Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

by Zeynep Tufekci

Traditional journalism failures had also fostered an environment of mistrust in all gatekeepers and intermediaries.

They started going to events, including significant political court cases, that they thought were newsworthy but were not being reported on, and they would tweet from them. They would often be the only reporters remaining in the room after the judge would throw out all the traditional journalists.

Often, they traveled to various venues—important court cases, demonstrations, and other events—and reported from the scene.

Replicating old-style journalism and merely using social media were not going to harness the potential of having so many connected phones in so many ordinary hands. As a tentative experiment, they started seeking social media reports from citizens to verify and put on their own feeds.

when social media curating is done correctly, it can be far more conducive to a comprehensive reporting effort than being in one place on the ground, amid the confusion, as traditional journalists tend to be.

a social media journalism curator can see hundreds of feeds that show an event from many points of view.

Social media curatorial journalism tries to solve a problem of abundance: telling false or fake reports from real ones and composing a narrative from a seemingl...

The members of 140journos developed novel techniques for verification of citizen reporting.

Very few people in authority in Turkey at the time thought that there was anything troublemaking about digital connectivity.

The experience of the news blackout of the bombing of the Kurdish village of Roboski had exposed many people to the fact that the mass media could block out major news stories.

At one point, the clashes around Taksim were so intense that CNN International started broadcasting live. At that very moment, CNN Turkey, owned by a Turkish corporate conglomerate eager to please the government, was showing a documentary on penguins. Enraged, a viewer put his two television screens side by side, one tuned to Gezi protests on CNN International and the other to the plight of penguins on CNN Turkey, and snapped a picture of both. The picture documenting the stark media blackout went viral. Later on, a penguin would come to symbolize censored media.

Much of modern life is similarly dependent on complex infrastructures held together by people who often toil in obscurity.

There are many mundane details; much more is involved than merely showing up: How will the protest be organized? Who will get the word out? Once people show up, what will they eat? Where will they sleep or use the toilet? Who will take care of any ill or wounded? How are donations organized? Who makes the signs?

Using social media and digital tools, protesters can organize at a large scale on the fly, while relying on a small number of people to carry out work that previously required much infrastructure and many people.

The Gezi Park protests faced significant police responses, including multiday clashes involving tear gas and water cannons before the protesters occupied the park.

Some local businesses in the trendy arts district opened their Wi-Fi to protesters (the cellular internet—the internet that is transmitted by phone networks like T-Mobile or Verizon in the United States—as far as I knew or could tell, was not censored but was overwhelmed).

Most tasks were taken care of by horizontal organizations that evolved during the protests, or by unaffiliated individuals who had simply shown up, alone or in groups of friends.

Without a tool similar to Twitter with its hashtags, and without all this digital connectivity, it would be quite difficult to call up or sustain spontaneous protests of this size.

This model of networked protest can be thought of as an “adhocracy”—tasks can be accomplished in an ad hoc manner by whoever shows up and is interested. This has has become the central mode of operating for many networked movements, especially those on the left, and with antiauthoritarian leanings.

His idea was resisted by others within the movement because the expense was so great. Rustin insisted on a $16,000, state-of-the-art system instead of the $1,000 or $2,000 systems that usually were leased for marches. An example of the esteem in which his logistical acumen was held was that he persuaded large unions, many of whom he had worked with for a long time, to provide the funds for the rental.

Hundreds of people worked directly on organizing for two months, although overall preparation took six months. The entire organizing staff met at the end of the day, almost every day, for those months.

The atmosphere in which the organizing work took place was not always harmonious; internal strife broke out constantly.

Older movements had to build their organizing capacity first, working over long periods and expending much effort. The infrastructure for logistics they created, using the less developed technology that was available to them at the time, also helped develop their capacity for the inevitable next steps that movements face after their initial events (be it a march, a protest, or an occupation) is over.

Modern networked movements can scale up quickly and take care of all sorts of logistical tasks without building any substantial organizational capacity before the first protest or march.

This Gezi Park moment, going from almost zero to a massive movement within days, clearly demonstrates the power of digital tools. However, with this speed comes weakness, some of it unexpected.

Often unable to change course after the initial, speedy expansion phase, they exhibit a “tactical freeze.”

the ease with which current social movements form often fails to signal an organizing capacity powerful enough to threaten those in authority.

in effect, by not choosing its own leaders and representatives, the Gezi movement yielded power to the government, allowing it to usurp the choice of negotiators.

Undertaking the tasks that are required for organization, logistics, and coordination together over time has benefits I call “network internalities.” Network internalities are the benefits and collective capabilities attained during the process of forming durable networks which occur regardless of what the task is, or how trivial it may seem, as long as it poses challenges that must be overcome collectively and require decision making, building of trust, and delegation among a semidurable network of people who interact over time.24

In the long term, however, the process of organizing may be as important as the immediate outcomes.

Network internalities do not derive merely from the existence of a network—something digital media easily affords—but from the constant work of negotiation and interaction required to maintain the networks as functioning and durable social and political structures.

people have invested time and energy and gained trust and understanding about the ways of working and decision making together.

Building network internalities can be viewed as similar to building muscles.

Technology can help movements coordinate and organize, but if corresponding network internalities are neglected, technology can lead to movements that scale up while missing essential pillars of support.

Now, big protests can take place first, organized by movements with modest decision-making structures that are often horizontal and participatory but usually lack a means to resolve disagreements quickly. This frailty, in turn, means that many twenty-first-century movements find themselves hitting dangerous curves while traveling at top speed, without the ability to adjust course.

“The Square,” however, did not have a structure to negotiate with the newly announced military council or even to deliberate among itself.

leaderlessness greatly limits movements’ capacity to negotiate when the opportunity arises.

Over the longer term, though, this strength means that there is nobody with the ability to nudge the movement toward new tactics. Like many other dynamics explored in this book, weaknesses and strengths are inseparably entangled.

Wael Ghonim, for example, chose to disappear from social media for two years, mostly because of the stress of being constantly attacked from within the movement for which he was seen as a spokesperson.

“I once sarcastically said that I feel like it is much harder to actually stand up against the mainstream on Twitter than stand up against a dictator.”

The flawed but real elections that took place in Egypt after Tahrir were, for the most part, not popular with many of the young people who had played a major role in the protest.

Sanders’s campaign ultimately fell short, but, as a testament to the power of movements once they do get moving, what started as a quixotic effort by a senator from a small U.S. state turned into a campaign that mounted a significant threat to an otherwise institutionally strong candidate, Hillary Clinton.

the civil rights movement was able to shift tactically, moving from boycotts and lunch-counter sit-ins to pickets, freedom rides, and marches by people working together as a movement and able and willing to follow decisions by a leadership.

It is important to remember that the lack of institutionalization and the lack of leadership are not just happenstances or mere by-products of technology. They are deeply rooted political choices that grow out of a culture of horizontalism within these movements—a topic explored in chapter 4—and that are enabled by current information technology.

Networks of global activists are much tighter and more interpersonally connected than many outside observers may assume, although the ways they interact—and the divisions that exist between them—do not always fit traditional political categories.

Libraries do not seem like a necessity in the middle of protests that may come under police attack, but they are among the first structures constructed by protesters and are subsequently stocked and defended with enthusiasm.

my experience is that generally speaking, protest camps gather far too much donated food, and most people attending the protest do not really need any extra clothes.

In fact, tellingly, most protest camps struggle to manage the opposite problem—too many volunteers and too many donations coming in too quickly.

The sense of rebellion that is felt at a protest and the work that people perform in protests are inseparable.

we consider the taking of the Bastille a turning point in the French Revolution in the eighteenth century. However, it was more a symbolic event. Only seven prisoners—“four forgers and three madmen”—were freed at a cost of one hundred lives lost in storming the prison.