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

by Zeynep Tufekci

However, the work that went into traditional organizing models generated much more than rides and fliers. The presence of movement organizations before and during the boycott in the African American community of Montgomery allowed the creation of both formal institutions and informal ties that were crucial for the boycotters to weather the severe repression and threats they received, as well as the legal and extralegal pressure and economic challenges they suffered.

The formal organizations constituting the movement were bolstered by the informal ties—the community and friendships—among participants that carried the boycott through its challenges, and were no doubt strengthened along the way as people met, gathered, and undertook the lengthy and tedious logistical work.

Instead, the movement was a lively band of rebels, united under the umbrella of a cause but also with many differing ideas about how and why they should proceed. However, they had spent years working together and had a shared culture of mutual respect—even if it was quite tense at times.

The young organizer charged with overseeing transportation worked so hard during the eight weeks before the event that she fell asleep from utter exhaustion on the day of the march. She missed the whole march, even King’s speech, but the transportation worked perfectly.

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.

First, these new movements find it difficult to make tactical shifts because they lack both the culture and the infrastructure for making collective decisions. Often unable to change course after the initial, speedy expansion phase, they exhibit a “tactical freeze.” Second, although their ability (as well as their desire) to operate without defined leadership protects them from co-optation or “decapitation,” it also makes them unable to negotiate with adversaries or even inside the movement itself. Third, the ease with which current social movements form often fails to signal an organizing capacity powerful enough to threaten those in authority.

Later, I heard accounts from the government side that its inability to find a negotiating counterpart had been both a source of frustration and an opportunity to shape the moment to the government’s liking—and also to shore up their own base. Some government officials had wanted a negotiated end to the occupation. Others had thought that no concessions should be given, so as not to encourage further protests.

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 I contrast these with “network externalities,” an established phrase that is often defined as an increase in benefit from a good or service when the number of people using that good or service goes up. For example, a fax machine is much more useful if there are many people using fax machines. In contrast, network internalities refer to the internal gains achieved by acting in networks over time. Network internalities are not always easily visible, because most of the time, analysis of the gains attained from the work itself focuses on the task: Was the rally organized and held? Did the word get out? In the long term, however, the process of organizing may be as important as the immediate outcomes. This is why it matters whether the word gets out via fliers (a more laborious task) or hashtags (which lend themselves to decentralized organization), and whether meetings were held every day to organize a carpool, or whether a Google spreadsheet maintained by a few people was used.

In the past, organizing big protests required getting many people and organizations to plan together beforehand, which meant that decision-making structures had to exist in advance of the event, building the network internalities along the way. 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. Although participatory leaderlessness and horizontalism are a source of strength in some ways, it is also a treacherous path over the long haul.

Many movement participants view the idea of leadership with deep and profound suspicion and find the lack of it to be empowering. They have strong historical reasons for this: leaderless movements are less prone to decapitation by co-optation or, as is unfortunately very common, killing of the leaders. It is fairly clear that being leaderless is not a pure disadvantage or irrational in every aspect, either politically or operationally. Yet even if it enhances resilience in other ways, as it did in Tahrir Square, leaderlessness greatly limits movements’ capacity to negotiate when the opportunity arises.

Ostensible leaderlessness does not stop de facto leadership from springing up, and the de facto leadership is often composed of those with the most time, tenacity, energy, extroversion, preexisting social status, and even plain aggressiveness. This is not a new dynamic, of course—participatory movements have long dealt with these issues.25

Sometimes it succeeds; in other cases it results in destructive public conflicts within movements, with no means to settle them.

How?

The sense of rebellion that is felt at a protest and the work that people perform in protests are inseparable.5

in some countries, risks have declined, and participation in protests remains quite high despite the potential benefits that may be obtained by free riding. Why? Because the expressive side of protest is a significant part of the reward that protesters seek.9

Marx called this act of hiding social relations in monetary exchanges “fetishism” because using money in return for the commodity—the item being purchased—blinds the buyer and the seller to the deeper social nature of the exchange that makes the whole transaction possible.

Exchanging products without money is like reverse commodity fetishism: for many, the point is not the product being exchanged but the relationship that is created, one that is an expression of their belief that money is not necessary to care for one another.

Voluntary public speaking as a mode of decision making is another impediment to participation because people willing to speak up, especially in a challenging way in public, tend to be from privileged backgrounds, people who already like to wield authority and power, and, in my observations around the world, mostly men.

A common media trope imagines connectivity devices functioning as mere “alienating screens.”28 In fact, especially in protests, they act as “integrating screens” because many people use their devices to connect with other people, not hide from them. Social uses are among the most widespread functions of digital technology across the globe.

Digital media enhance the visibility of a cause and can assist the breakdown of pluralistic ignorance, but what is less noticed is how connectivity also supports a sense of camaraderie and community—even a hashtag storm can create a sense of belonging. Digital connectivity can help create, set, and maintain a mood in a protest, even if it is completely decentralized otherwise.

A print society functions through a different ecology of social mechanisms than does a society with an internet public sphere.5 Who is visible? Who can connect with whom? How does knowledge or falsehood travel? Who are the gatekeepers? The answers to each of these questions will vary depending on the technologies available.

Technology influences and structures possible outcomes of human action, but it does so in complex ways and never as a single, omnipotent actor—neither is it weak, nor totally subject to human desires.

Realizing that causes occur at multiple levels and can be necessary without being sufficient, and that complex events have many causes, helps avoid false dilemmas. “Was it the people or the technology that caused the Arab Spring uprisings?” Posed in this way, the question is incoherent. We do not have to declare technology unimportant in order to credit and honor people.

Technologies can also have different efficiencies and potencies which coexist with their affordances on multiple spectra. A baseball bat may be a potent weapon for murdering one person at a time, but it is not a very efficient tool for mass murder. A machine gun or a bomb, however, is.

“Technology is neither good nor bad; nor is it neutral” (my italics).16 Technology alters the landscape in which human social interaction takes place, shifts the power and the leverage between actors, and has many other ancillary effects. It is certainly not the only factor in any one situation, but ignoring it as a factor or assuming that a technology could be used to equally facilitate all outcomes obscures our understanding.

Overall, it is important to keep in mind that understanding digital technology’s role in social movements requires multilevel analyses that take into account the way digital technology changes society in general, that the particular design and affordances of each technology have complex consequences, and that people make active choices in how they create, influence, and use technologies.

Technology rarely generates absolutely novel human behavior; rather, it changes the terrain on which such behavior takes place.

People make technology, but technology also has structuring power. The specifics of technologies, their spectrum of affordances, and the way layers of causality interact and intermix all matter if we want to understand networked protest.

God, her writing has me smitten.

Internet-freedom advocate Rebecca MacKinnon was prescient in identifying the core problem: the growth of privately owned spaces that functioned as a new kind of public space, as if street corners or cafés where people gathered were owned by a few corporations.9

Nowadays, the function of gatekeeping for access to the public sphere is enacted through internet platforms’ policies, algorithms, and affordances.

Platforms’ power over users rests largely in their ability to set the rules by which attention to content is acquired rather than by picking the winners directly, the way mass media had done in the past. These companies shape the rules, which give them real power, but they are also driven by user demand, creating a new type of networked gatekeeping.

Zuckerberg once said, “Having two identities for yourself is an example of lack of integrity”—a statement ignoring the obvious function of social roles: people live in multiple contexts and they do not behave the same way in each of them.

Shaming to the max

Her offer to publicly associate herself with the Said Facebook page, which she made simply to satisfy Facebook’s terms of service, meant that she risked permanent exile from her native country and reprisals against members of her family.

Social media platforms increasingly use algorithms—complex software—to sift through content and decide what to surface, prioritize, and publicize and what to bury. These platforms create, upload, and share user-generated content from hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people, but most platforms do not and cannot show everything to everyone. Even Twitter, which used to show content chronologically—content posted last is seen first—is increasingly shifting to algorithmic control.

Perhaps the most important such algorithm for social movements is the one Facebook uses which sorts, prioritizes, and filters everyone’s “news feed” according to criteria the company decides.

Algorithmic control of content can mean the difference between widespread visibility and burial of content.

I wondered whether it was me: were my Facebook friends just not talking about it? I tried to override Facebook’s default options to get a straight chronological feed. Some of my friends were indeed talking about Ferguson protests, but the algorithm was not showing the story to me. It was difficult to assess fully, as Facebook keeps switching people back to an algorithmic feed, even if they choose a chronological one.

This creates a double challenge: if the content a social movement is trying to disseminate is not being shared widely, the creators do not know whether the algorithm is burying it, or whether their message is simply not resonating.

Facebook’s own studies show that the algorithm contributes to this bias by making the feed somewhat more tilted toward one’s existing views, reinforcing the echo chamber.

Algorithmic governance, it appears, is the future and the new overlords that social movements must grapple with.

Social scientists have long emphasized that “deviance” has no absolute definition; we understand it only as a departure from the norms of a community.

There is no perfect, ideal platform for social movements. There is no neutrality or impartiality—ethics, norms, identities, and compromise permeate all discussions and choices of design, affordances, policies, and algorithms on online platforms. And yet given the role of these platforms in governance and expression, acknowledging and exploring these ramifications and dimensions seems more important than ever.

Strength of social movements lie in their capacities: to set the narrative, to affect electoral or institutional changes, and to disrupt the status quo.

I focus on three crucial capabilities of social movements from the point of view of power: narrative capacity, disruptive capacity, and electoral and/or institutional capacity.

Narrative capacity refers to the ability of the movement to frame its story on its own terms, to spread its worldview.10 We might think of this as “persuasion” as well as “legitimacy”—key ideological pillars of any social movement. Disruptive capacity describes whether a movement can interrupt the regular operations of a system of authority. Finally, electoral or institutional capacity refers to a movement’s ability to keep politicians from being elected, reelected, or nominated unless they adopt and pursue policies friendly to the social movement’s agenda, or the ability to force changes in institutions through both insider and outsider strategies.

As the saying goes, if a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound? Social movements not only must get the word out that the tree has fallen, but must also spread their own explanation of why the tree fell, and what must be done about it now.

Narrative capacity is a movement’s ability to articulate a voice, get its voice heard, and have it responded to as legitimate.

Politicians know that the elderly are very likely to vote and to punish leaders for cutting their benefits, while young people are less likely to act collectively as an interest group via social movements or formal organizations that carry electoral threats.

Statistics?

Electoral capacity thus refers to a movement’s ability to credibly threaten politicians and policy makers with unsuccessful electoral outcomes, whether by preventing them from becoming candidates through primary challenges, causing them to lose elections, making reelection less likely or impossible, or even engaging in recall campaigns.

Disruptive capacity is powerful but also carries the highest risk of backlash. Disruptive capacity, properly interpreted, also includes the ability to bear the costs of either the backlash or the consequences that are doled out by the authorities—abilities which are also indicative of the underlying capacity.

Those in power try to assess a protest’s capacity to change the narrative, to alter electoral outcomes, and to disrupt the usual order of business by trying to assess the honesty, cost, and depth of a movement’s capacity.