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July 19, 2017 - October 29, 2020
in 2016, after Bernie Sanders, an independent Senator from Vermont, would launch a seemingly-quixotic challenge for the presidential nomination of the Democratic Party. His bid was not successful, but it re-mobilized many people who had been part of the Occupy movement earlier,
The Tea Party movement has been less studied and less visually spectacular than Occupy, but it has arguably had greater impact on policy in the United States.
much like other right-wing movements elsewhere (notably in Europe), the Tea Party movement in the United States focused on developing electoral capacity almost above everything else and used both online tools and street protests to gather capacity for that end.
protests are also crucial spaces for protesters to meet one another and to create community.
Like its counterparts across the political spectrum, the 2009 tax protests had little organizational infrastructure: they came mere months after the initial inspiration. However, like most protests, once they were held, they had impacts as participants met one another and gained the collective experience of building a community of protest.
We can call such right-wing movements “status quo” movements: reactions to changing times and the loss of privilege, especially ethnic privilege.39
“Tea Party Patriots” wanted the policy makers to represent them, and they intervened heavily in the electoral process, using online organizing tools and grassroots efforts, along with support from wealthy donors.
the activists had encyclopedic knowledge of the political process by which policy gets made and implemented: veto points, committee agendas, which person needs to be called when.
They focused intensely on process—and how to block or shift it to their liking.
Nowadays, governments or powerful groups also make rhetorical attacks on bona fide experts by positioning these movements as authorities to be resisted, portraying the media as a tool of elites (often distant or foreign).
When Mubarak cut off internet and cell-phone communication in Egypt in January 2011, just as throngs packed Tahrir Square, his move backfired at all levels.
Cutting off connectivity also made it harder for Egyptians to wait out the events at home, since they were suddenly plunged into information darkness.
Shutting down the internet also backfired because this draconian move increased both global and domestic attention to the protests.
In the digital age, attempts at censorship can backfire and bring much more attention to the information that was supposed to be suppressed. This even has a name, the Streisand Effect from an incident in 2003, when Barbra Streisand attempted to keep images of her Malibu villa from appearing in a series of photographs of the California coastline—a project documenting coastal erosion—through legal measures like cease-and-desist letters.
Later governments would not repeat Mubarak’s digitally naïve, counterproductive moves.
To be effective, censorship in the digital era requires a reframing of the goals of censorship not as a total denial of access, which is difficult to achieve, but as a denial of attention, focus, and credibility. In the networked public sphere, the goal of the powerful often is not to convince people of the truth of a particular narrative or to block a particular piece of information from getting out (that is increasingly difficult), but to produce resignation, cynicism, and a sense of disempowerment among the people. This can be done in many ways, including inundating audiences with
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In the past, there was too little information, and there were too few means to broadcast it to the masses, which meant that it could be censored via blocking. In the networked public sphere, there is too much information, and people lack effective means to quickly and efficiently verify it, which means that information can be effectively suppressed by creating an ever-bigger glut of mashed-up truth and falsehood to foment confusion and distraction.
many governments have learned that ignoring and waiting out a protest may be the best path in some cases, rather than blocking it or creating tension with protesters through tear gas or other violent methods of repression (which, paradoxically, sometimes rejuvenates their spirits).
Contrary to most people’s assumptions, however, Chinese government censors were not suppressing criticism of the state or the Communist Party. Internet posts that contained “scathing criticisms” of the government and Chinese leaders were not more likely to be censored than other content. In fact, the censors allowed harshly critical posts. But the research team found that they swiftly censored posts that had any potential to encourage collective action.
It is arguable that allowing critical content to remain online can actually benefit authoritarian rule by providing a feedback mechanism to foster rebalancing, albeit a toothless one as it suits an authoritarian regime.
Russia and other governments with authoritarian tendencies cannot easily duplicate China’s methods exactly.14 Instead, many such countries use information glut and targeted harassment as their modes of censorship.
Trolling comments are not meant to convince or even to generate a back-and-forth argument, but just to upset people.
“firehose of falsehood” propaganda model.18 The primary goal is simple: “to confuse and overwhelm” the audience.19
The goal is to drown out the voices of informed commentators, dissidents, and social movement activists in an online cacophony, and to make it practically impossible to use social media to hold a sane political conversation based on facts and a shared broadly empirical framework among the populace.
If everything is in doubt, while the world is run by secret cabals that successfully manipulate everything behind the scenes, why bother?
Each time the park was teargassed, I noticed that people would take their phones out almost as soon as they could breathe, sometimes while still coughing.
Movements grow by expanding their networks, and when it comes to surveillance, networks are as weak as their weakest point.
Historian Melvin Kranzberg’s famous dictum holds true: “Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral.”8
Another blogger wrote about the spread of fake news in Egypt, and lamented: “The social media is always highlighted for its role in the Arab spring, especially in the Egyptian revolution. Well, I think it is time to let the world know that the social media is also destroying the Arab Spring.”15
Mass media had already been losing credibility both due to its own missteps and failures, but also due to a sustained attack against its normative function as gatekeeper for facts.
The same undermining of gatekeepers that has permitted social movements to bring the facts to the public despite active repression by authoritarian regimes or casual indifference also enable the effective suppression of the facts through the proliferation of fake news.
Collective action has always required a balance between empowering the individual voice and expressing the will of the group.
Who speaks for the movement as a whole when members can speak through their individual social media accounts, but there is no mechanism for closure or decision making?
Social media platforms are designed for inefficient allocation of attention; they aim to increase the amount of time spent on their site, often to the detriment of efficient consumption of important information.
Commercial online spaces that provide a few tools for organizational strength and decision making but make it easy for a few people to dominate conversations have become the hegemonic activist tools.
