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

I’m very impressed! It’s an amazing book, interweaving your personal life with some of the great dramas of the past decade, all told from the perspective of how social media enables, amplifies, and challenges protest movements. Your journalistic skills bring great satisfactions as you tell the compelling stories of the protesters and your own engagement from Chiapas to Gezi Park to Tahrir Square and beyond. The most dramatic moment was at Antalya Airport when you saw the video of tanks on the Bosporus, and realized that a coup was in progress, so you needed to get your checked bag back and find a safer place. Equally your sociology skills bring vital insights about how social media have become part of the world-wide political story, especially for protest movements. You document and catalog how protests can be formed quickly, without the long process of capacity development that was manifest in the civil rights movement. At the same time you make it painfully clear that many of these rapidly assembled protest movements just can’t sustain their efforts, adapt their tactics, or accept the idea of leadership structures, and therefore often fail to achieve their goals. Your nifty theorizing comes across clearly, e.g. signaling and the way that movements need to build their narrative, disruptive, and electoral/political capabilities. This was a helpful guide to understanding what happened, including how governments are able to crack down on leaders. Your technology skills also brought insights in your descriptions of the differing affordances for each social media platform, making it clear why Twitter became the platform of choice for protest movements – suitable balance of anonymity/reputation, easy access, and appropriate openness. Your stories of abuses on Reddit and other platforms provide valuable lessons about what needs to be fixed. The opening chapter was more difficult reading, with too many long complex sentences and fewer of the colorful stories. I was pleased to see the warm appreciation for Dean Gary Marchionini – I’m pleased he was so supportive to you. Overall, an important and vital book, filled with insights and compelling stories that stick in my mind.

This is a must-read for anyone --- lay person or academic --- interested in the increasing role the Internet and social media has played in recent protests around the globe. Tufecki draws on her extensive first-hand experience with movements that have used recent technologies from the Zapatistas through Occupy and recent events in the Middle East and the last US presidental election, looking at how today's networked platforms can be easily co-opted by small groups to reach large audiences and the resulting successes and failures, contrasting the work with earlier movements such as the American civil rights movement of the 1960s. Given her cultural heritage, she presents an especially interesting and personal account of events in Turkey as they apply to today's networks.Three areas of the book really stand out to me: her observations and anecdotes about how today's platforms enable very small groups of people to drive large movements very quickly; the advantages and disadvantages these movements have because they are generally consensually led rather than hierarchical, and the close relationship between users, the corporations of the social platforms they use, and their interaction with the nation-states in which they operate.Tufecki also advances the capacities and signals model for how these networks operate. There I think she might have done somewhat better --- or perhaps I lost the thread of her argument, as my background is more technical than sociological. The model seems sound (although I am not qualified to dispute it), but could have been called out more clearly in some ways from her relating of specific observations and trends. To her credit, she does a good job of summarizing the model in both the introduction and conclusion. This may be a weak point to the academic reader, although I imagine her model is --- or will be --- better-covered in her writing targeted specifically at that audience.The material she presents is accessible to anyone, but I think has special value for three groups of people: those attempting to implement change using today's networked mediums, those studying trends and developments in Internet culture, and those working on Internet technologies that should be aware that their work has real social consequences that are difficult to foresee in advance.

I initially encountered Zeynep Tufekci’s writing in The New York Times where her writing on technology’s impact on society seemed sharp and insightful. Twitter and Tear Gas is a clear and to the point analysis of the state of social media and its role in protest movements. Everything is described in clear terms. The book is written with academic rigour yet describes everything in plain language.What most impressed me the most is how balanced her tone is. She is able to describe the strengths and weaknesses of social media as a protest platform while avoiding casting the big picture as either utopian or paranoid. This is most impressive when she documents how repressive regimes have mastered social media in recent years, creating a new kind of censorship. As I am more suspicious of social media as a social force I respected her sober tone.It took me some time to make my way through the book because I wouldn’t call it riveting, but I am glad I read it and feel more informed as a result.

A book to read to understand the role social edia had, why so and what could we further expect. Good basis to understand also what AI (Artificial Intellingence) might bring with it and we all must take care of for our future and the one of our future generations: freedom, respect, peace, cooperation, education and understand that there is only this world that we have and that WE, as all what in this world, are one variable, an element, subject to the law of the nature. There is no plan(et) B to this, just as there is no alternative to war but peace, no alternative to manipulation and oppression but freedom.

Questo libro offre degli spunti davvero interessanti e coinvolgenti sul tema dell’influenza dei social network nelle proteste moderne. Ben scritto e innovativo, da leggere.

This books explains a lot about networked protest. It highlights its strengths and its shortcomings. A lot of ideas worth pondering.

I liked this book for it’s extensive coverage of the topic. The author is a professor who specializes in the field and this shows in how the book is written. The book provides a broad perspective on how social media can help social movements achieve their goals, and also pinpoints some of the drawbacks for activists.All in all, I find the book an enlightening read.

I have fewer than 100 followers on Twitter and know zero about activism, so you should probably not take my views too seriously.Views I do have, however, and they are rather dark: I think there’s a reason the emergence of a bourgeoisie in China has not had the effect it had on the US in the 1880’s and it’s that the government can monitor electronically all communication that in the 1880’s would have stayed unobserved long enough for a revolutionary movement to emerge. Something not too different happened when the “green movement” was quashed in Iran almost a decade ago, and Siemens was singled out in the press as a purveyor of the necessary surveillance technology to the theocratic state.So I bought “Twitter and Teargas” to see how it squared with my sundry biases. Much as I ordered the book on the strength of the author’s writing in the NYT, I had not made up my mind on whether I’d actually read it, until I saw her picture / statement on the inside sleeve of the book. At that point I knew I had to.I was not disappointed.Zeynep Tufekci has written the manual and the history of online activism, all rolled into one. She’s been at it since its birth (maybe even before that, in its very conception amongst the Zapatistas), she knows the main actors personally and she recounts their story merely by telling hers. For this is not only a manual and a history, but also a pretty complete memoir. It’s amazingly impressive, without once becoming tedious. Quite to the contrary, it’s totally gripping.It’s also very profound. Between Tahrir Square, Gezi Park and Zuccotti Park, this young author has been busy “doing,” but she’s also been busy thinking, questioning and analyzing. A (very incomplete) list of her findings would be as follows:• The new online tools have made it easier to reach the “mass protest” phase than ever before. The main reason is that today’s digital technology is both a quantum leap in the public’s ability to discover the truth (the first necessary ingredient in wanting to protest), but also in terms of providing a platform to organize an event involving multiple participants. Similarly, technology has made it orders of magnitude easier to organize procurement once a movement has graduated to its “mass protest” phase.• Consequently, the significance of mass mobilization has changed too. In particular, whereas in the past a movement that was able to organize a massive demonstration had by definition reached some type of maturity, cohesion, familiarity and common background of suffering together between its members, the fostering of such “network internalities” is no longer typically the case. The author draws upon encyclopaedic knowledge of the US civil rights movement to illustrate this point.• By dint of the fact that they can be organized in hours using a single account, mass movements can today be a lot more “horizontal” than ever before. Apart from the strong bonds and feelings of brotherhood that unite participants in a horizontal structure, this “spirit of Tahrir” type of environment comes with some small practical benefits too; for example, it is impossible to “decapitate” a horizontal organization. Chiefly, however, it comes with a series of large drawbacks: lack of flexibility, no authority to negotiate with the state, and often a “deer in headlights” approach to changes in the environment, that the author politely calls a “tactical freeze.” The best case scenario is that an “adhocracy” arises, and that’s not particularly great either.• Moreover, the oppressors around the world may have had to concede that things will never be the same again when it comes to censorship, but they have taken on board the “affordances” of the new tools and they have by now come up with the appropriate response that strikes at the Achilles’ heel of the activists’ approach: crowding out of the message via the organized spreading of their view, via targeted misinformation campaigns against whoever dares speak truth to power and, more generally, by dividing and diverting the attention of the public.I could go on, but I’d like to encourage you to buy and read the book, instead. With all that said, the author does not arrive at a conclusion: Will the state harness the new technology and, China-style, take advantage of it better and more systematically than the diffuse and disparate dissidents and protesters?That would be a very dark message, indeed, but it’s the message my friend Kentaro Toyama arrived at in at least a couple of articles he once published in the Atlantic. I’d love to see him on a panel with Zeynep Tufekci one day!