What a year! Hope this finds you as well as possible. Given the challenges we’re facing in this pandemic, campaigning and online activism has become even more important.
So I was super excited to come across Zeynep Tufecki’s work, Twitter and Teargas, which is packed full of insights and recommendations, based on the overall premise that ‘Digital tools have altered the narrative, disruptive, and electoral and institutional capacities of movements and the ways in which they can signal those capacities, resulting in strengths, weaknesses, and complexities.’
I have broken it down into handy and digestible pointers to help you shape your own movement:
1. Infrastructure
In the past if you wanted to organise a protest, you’d have to organise, and try to get onto mainstream media. Now, thanks to the power of social media, we’ve seen an emergence in ‘network protests.’ ‘Many such movements lose out on network internalities or the gains in resilience and collective decision- making and acting capacity that emerge from the long- term work of negotiation and interaction required to maintain the networks as functioning and durable social and political structures.’
Take the Women’s March – it went from a facebook post to millions around the world in just three months. It went from idea to execution very quickly, and social media was part of how it could scale up so fast.
Now, compare that to 1963, when Martin Luther King said ‘I have a dream’. That movement took 10 years just to deal with the logistics and took years of capacity building.
On the one hand, scaling up that fast really empowers movements, on the other hand when you scale up that fast, it’s really important to consider the infrastructure of your movement.
Try thinking about how to build collective decision-making capacity. Perhaps you can harness digital technology to connect to one another to seek new ways to organise our public sphere.
2. Tactics
Like many recent movements, the women’s march lacks that political infrastructure. Today’s movements tend to be leaderless and very participatory. That participatory character they have, that allows people to find a voice and empowers them, may also be a hindrance. We sometimes see that, because they scale up so fast, they tend to repeat the last thing they did. It’s a ‘tactical freeze, where movements cannot quickly respond to changing conditions and have an inability to negotiate and delegate when necessary— since they have no strong means of collectively making decisions and adapting to new circumstances.’
Successful movements make tactical moves, each one designed to put pressure on their goal. When thinking about your movement, try and think about what will come next.
3. Communication Channels
Very often, protests are holding discussions on Facebook. But here is the catch, Facebook’s business model is designed to keep you on, and we are seeing the implications of holding meetings on a platform that’s designed to not let you conclude because they want to keep you there. ‘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.’
Try and think about the best ways to communicate with others, and set agendas for decision-making
4. Fake News
One of the things you have to do as a movement is convince people to act. But you should consider the possibility that some governments or corporations are also working to achieve the same goal. Some authoritarian governments have figured out how to use information in a way that is not compatible with a healthy democracy.
Consider the possibility that authoritarian governments are trying to paralyse people – to stop people from acting. There is a ‘deliberate information glut [which] can hide the truth by denying attention or credibility to events or facts inconvenient to those in power.’ This is where fake news comes from.
There is so much information that people disengaged from politics. ‘Instead of an aware public, there is often a lot of distraction, confusion, and partisan polarization about which claims are true.’ The more people disengaged, as well as weakening journalism because money goes to Facebook, the it easier it is for authoritarians to come into that space.
Consider supporting real journalism and engaging institutions to bring real political and public pressure in the public sphere.
5. Keep Innovating
The overall take-away from Zeynep Tufecki’s work is that we have huge opportunity with all the digital tools at our disposable, and have not even begun to explore all the great things that can be done with these platforms.
‘This coevolution of power and protest is far from over, and social movements are far from static. Many social movements, too, are testing new arenas, developing new tools, and building new capacities. They are flexing new muscles.’
Keep going!
Tufecki, Z (2017) Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of the Network Protest, New Haven: Yale University Press