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July 19, 2017 - October 29, 2020
the ability to use digital tools to rapidly amass large numbers of protesters with a common goal empowers movements. Once this large group is formed, however, it struggles because it has sidestepped some of the traditional tasks of organizing.
The expressive, often humorous style of networked protests attracts many participants and thrives both online and offline,2 but movements falter in the long term unless they create the capacity to navigate the inevitable challenges.
In some ways, digital technologies deepen the ever-existing tension between collective will and individual expression within movements, and between expressive moments of rebellion and the longer-term strategies requiring instrumental and tactical shifts.
When Facebook friends change their avatar to protest discrimination against gay people, they also send a cultural signal to their social networks, and over time, such signals are part of what makes social change possible by changing culture.
In a repressive country, tweeting may be a very brave act, while marching on the streets may present few difficulties in a more advanced democracy.
But I have also seen movement after movement falter because of a lack of organizational depth and experience, of tools or culture for collective decision making, and strategic, long-term action.
Sufficiently brutal governments seem not to bother too much with scientific network analysis and the minutiae of secretly surveilled online imprints. Instead, they are often guided by the philosophy “Shoot at them all, and let terror sort them out.”
Whereas a social movement has to persuade people to act, a government or a powerful group defending the status quo only has to create enough confusion to paralyze people into inaction. The internet’s relatively chaotic nature, with too much information and weak gatekeepers, can asymmetrically empower governments by allowing them to develop new forms of censorship based not on blocking information, but on making available information unusable.
she explained that she had gone online to look for political conversations that were more open and more inclusive than any she had experienced in her offline personal life, and that this had led to her participation in the massive Tahrir protests.
Many people tend to seek people who are like themselves or who agree with them: this social science finding long predates the internet. Social scientists call this “homophily,” a concept similar to the notion “Birds of a feather stick together.”
Activists can become catalysts for broader publics who can be mobilized, but to make a significant impact, large social movements require the participation of large numbers of people, many of whom may not have much prior political experience.
rebellions are drowned out through silencing and censorship.
To be ready to play key roles in movements that emerge quickly, activists must maintain themselves as activists over the years even when there is little protest activity or overt dissent.
Remarkably, the very first mention of Tunisian protests in the New York Times appeared on January 4, 2011, only one day before Ben Ali fled. Just like the autocratic rulers, many in the West thought that the internet would not make much of a difference in the way politics operated, and they did not anticipate the vulnerability of Ben Ali.
The ignition of a social movement arises from multiple important interactions—among activists attempting to find one another, between activists and the public sphere, and among ordinary people finding new access to political content matching their privately held beliefs.
In his influential book The Net Delusion and in earlier essays, Morozov argued that “slacktivism” was distracting people from productive activism, and that people who were clicking on political topics online were turning away from other forms of activism for the same cause.
Most people who become activists start by being exposed to dissident ideas, and people’s social networks—which include online and offline interactions—are among the most effective places from which people are recruited into activism.
“digital dualism”—the idea that the internet is a less “real” world.
Government leaders around the world remain remarkably incognizant of how the internet works at even a basic level.
proved to be crippling for dictators in countries whose rule depended on controlling the public sphere.
Some activists told me that they had taken to setting up “technology” companies to disguise their political activism from the doltish authorities.
political activists in many countries, including Egypt, were allowed to write online relatively freely.
People on Facebook (more than four million Egyptians around the time of the January 25, 2011, uprising) communicate with those who are not on the site by sharing what they saw online with friends and family through other means: face-to-face conversation, texting, or telephone.
Two key constituencies for social movements are also early adopters: activists and journalists.
While many Westerners were surprised by the use of social media during Middle East protests, these young journalists were habituated to it since, like their activist counterparts, they lived in repressive countries with tightly controlled public spheres.
Facebook changed the picture significantly by opening to the masses the networked public sphere that had previously been available only to a marginal, self-selected group of people who were already politically active.29
Facebook also has specific features: such as a design that leans toward being open and non-privacy respecting.
it meant that things spread easily.
Ethan Zuckerman calls this the “cute cat theory” of activism and the public sphere. Platforms that have nonpolitical functions can become more politically powerful because it is harder to censor their large numbers of users who are eager to connect with one another or to share their latest “cute cat” pictures.30
these internet platforms harness the power of network effects—the more people who use them, the more useful they are to more people.
Traditionally, most people have strong ties to only a few people, but the number of people to whom they have weak ties may vary widely.
For people seeking political change, though, the networking that takes place among people with weak ties is especially important.
Research shows that weak ties are more likely to be bridges between disparate groups.
“People who showed up in Tahrir weren’t just your friends.” Ali paused, searching for a way to describe the people who had shown up that year. “They were your Facebook friends.”
Now the annual crowd of a few hundred in the square had grown to thousands. There were too many people to beat up or arrest without repercussions, especially because the presence of digital cameras and smartphones meant that those few thousands could easily and quickly spread the word to tens and hundreds of thousands in their networks of strong and weak ties.
it has been repeatedly found that in most emergencies, disasters, and protests, ordinary people are often helpful and altruistic.37 This is not a uniform effect though; pre-existing polarization can worsen, for example, under such stress.
for many repressive governments, fostering a sense of loneliness among dissidents while making an example of them to scare off everyone else has long been a trusted method of ruling.
“pluralistic ignorance.”
Pretending to pay attention, and even to enjoy the event, is the safest bet. That is what people do, and that is what those in authority often rely on to keep people in line.
Thanks to a Facebook page, perhaps for the first time in history, an internet user could click yes on an electronic invitation to a revolution. Hundreds of thousands did so, in full view of their online networks of strong and weak ties, all at once.
Attention is oxygen for movements. Without it, they cannot catch fire.
A movement may not get favorable media coverage because of ideological or corporate reasons, rather than government censorship.
Movements often faced having their causes trivialized or distorted by mass media, with no chance to talk back.
Powerful people could not block the news from traveling on the internet, but they could make sure that people like Akinan could not work as journalists.
Tahrir Supplies of Egypt, which I will discuss further in chapter 3, had gone from an idea to a website and a Twitter page in one day and an effective field medical-supply coordinator in just a few more.
The details of what they wanted to do were vague: turn social media into a platform for journalism, break the censorship they knew dominated mass media, and become intermediaries for the public.
the openness of this new part of the public sphere should be seen as the first salvo of its evolution, and as with many technologies before it, the initial stages do not tell us the whole story.
Often there is simply too much information, and too much of it is unverified.
On the internet, in contrast, the problem is not too little information or even direct censorship (since it is often very hard to block all sources of information). Rather, the challenge is that there is too much information, some of it false, and there is often little guidance for sorting through it.
There is too much content competing for attention, and it is hard to tell what is verified from what is false, whether through honest error or deliberate misinformation.
