This position, according to Clay Shirky, is held by Evgeny Morozov and Rebecca Mackinnon
"Here’s my precis of Evgeny’s thesis: although the internet and mobile phones *can* lead to things like improved ability to mobilize, those improvements will not necessarily lead to a net increase in political freedom. The governments threatened by increasingly synchronized populations can still avail themselves of Evgeny’s troika of surveillance, propaganda, and censorship, thus retaining or even strengthening their hold on the populace. (Rebecca Mackinnon makes a similar argument in her work on networked authoritarianism.)"
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