Despite state censorship, the use of blogs and social media sites as democratic platforms in Southeast Asia seems to have taken hold – but can it survive?

Minutes after midnight on January 28, the internet suddenly vanished from screens across Egypt. Days prior, hundreds of thousands had taken to the streets to demand they be represented not by an autocratic president, but by democratic processes.

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On TVs, laptops and mobile phones, the world watched as footage flooded the web – until the government pulled the plug.

The episode evoked memories of the 2007 Saffron Revolution in military-ruled Myanmar, when tens of thousands of Buddhist monks and students marched against a sudden increase in fuel prices. During the first days of the junta's response, graphic raw footage and eyewitness accounts were fed to the outside world via the internet. Exiled news organisations beamed them back into the country via satellite TV and radio, but when the authorities unplugged the internet and upped the violence, the protests swiftly died down.

In Egypt, however, they did not. Denied the internet, protesters turned instead to flyers, dial-up modems, fax machines and the innovative Speak2Tweet service to get their messages out to the world. After five days, the government relented and Egypt was brought back online. Two weeks later, President Hosni Mubarak – ruler since 1981 – resigned.

What happened in both cases was about more than the internet. As United States Secretary of State Hillary Clinton noted during a February speech on internet rights and wrongs delivered in Washington DC, "Egypt isn't inspiring people because they communicated using Twitter. It is inspiring because people came together and persisted in demanding a better future."

When Malaysia's ruling Barisan National coalition lost the 2008 elections, Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said its 'biggest mistake' had been dismissing the internet. Independent news sites gave other parties a platform and five bloggers were elected to the opposition. Globally, two billion people are now online – almost a third of the human race. As populations gain access to the power that comes from information, can politics remain the sole province of the state?

In Southeast Asia, home to some of the most-connected and least-connected countries in the world, the internet has become an important accelerant of political change – as well as a means of stifling it. First-generation government controls, typified by the Great Firewall of China, are being replaced by more sophisticated techniques that go beyond mere denial of information and aim to normalise – in some cases even legalise – a climate of control.

"Southeast Asian countries are increasingly taking their cues for managing the internet from China and more aggressively restricting the space for online debate," said Shawn Crispin, of the Committee to Protect Journalists. "While the internet is still a powerful tool for journalists and bloggers to speak the truth to power in countries ruled by repressive regimes, many of those regimes are now fighting back to close that once-open space."

Methods include targeted malware; surveillance; take-down notices and strategically timed distributed denial-of-service attacks. Transnational gatekeepers such as Google handover ISP addresses and Gmail identities to authorities; YouTube filters content by geolocation and Research in Motion, maker of the Blackberry, is in talks with India about gaining access to encrypted corporate e-mails (it already has access to instant messages). Legal frameworks are also being refined to bring social media under control. "There's a fear exhibited by the ruling elites that should they loosen restrictions on censorship, the subaltern classes would get out of hand," said a blogger with Political Prisoners in Thailand, requesting anonymity for fear of reprisal.

The Abhisit Vejjajiva administration shuttered tens of thousands of websites last year in Thailand, where Social Sanction, a group of 1.3 million volunteers from 4,825 networks, monitors media content that could 'offend and harm Thai culture'. Because of a post published on one of its online forums, Prachatai ('Free People') co-founder Chiranuch Premchaiporn, better known as Jiew, faces up to 70 years' imprisonment, at least in theory.