Hacktivism 3: Risk taking and tipping points.
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Malcolm Gladwell's lecture discusses the transformation of activism through social media, contrasting historical civil rights protests in Greensboro with modern movements. He argues that while social media can mobilize large groups, true activism is rooted in strong personal connections, exemplified by the courageous sit-ins of the 1960s. Despite the superficial connections of platforms like Facebook and Twitter, significant movements often stem from deep, personal relationships and shared risks among activists.
Hacktivism 3: Risk taking and tipping points.
- 2. Gladwell: “Small Change” • The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coördinate, and give voice to their concerns. • But…
- 3. Gladwell 1 • At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday, February 1, 1960, four college students sat down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina. They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T., a black college a mile or so away. • “I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress. • “We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied.
- 4. Gladwell 2 • The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L- shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people, with a standup snack bar at one end. The seats were for whites. The snack bar was for blacks. Another employee, a black woman who worked at the steam table, approached the students and tried to warn them away. “You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said. They didn’t move.
- 5. Gladwell 3 • Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store were locked. The four still didn’t move. Finally, they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd had gathered, including a photographer from the Greensboro Record. “I’ll be back tomorrow with A. & T. College,” one of the students said.
- 6. Gladwell 4 • By next morning, the protest had grown to twenty-seven men and four women, most from the same dormitory as the original four. The men were dressed in suits and ties. The students had brought their schoolwork, and studied as they sat at the counter. On Wednesday, students from Greensboro’s “Negro” secondary school, Dudley High, joined in, and the number of protesters swelled to eighty.
- 7. Gladwell 5 • By Thursday, the protesters numbered three hundred, including three white women, from the Greensboro campus of the University of North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had reached six hundred. People spilled out onto the street. White teen-agers waved Confederate flags. Someone threw a firecracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team arrived. “Here comes the wrecking crew,” one of the white students shouted.
- 8. Gladwell 6 • By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham, fifty miles away. The day after that, students at Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C. Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on Wednesday by students at St. Augustine’s College and Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday, the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina, and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far west as Texas.
- 9. Gladwell 7 • “I asked every student I met what the first day of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,” the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote in Dissent. “The answer was always the same: ‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ” Some seventy thousand students eventually took part. Thousands were arrested and untold thousands more radicalized.
- 10. Gladwell 8 • These events in the early sixties became a civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the rest of the decade—and it happened without e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.
- 11. Gladwell 9 • When ten thousand protesters took to the streets in Moldova in the spring of 2009 to protest against their country’s Communist government, the action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the means by which the demonstrators had been brought together. A few months after that, when student protests rocked Tehran, the State Department took the unusual step of asking Twitter to suspend scheduled maintenance of its Web site, because the Administration didn’t want such a critical organizing tool out of service at the height of the demonstrations. • But…
- 12. Gladwell 9 • Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all? As for Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist.
- 13. Morozov, Ludlow, x, Domscheit-Berg, y
- 14. Gladwell 10 • In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. “It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.”
- 15. Gladwell 11 • The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”
- 16. Gladwell 12 • Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is. • Greensboro in the early nineteen-sixties was the kind of place where racial insubordination was routinely met with violence. The four students who first sat down at the lunch counter were terrified. “I suppose if anyone had come up behind me and yelled ‘Boo,’ I think I would have fallen off my seat,” one of them said later.
- 17. Gladwell 13 • On the first day, the store manager notified the police chief, who immediately sent two officers to the store. On the third day, a gang of white toughs showed up at the lunch counter and stood ostentatiously behind the protesters, ominously muttering epithets such as “burr-head nigger.” A local Ku Klux Klan leader made an appearance. On Saturday, as tensions grew, someone called in a bomb threat, and the entire store had to be evacuated.
- 18. Gladwell 14 • The dangers were even clearer in the Mississippi Freedom Summer Project of 1964, another of the sentinel campaigns of the civil-rights movement. Within days of arriving in Mississippi, three volunteers—Michael Schwerner, James Chaney, and Andrew Goodman—were kidnapped and killed, and, during the rest of the summer, thirty- seven black churches were set on fire and dozens of safe houses were bombed; volunteers were beaten, shot at, arrested, and trailed by pickup trucks full of armed men. A quarter of those in the program dropped out.
- 19. Gladwell 15 • What makes people capable of this kind of activism? The Stanford sociologist Doug McAdam compared the Freedom Summer dropouts with the participants who stayed, and discovered that the key difference wasn’t, as might be expected, ideological fervor. “All of the applicants—participants and withdrawals alike—emerge as highly committed, articulate supporters of the goals and values of the summer program,”
- 20. Gladwell 16 • What mattered more was an applicant’s degree of personal connection to the civil- rights movement. All the volunteers were required to provide a list of personal contacts—the people they wanted kept apprised of their activities—and participants were far more likely than dropouts to have close friends who were also going to Mississippi. High-risk activism, McAdam concluded, is a “strong-tie” phenomenon.
- 21. Gladwell 17 • This pattern shows up again and again. One study of the Red Brigades, the Italian terrorist group of the nineteen-seventies, found that seventy per cent of recruits had at least one good friend already in the organization. The same is true of the men who joined the mujahideen in Afghanistan.
- 22. Gladwell 18 • So one crucial fact about the four freshmen at the Greensboro lunch counter—David Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, and Joseph McNeil—was their relationship with one another. McNeil was a roommate of Blair’s in A. & T.’s Scott Hall dormitory. Richmond roomed with McCain one floor up, and Blair, Richmond, and McCain had all gone to Dudley High School.
- 23. Gladwell 19 • The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of social media are built around weak ties. Twitter is a way of following (or being followed by) people you may never have met. Facebook is a tool for efficiently managing your acquaintances, for keeping up with the people you would not otherwise be able to stay in touch with.
- 24. Gladwell 20 • The evangelists of social media don’t understand this distinction; they seem to believe that a Facebook friend is the same as a real friend and that signing up for a donor registry in Silicon Valley today is activism in the same sense as sitting at a segregated lunch counter in Greensboro in 1960.
- 25. Bakioglu and Ludlow • On January 14, 2011, Tunisian strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was forced from office, and by some accounts he thereby became the first political casualty of the age of Wikileaks and social media. Social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter provided communication outlets for many of Tunisia's unemployed youths. Tunisians posted amateur videos of police repression, firing squads and riots on their personal profiles from their homes and cybercafes. Relatives living abroad were then able to view the videos that were posted on Facebook and linked them to profiles that subsequently appeared on newsfeeds back in Tunisia.
- 26. Bakioglu and Ludlow 2 • It rapidly became impossible for Ben Ali to control the information flow within Tunisia despite his ability to control all other media outlets. So important were the social media reports, that for the first two weeks of the protests, Al Jazeera and France24's footage was exclusively provided by Tunisian social media users.
- 27. Bakioglu and Ludlow 3 • the revolution seemed to have jelled days days after Wikileaks released a secret cable, written in 2008 by Ambassador Robert F. Godec that seemed to make it vivid that the external world saw his corruption as clearly as the Tunisians did.
- 28. Bakioglu and Ludlow 4 • As Godec put it in the leaked cable, “...beyond the stories of the First Family's shady dealings, Tunisians report encountering low-level corruption as well in interactions with the police, customs, and a variety of government ministries… With those at the top believed to be the worst offenders, and likely to remain in power, there are no checks in the system.” The Tunisian Government, the Ambassador wrote, seemed to believe that “what’s yours is mine”.
- 29. Bakioglu and Ludlow 5 • Was the leaked document significant?Libya’s Moammar Khadaffi certainly thought so, speculating that the US Government had leaked the cables through Wikileaks specifically to foment revolution in Tunisia.
- 30. Bakioglu and Ludlow 6 • No sooner did talk of a Wikileaks revolution or Facebook revolution surface than pushback came. Laila Lalami, a Los Angeles-based writer from Morocco, wrote on Twitter, "Please stop trying to give credit to WikiLeaks, or Twitter, or YouTube for the toppling of Ben Ali. The Tunisian people did it." Later, she tweeted that "The Internet facilitates communication, but it alone doesn't keep people in the streets for four weeks."
- 31. Bakioglu and Ludlow 7 • Gladwell’s point was not entirely off target. Risk-taking political action probably does require close social ties. However it would be a blunder to think that social media are only utilized by people with weak ties. As we will see, in this case social media were valuable tools for people with close ties and much at risk.
- 32. Bakioglu and Ludlow 8 • It would also be a blunder to claim that the social media by themselves caused or created or was even a sufficient condition for the revolution in Tunisia. But to our knowledge, no one has ever claimed that, even though people may toss around vacuous phrases like “twitter revolution”. The serious question is whether social media played an important role in Tunisia – whether they were valuable tools that saved the lives of protestors and made the fall of a government possible or at least quicker and less painful.
- 33. Bakioglu and Ludlow 9 • It is impossible to pinpoint the exact causes of an event like this. Surely there was enough economic desperation and pent up anger over the corrupt government to fuel a revolution, but the world is full of people in economic desperation under the thumb of corrupt governments. That is not enough for a revolution. Regime change also requires an igniter and an accelerant.
- 34. Bakioglu and Ludlow 10 • The igniter surely came when Mohammed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old unemployed graduate in the central town of Sidi Bouzid, immolated himself after his produce was confiscated by the police because he was selling without a permit. Bouazizi's act of desperation was followed by another suicide, that of Houcine Falhi, a 22-year- old, who electrocuted himself in the midst of another demonstration over unemployment in Sidi Bouzid, after shouting out "No to misery, no to unemployment!" From then on, rallies quickly spread across the state.
- 35. Bakioglu and Ludlow 11 • But there was also the accelerant. As a response to the aforementioned cable releases, the Tunisian government blocked Wikileaks, a Tunisian WikiLeaks mirror, and several media outlets reporting on the cables. In response to this action, late December and early January, Anonymous, a loosely organized group of hacktivists famous for its support of freedom of expression, started recruiting for #optunisia (Operation: Tunisia).
- 36. Bakioglu and Ludlow 12 • On January 2, Anonymous proceeded to hack a number of Tunisian state-run websites, temporarily defacing them and shutting them down. In an open letter to the Tunisian government, the Anons said “attacks at the freedom of speech and information of its citizens will not be tolerated.”
- 37. Bakioglu and Ludlow 13 • “The Tunisian government wants to control the present with falsehoods and misinformation in order to impose the future by keeping the truth hidden from its citizens. We will not remain silent while this happens. Anonymous has heard the claim for freedom of the Tunisian people. Anonymous is willing to help the Tunisian people in this fight against oppression. It will be done.” Curiously, most of these DDoS attacks were from within Tunisia itself and were in support of those on the ground protesting.
- 38. Bakioglu and Ludlow 14 • Whether or not the actions of Anonymous and social media activists were having consequential effects, the Tunisian government treated them as though they were. It was discovered that the Tunisian Internet Agency (ATI) was injecting JavaScript into web forms, using it to harvest usernames and passwords. In response to this surveillance operation, Anonymous released a browser add-on that stripped the added JavaScript code, thereby allowing the Tunisian internet users to access Blogger, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo, and Twitter without exposing their login details.
- 39. Bakioglu and Ludlow 15 • Meanwhile, in an effort to support the protestors in Tunisia, members of Anonymous also provided links to what they called a “care package” for protestors. In it, they included how-to guides for a number of things including how to make homemade gas masks, as well as links to Tunisian proxy servers, instructions for LiveCD usage, and they uploaded a book titled Bypassing Internet Censorship.
- 40. Bakioglu and Ludlow 16 • No risk in social media? • “Hamadi Kaloutcha, a blogger and activist, was arrested at his home. While arresting him, police confiscated his computer equipment. Sleh Edine Kchouk, a student activist, was also arrested. They have not been seen since. • Hamada Ben Aoun, a rapper who recently released two songs on his Facebook account criticizing the Tunisian regime and its social policies, was arrested around the same time as the others.
- 41. Bakioglu and Ludlow 17 • No risk in social media? • Slim Amamou, one of the more visible Tunisian bloggers online, has also dropped off the grid. There has been no word of his status since Thursday. In their story, Reporters Without Borders said that sources told them he was being held at the Ministry of Interior. Azyz Amamy, who had covered the Tunisian protests from the beginning, has also gone missing, presumably arrested. His Blogger account and Facebook account have both been deactivated. There is no word as to his status.
- 42. Bakioglu and Ludlow 18 • All of this shows that the events in Tunisia were not the stereotypical “Facebook activism” critiqued by the likes of Gladwell. Tunisian social media activists Kaloutcha, Kchouk, Amamou, Aoun, and Amamy, all arrested, certainly had risked much. Their activism was certainly not the kind of stuff “that people do when they are not motivated enough to make a real sacrifice.”
- 43. Bakioglu and Ludlow 19 • The error in play seems to be the assumption that just because social media allows for weak ties, it is only used for communication that creates weak ties. As everyone who uses social media knows, we also use it to regularly communicate with our BFFs and family members. When other lines of communication fail in times of crisis, social media can be the only means of sharing information that we have.
- 44. Bakioglu and Ludlow 20 • The critique also gets things backwards when it supposes that the importance of social media is concocted by Westerners who are overimpressed by their own technology. It gets things backwards because social media is not our technology – people in the developing world are not too poor or ignorant to use social media – they have embraced social media at least to the degree that we have and they have extended its applications and retasked it to be political tool. Social media is not Western media; it is world media