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

by Zeynep Tufekci

had become much less optimistic and significantly more cognizant of the tensions between these protesters’ digitally fueled methods of organizing and the long-term odds of their having the type of political impact, proportional to their energy, that they sought.

This is a story of intertwined fragility and empowerment, of mass participation and rebellion, playing out in a political era characterized by mistrust, failures of elites, and weakened institutions of electoral democracy.

Wow. What brilliant writing.

The internet similarly allows networked movements to grow dramatically and rapidly, but without prior building of formal or informal organizational and other collective capacities that could prepare them for the inevitable challenges they will face and give them the ability to respond to what comes next.

The ability to organize without organizations, indeed, speeds things up and allows for great scale in rapid time frames. There is no need to spend six months putting together a single rally when a hashtag could be used to summon protesters into the streets; no need to deal with the complexities of logistics when crowdfunding and online spreadsheets can do just as well. However, the tedious work performed during the pre-internet era served other purposes as well; perhaps most importantly, it acclimatized people to the processes of collective decision making and helped create the resilience all movements need to survive and thrive in the long term

In the networked era, a large, organized march or protest should not be seen as the chief outcome of previous capacity building by a movement; rather, it should be looked at as the initial moment of the movement’s bursting onto the scene, but only the first stage in a potentially long journey.

For example, I talk about what I call “tactical freeze,” the inability of these movements to adjust tactics, negotiate demands, and push for tangible policy changes, something that grows out of the leaderless nature of these movements (“horizontalism”) and the way digital technologies strengthen their ability to form without much early planning, dealing with issues only as they come up, and by people who show up (“adhocracy”).

Funnily enough, strong leftist / grassroots movements need leadership. Structure is important to the way we function whether we like it or not.

Camels and sticks versus satellite phones and Twitter. Seventeenth century, meet twenty-first century. Indeed, the internet in Egypt soon came back online, and Mubarak, unable to contain or permanently repress the huge crowds, was forced to resign shortly thereafter.

For example, 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. Besides taking care of tasks, the drudgery of traditional organizing helps create collective decision-making capabilities, sometimes through formal and informal leadership structures, and builds a collective capacities among movement participants through shared experience and tribulation.

So true. We build experiences through collective hardships and decision making.

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.

Digital connectivity had warped time and space, transforming that square I looked at from above, so small yet so vast, into a crossroads of attention and visibility, both interpersonal and interactive, not just something filtered through mass media.

Symbolic action online is not necessarily without power either—rather, the effect depends on the context. 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. Somewhat paradoxically the capabilities that fueled their organizing prowess sometimes also set the stage for what later tripped them up, especially when they were unable to engage in the tactical and decision-making maneuvers all movements must master to survive. It turns out that the answer to “What happens when movements can evade traditional censorship and publicize and coordinate more easily?” is not simple.

Love!

This is not necessarily Orwell’s 1984. Rather than a complete totalitarianism based on fear and blocking of information the newer methods include demonizing online mediums, and mobilizing armies of supporters or paid employees who muddy the online waters with misinformation, information glut, doubt, confusion, harrasment, and distraction, making it hard for ordinary people to navigate the networked public sphere, and sort facts from fiction, truth from hoaxes.

Re: 2016 election

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.

We lack the solidarity of previous groups. Because of our nimble nature, we don't form bonds and are more subsequent to falling apart easily.

The shift from face-to-face communities to communities identified with cities, nation-states, and now a globalized world order is a profound transition in human history. Because we have been born into this imagined community, it can be hard to realize how much our experiences, our culture, and our institutions have been shaped by a variety of technologies, especially those that affect the way we experience time and space.

The authorities, too, have changed and altered their tactics to control and shape the public sphere even though their aims have remained similar. Producing information glut, inducing confusion and distraction, and mobilizing counter-movements, rather than imposing outright censorship, are becoming parts of the playbook of governments that confront social movements.

Re: MLK defamation

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.”14 Dissidents and other minorities especially draw strength and comfort from interactions with like-minded people because they face opposition from most of society or, at the very least, the authorities.

The rain on that initial day of protest had significant long-term effects on the fortunes of the Tea Party movement. The main driver was simple, but not surprising: people met one another at the protests that could be held and then continued to organize together.

The residents’ lack of success in drawing attention and widespread support to their struggle is a scenario that has been repeated the world over for decades in countries led by dictators: 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.

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.

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.

This is a good place to start. Sure slacktivism occurs, but someone needs to start somewhere.

This style helped create an unfortunate dynamic where nuanced and complex conversation on the role of digital connectivity in dissent was drowned out by vitriol and over-simplification, as the “sides” proceeded to set up and knock down strawman, helped by a heaping of personalized insults, which made for entertaining reading that could go viral online, but muddied the analytic waters. In that environment, an underdeveloped concept of slacktivism—a catchphrase that insulted activists and non-activists using digital tools without adding to understanding the complexity of digital reconfiguration of the public sphere—took hold.

So far so good. She is conceptualizing the importance of technology including reddit, facebook, etc.

This broadly erroneous understanding of the relationship of people to the internet, along with an oversimplification of how it affects social movements, stems from a fallacy that has long been recognized scholars, and one that has been dubbed “digital dualism”—the idea that the internet is a less “real” world. Even the terms “cyberspace” and “virtual” betray this thinking, as if the internet constituted a separate space, like the digital reality in the movie Matrix that real people could plug into.

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

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.

For people seeking political change, though, the networking that takes place among people with weak ties is especially important.

My research of that showed that people with a presence on social media, especially Facebook and Twitter, were much more likely to have shown up on the crucial first day that kicked off the avalanche of protest that was to come.

Humans are group animals—aside from rare and aberrant exceptions, we exist and live in groups. We thrive and exist via social signaling to one another about our beliefs, and we adjust according to what we think others around us think. This is absolutely normal for humans. Most of the time we are also a fairly docile species—and when we are not, it is often in organized ways, such as wars.

Given the role of pluralistic ignorance in keeping people who live under repressive regimes scared and compliant, technologies of connectivity create a major threat to those regimes. Even in the absence of repression, pluralistic ignorance plays a role simply because we like to belong; however, the effect is weaker since people are less likely to be quiet about their beliefs.

Attention is rarely analyzed on its own; a significant oversight given its importance. Attention is oxygen for movements.

A movement may not get favorable media coverage because of ideological or corporate reasons, rather than government censorship.

despite a proliferation of mass-media channels, a new censorship regime emerged based on ownership of mass media by corporations that depended on government favor for profit. Owners of these pliant mass-media outlets voluntarily censored and adjusted their coverage to please the ruling party.

“I first censor myself, as I know I’ll be in trouble if I write something critical of the government. And then my editor censors me, if I haven’t been mild enough. And then owners of the newspaper also check, to make sure nothing too critical gets through. And if something is published anyway, especially if in defiance, someone from the government calls our boss. And then the tax inspectors are sent in, to find something to fine the newspaper with.” Such pressure on the media from government officials and corporate owners is common around the world.

There are many layers in the problem of gathering attention and the tactics for denial of attention by those in power. Another crucial dynamic in the new public sphere is the role of verification and trust, as many more people acquire the ability to become broadcasters, and as information diffuses in networks rather than through a few gatekeepers. Often there is simply too much information, and too much of it is unverified.

The digitally networked public sphere does not replace the old media environment wholesale; it integrates with and interacts with it in complex ways. The result is a new public sphere that is more open than the past, but one that is not flat in the sense of all information and nodes having equal reach, attention, and credibility.

Even in nations with more press freedoms, like the United States, there have been spectacular failures of the press. The United States was taken to war after almost all major news publications, including the most elite and distinguished ones, repeated false government lines about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction without sufficient probing or investigation.

People often tune in to ideologically resonant sources of information and become suspicious of everything else they see, both because of well-known human tendencies to seek information we agree with and to defend against information glut.

Traditional journalism tries to solve a problem of scarcity: lack of cameras at an event. 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 seemingly chaotic splash-drip-splash supply of news.

Reshaping of publics and the flow of attention often occurs without being noticed by those who are used to looking only at old structures. Its consequences can suddenly burst into life.

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

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.

But the consequences of this shift to digital connections as a form of organization can be surprisingly complex because the how or organizing is more than an afterthought. How protests operate—even to take care of trivial and mundane tasks—reverberates through many layers of movement dynamics.3

common misconception about Twitter is that one must already have a high follower count to gain attention. In fact, two key features of Twitter enable anyone with compelling content to generate a whirlwind of attention. One was just described: Twitter provides a “mentions” column that shows any user of your Twitter handle in a post by another user, providing a record of how people are interacting with you. Since anyone may “@mention” or “tag” you, this feature provides an opening for people to reach you even if you do not know or follow them.

However, lack of attention to infrastructure and logistics by popular and mass media—in movies, schools, books and journalistic accounts—is a problem but not only because it fails to give appropriate credit to the hardworking activists who organize things. Not looking at the “how” can blind us to significant differences, both in their nature and in the political capacities they signal to power, between the types of protests that require onerous labor and deep organizational and logistical capacity to make things happen, and those that use digital technology to take off as soon as they tap into a vein of grievance in the zeitgeist and that scale up quickly using digital affordances.

Logistics can alter the trajectory of a movement in ways not captured by historical accounts that focus on the small number of people whose names dominated news coverage.

What gets lost in popular accounts of the civil rights movement is the meticulous and lengthy organizing work sustained over a long period that was essential for every protest action.

Unlike young Claudette Colvin, Parks was an NAACP secretary and volunteer, a committed and experienced activist. Nixon had been organizing in Montgomery for decades, and he thought that Parks would be a good candidate who would be able to withstand the intense pressure and danger that would come her way.

Woah. Totally didnt know this.

Jo Ann Robinson, an English professor at Alabama State College, asked a colleague in her university for access to the mimeograph, a duplicating machine. Mimeographs do not create brilliant or glossy reproductions, but they work well enough, especially for typewritten material. Robinson typed up an announcement of the boycott.

This makes me well up wiith tears. Zeynep is recognizing the forgotten and underwritten heroes. These are the people who strive to push the platforms together and make things happen.