http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2010/10/28/attitude_problem_what_social_media_can_t_tell_us_about_palestine

“We don’t understand the extent to which Palestinian social media is popular or is representative necessarily of the wider Palestinian population,” Schanzer, a former counterterrorism analyst at the Department of the Treasury, told me by phone. “What we do understand is that somewhere between 4-20 percent of the Palestinian people use the internet, the percentage of those who actually engage in discussions in online media could be much smaller.”

It’s quite a tautology. These selected online threads shed light on a single cluster of Arabic-speakers: those who air their laundry on the internet.

Khalil Shikaki, director of the Palestinian Center for Policy and Survey Research, was skeptical as to whether one could approach a study of Palestinian blogs in a scientific manner: “The idea of having a representative sample by looking at the internet is absolutely ridiculous.”

To be sure, Palestinians are questioning of the peace process as it is and are not confident that a Palestinian state will be established in the near term. Yet a majority of Palestinians prefer a two-state outcome with a state of Palestine alongside Israel. By focusing solely on “rejectionist” posts from so-called “Palestinian” social media, the political landscape is distorted.

Still, the exponential rise in access to technology in the West Bank and Gaza, compounded by the difficulty of movement between Palestinian locales, highlights the importance of social media and the need for further study.

Adel Iskander, a global communications expert at Georgetown University’s Center for Contemporary Arab Studies suggested that the expansion of internet usage in the Palestinian territories is directly correlated with their desire to communicate with the world. “The only way to understand the Palestinian online presence is to look at in anthropological terms — what is it that they are doing online and what are they looking for — rather than how we can define policy around them.”

Indeed, Fatah and Hamas activists are competing for attention and attempting to build communities in cyberspace. But for Schanzer and Dubowitz to say “ConStrat analyzed the Palestinian social media environment,” is in itself a leap of judgment: there are, of course, numerous communities and no monolithic “Palestinian social media environment.” Beyond that, to assume that online conversation reflects public attitudes only contributes to the misreading of Palestine’s “pulse.”