuseniks who, back in the 1970s, were limited to secretly communicating by one handwritten samizdat at a time. Maybe the "Iron Curtain" would have come down a decade earlier. Or perhaps the outcome would have been different in Tienanmen Square in 1989 had Chinese protesters been able to communicate and organize instantaneously.

Or maybe not. It remains to be seen whether real tanks or motorcycling shock troops such as Iranian President Ahmadinejad's Basij militia can be ultimately trumped by virtual protests. Would YouTube posts from inside the Munich beer hall where Hitler launched his abortive 1923 putsch have made the Nazis look ridiculous or, more likely, created a cult following among young people in search of a strong leader? Would smuggled cellphone videos from Auschwitz have horrified and mobilized the German public or world public opinion to stop the factory of death? Not likely, given that images of mass murder actually sent back home by Germany's "willing executioners" failed to change anything.

There's little reason to believe the Internet could have stopped genocide in 20th-century Europe any more than it has in 21st-century Africa.

In 2009, regimes such as Myanmar nip their potential Internet problem in the bud by outlawing the Web: no medium, no message. But China and Iran take a more sophisticated approach. The Chinese government has found hi-tech means to thwart Internet dissent. Tehran seems to be going further. Using technology bought from Nokia Siemens, Iranian authorities have identified dissenters who used technology during the recent street protests. And they are using Internet technologies to confuse tweeters with disinformation, a campaign that even denies the martyrdom of Neda, the symbol of people's civil outcry.

As Big Brother regimes manipulate the Internet, extremist movements strive to exploit it. In 1995, when the Simon Wiesenthal Center began tracking online hate, there was one hate website. Today, there are more than 10,000.

Let's face it: From the printing press to the telegraph, to radio and television and the Internet, innovation has always been a double-edged sword. Contrary to the technological Utopians, there is no such thing as an invention whose potential for good cannot be perverted for evil.

Scholar Marshall McLuhan's "global village" has arrived, but it's populated by the good, bad and ugly of humanity. Alas, Mr. Le Clezio, the Nobel laureate is wrong: Technology will never deliver us from evil. Only decent people can. We all must do our part to ensure that social media lands on the side of the good.


Rabbi Abraham Cooper would like to hear from people using Facebook on behalf of human rights.