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

by Zeynep Tufekci

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, 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.

This elaborate scheme makes sense if one conceptualizes attention rather than information as the key commodity that a social movement needs. Without attention, information means very little.

Censorship by disinformation focuses on attention as the key resource to be destroyed and credibility and legitimacy as the key components necessary for a public sphere that can support dissident views—or indeed, any coherent views.

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.

Social media’s business model financed by ads paid out based on number of pageviews makes it not just possible but even financially lucrative to spread misinformation, propaganda, or distorted partisan content that can go viral in algorithmically entrenched echo chambers.

It was, however, a sad lesson in today’s reality: even the most heartbreaking tragedy is immediately accused of being false, a hoax, a staged event.

Social movements, by their nature, attempt change and call for action, but doubt leads to inaction that perpetuates the status quo.

However, he was most afraid of hurting and disappointing his loved ones—especially his mother, who had lost another child to political violence in Turkey—through leaking of personal information that wasn’t illegal, or even bad, but just sensitive. Indeed, he knew of prominent activists who had been snared through personal matters that hurt or disappointed their loved ones—an extramarital affair, an embarrassing photograph, or a family feud.

Further, even when you confine yourself to one factor, causation is not always straightforward; clearly, the demand for this type of information existed, and for some of the readers the fake stories operated more as an excuse or retrospective justification for their actions than as a cause. The lack of trust in elites and gatekeepers is a story with deep roots and a long history.16

Capabilities are like muscles that need to developed;