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Trying to get that could be hard, and it’s harder to remember what they were doing some years ago and what other public jobs they held. The answers to these questions could help citizens make a more informed choice.

Monitor Electoral (Electoral Monitor) is a site to visualize in one place political candidates’ history, platforms, and proposals. The site also tracks eight newspapers, counting the frequency of words, making it possible to visualize how many times a newspaper had mentioned a candidate, political party, or any other group.

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The subject at hand is activism, especially the slacktivism, which according to Gladwell is a powerful mechanism to engage, motivate critical populations and the powerless to collaborate and to coordinate an action.

The success of an action can only be assessed if the goals are clear and, necessarily, the purpose of any action within this context is to address a problem and thus to challenge the [state of affairs]. His arguments are about how deeply these actions go in order to change it.

The author says that slacktivism doesn´t really change the status quo, but recognizes that it has upended the traditional relationships between political authority and popular will. This is already a great change and today there are several researches towards the emergence of a shared [governance/governability].

One of the author´s main arguments is that slacktivism does not attack deeply rooted problems, but there are several deeply rooted problems that are attacked simply by giving voice and distributing the power that otherwise could be more centralized. On the other hand, I agree that it is hard to make “choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has equal say”. This issue could also be addressed by the field of participatory design for example, with new techniques that are emerging.

Another argument presented by the author regarding the distinction between “real activism” and slacktivism is about taking risks (for example, to be arrested or killed) and he points to the need of more research about it, because there is a pattern that indicates that slacktivism is a low-risk strategy. Something to consider is that taking this kind of risk is just a criterion, among others (distinctions between kinds of risks could also be better examined), and it doesn´t mean that some action that started as “slack” can´t be articulated to a variety of other actions.

The characteristic of being self-organizing is not a distinction, according to the author, who uses examples to illustrate movements that did not even depend on social media.

Finally, the author doesn´t emphasize it, but the weak ties are good for diffusion of innovation and interdisciplinary collaboration, which in turn are related to culture, education and distribution of power and are key points to changing the status quo.

In “Small Change,” Malcolm Gladwell seems to throw a wrench in the dreams of techno-utopians who claim to have solved the problems of civil society through networked computers.  And he makes a compelling case.  The crux of his argument rests upon differences in classes of interpersonal connections, the differences between what he calls “weak-ties” and “strong-ties.”  Gladwell masterfully paints a comparison between two very different kinds of activism where these different types of connections draw stark dividing lines: the Greensboro sit-ins during the American civil rights movement and internet-enabled activism such as Sameer Bhatia’s Bone Marrow Drive.

Gladwell accurately points out that the reason Bhatia’s drive was successful is because the internet enables large networks of weakly connected individuals to unite around an effort: in this case saving Bhatia from leukemia.  Gladwell also accurately points out that these sorts of networks, when faced with actions more along the lines of rising up against a totalitarian government than being tested for a bone marrow match, crumple under the pressure and risk involved in taking such actions.

Gladwell is right.  Weakly tied networks formed solely over the internet are not well equipped for the kind of high-risk activism required to make lasting change in civil society.  Yet, this is as far as his argument holds up, and the conclusions he draws from then on rest on the ashes of the straw man that Gladwell has set ablaze.

Gladwell takes his argument that weak ties cannot produce movements that create real change and projects it upon the entirety of online activism.  He assumes that no movement which takes place online can be anything but a weakly tied network of slacktivists liking the ‘Save Darfur’ page on Facebook and then going about their daily lives.  Yet, why does this have to be the case?

Somewhere in Gladwell’s chain of logic is the assumption that equates online activism with weak ties.  Since Gladwell himself does not back up this claim, he leaves it to the reader to believe him on face value.  Let’s probe into this a little and see why it certainly is not a claim that is obviously true, or even likely true.

Activists have been around as long as society has existed.  People who are willing to place their ideals above themselves and make it their mission to organize a movement which enacts those ideals have been the lifeblood of societal change throughout history.  And, as Gladwell points out, behind almost all of those successful movements lies strong-ties which bind together those activists and enable them to persevere through the difficulties on their path towards success.  So why do these people suddenly go away in a world that includes Facebook and Twitter?

The only argument that would explain a sudden absence of heavily committed and strongly connected activists is the hypothesis that people who would have joined such strongly connected networks of activists will now do nothing more than like a Facebook page.  But that is nothing more than an unlikely hypothesis with absolutely no evidence to back such a claim.  Why would someone who previously cared enough about an issue to scream into the barrel of a gun now settle for liking something on facebook?

In fact, the emergence of social media is not the first time we have seen people worry that a society’s modern technology would prevent activists from going to the streets and taking the risks required to bring their ideals to society.  In 1970 amid the height of the same movement that Gladwell points to as the epitome of strong-ties, Gil Scott-Heron wrote in a famous poem that Gladwell makes a nod to:

“You will not be able to stay home, brother
You will not be able to plug in, turn on and cop out
You will not be able to lose yourself on skag
And skip out for beer during commercials
Because the revolution will not be televised”

One of his concerns was that America’s consumer-oriented and television-drenched culture would prevent people from leaving the comfort of their armchairs and going to the streets to fight for their ideals instead of watching others on their television sets.  Sound familiar?  Yet, amid those concerns, there were still strongly connected networks who boycotted buses in Montgomery and sat at whites-only counters in Greensboro.  In fact, the revolution was televised, but people still showed up to the streets instead of watching from their armchairs

If we’ve seen this sort of concern before, and it has proven to be false, then Gladwell’s argument must imply that social media is categorically different from any of the other technologies that could have had civic-numbing effects on people in the past.  In the article, Gladwell explains that:

“It is simply a form of organizing which favors the weak-tie connections that give us access to information over the strong-tie connections that help us persevere in the face of danger. It shifts our energies from organizations that promote strategic and disciplined activity and toward those which promote resilience and adaptability. It makes it easier for activists to express themselves, and harder for that expression to have any impact.”

But in reality, the evidence that does exist seems to show the opposite.

In a talk entitled Now I Know Who My Comrades Are, Emily Parker makes the argument for three important ways that the internet and social media empower, rather than hinder, strongly connected networks of activists taking taking great risks.  From talking to activists in Russia, Cuba and China, Parker observes that the internet has undermined three of the most powerful tools of totalitarian regimes: Isolation, Fear and Apathy.

Parker tells the story of Anti, a Chinese citizen who became a dissident after downloading the video of the 1989 crackdown on protestors in Tiananmen Square off of a site on the internet.  As a dissident in a one-party state, he turned to the internet as the only place where he “knows where his comrades are.”  Parker also tells the story of Laritza Diversent, a dissident blogger in Cuba.  After Diversent began publishing blogs penned under her own name about the problems under Castro’s rule, she entered an initial state of fear as she became the object of government surveillance.  Yet the more she blogged, the more she realized that becoming a public voice of a dissent in an international community made it much harder for the government to make her disappear.  Parker also tells the story of Alexei Navalny, a Russian dissident who realized that the most difficult problem he had to overcome was the apathy of the Russian people and the cynicism in the idea that they could ever improve their government without being trampled.  Navalny provided a form of “comfortable struggle” using techniques that Gladwell would likely deride as slacktivism, and his act of doing so led to small victories that began to combat the plague of apathy and cynicism.

As the story of Anti shows, the internet empowers activism because it becomes nearly impossible for those in power to disconnect activists and force them into isolation in a modern connected world.  As Diversent’s story highlights, the internet provides activists in a totalitarian regime with the ability to express dissent while affording them enough protection that they don’t have to live life in a state of perpetual fear.  And the epitomical slacktivism that Navalny used in Russia highlights a powerful tool to combat cynicism in an oppressed people, reassuring and empowering them that they are not alone and that they are not helpless.

But internet activism isn’t only useful to those living under a totalitarian regime.  Weakly connected networks of people showing support through ‘likes’ and tweets have an important empowering effect on activists of any kind.  Showing people that they are not alone in their beliefs has the psychological effect of encouraging the leaders of movements and those strongly tied into them to push through adversity because they are fighting for a cause that is bigger than themselves and their immediate network.  And those in the weakly connected network watching from their armchairs are now tied into a media feed which gradually shifts their public perception.

So what explains Gladwell’s complaints?  Zeynep Tufekci, in her talk entitled Movements in a Connected Age: Better at Changing Minds, Worse at Changing Power makes a helpful analogy between what the internet does for movements and what Sherpas do for mountain climbers.  They both make it easy to do what was once extremely difficult.  Organizing thousands of people used to require large amounts of hierarchy, strategy, media production and logistics.  This barrier used to serve as a filter for those who could reach a certain level of attention.  With the internet, that barrier is lowered.  Like the Sherpas of Mt. Everest, the internet enables many people or movements to reach heights they would otherwise be unprepared to reach.  But success in activism requires climbing many peaks: gaining public attention, forcing legislative action, changing cultural norms, etc.  When those guided by a Sherpa arrive at one peak and realize that they must climb the others alone, only some are able to continue.  Gladwell happens to study the ones that can’t, but successful movements like the January 25 Revolution in Egypt, Occupy, and even ISIS show that many others can.

Gladwell proposes a well thought out argument that I, for the most part, agree with. As a child and even now, when I envision an activist, I don’t think of somebody sitting behind a computer voicing their opinion online. I think of someone who is willing to dedicate their time and energy to voice their opinion through physical actions. Digital activism is not effective unless there are people who are willing to put in the effort to make a concrete difference.

One movement that shows the power but also the limitations of social media as a form of activism is Occupy Wall Street. The Occupy Wall Street Movement didn’t just come from nowhere. The sentiment and anger behind had accumulated from years of domination by the upper classes in the world. Even though this resentment was evident, minimal change was occurring. Social media, a powerful tool for galvanizing people, could not get people to challenge this status quo. Social media, as Gladwell said, is limited by the thing that makes it useful- the power to connect people from all over. Social media was able to inform people from all over about the issue. Most people, though, did not do anything. They were not willing to spend their time and energy to fight this issue. From here, the old version of activism took over. People actually put themselves at risk to fight for a cause. Social media helped facilitate the fight by broadcasting the events occurring within Occupy Wall Street; people then either stayed back and did nothing again or they decided to actually join the fight. The Occupy Wall Street movement, albeit it did not really change the route the economy was heading, spotlighted the issue. Social media can’t achieve the change that activism of the past can.

Another instance that further solidifies Gladwell’s argument was the Ethiopian Famine of 1984. Even though this period was prior to the Internet boom, the general takeaway is the same. In 1985, musicians and others organized two concert known as Live Aid to help raise funds to help combat the famine. The event was a huge success as hundreds of thousands of people from all the world helped the cause by donating. Even though I commend these people for playing a role in this cause, I don’t consider them activists. Through the Live Aid concerts, which acted like how social media does in that it connected people from all over the world, these people donated money to help combat the famine. After this donation and the concerts, I doubt that the majority of these people did anything else to continue fighting the famine. They were content with giving money and going back to their daily lives. There’s nothing wrong with this; its very unlikely for someone to change their entire life to help people who they have no strong connection to. But that’s what makes activists who they are. They are willing to give up a part of themselves to achieve a goal that they feel strongly about. The Live Aid Concerts and social media are useful tools but the goal cannot be accomplished unless people are willing to dedicate themselves to the cause. Social media helps expand the outreach and influence that activists have; it is not a strong form of activism by itself.

Malcom Gladwell is right.

I don’t think he’s quite as right as he thinks he is, but he hits the nail on the head when he argues that networked movements are inherently bad at affecting structural change. To crystallize his analysis, is in generally true that “The Internet” (please excuse the personification) can do whatever “The Internet” sets its mind to: investigations, electoral campaigns, journalism, whistleblowing, etc. What holds it back from solving all the world’s problems is that “The Internet” is atrocious at follow-through.

Structural change requires orders of magnitude more follow-through than solving isolated issues. In fact, the very definition of a structural problem is that it’s not just a one-time occurrence. It’s easy to mobilize “The Internet” for a particularly compelling single narrative, but unless it also mobilizes for everyday occurrences of that same problem, there’s no hope of structural change. This is the core of the strong tie/weak tie phenomenon: weak ties may buy you an afternoon of someone’s time on twitter to help a good cause, but if you want someone to devote months or years to combating the underlying issue, you’re going to need something stronger.

Consider the Kony 2012 campaign. Kony 2012 was about as successful as anyone could every reasonably hope any online campaign to be. It convinced a truly startling number of people that a particular Central African warlord needed to be found and arrested. It even led to a US senate resolution. Sadly, Joseph Kony has yet to be apprehended, but that is only a minor setback for an otherwise remarkable movement, right?

Not exactly. While the campaign did mobilize people to support the apprehension of a particular African warlord, is has failed utterly to maintain their attention to combat the problem of African warlords generally. The Invisible Children organization has even fallen apart since then (partially due to unrelated finance issues). Clearly, the enthusiasm of the internet is closer to a stick of dynamite than a bonfire. I don’t mean to sound too cynical—when well placed, you can do a lot with a stick of dynamite, but it’s simply the wrong approach to handling structural problems.

http://www.wideopenspaces.com/save-pangolin-video/

Next, consider the pangolin. In response to John Sutter’s Change the List piece on pangolin trafficking, The Internet was abuzz with enthusiasm to help save them from extinction. As a result, readers donated $17,000 for PSAs and aid. When one pangolin went missing, many heartstrings were plucked. Overall, a rousing success.

Which has, as far as I can tell, translated into exactly zero interest in combating the structural issues surrounding animal trafficking. Pangolins are doing a heck of a lot better now than they probably would have been, and thousands of people can rest easy knowing they’ve helped conservation efforts, but that’s little consolation to the other variously furry critters on the brink. Once again, the single issue was solved, but the structural one remains untouched.

The online campaigns that seem to be the most successful at addressing structural problems are the ones where a core group of well-organized and committed (read: strongly tied) individuals maintain the movement consistently and fall back on the internet and social media to address single issues as they arise. At the risk of counting eggs before they hatch, this seems to be the strategy of Black Lives Matter. The movement is characterized by several central figures particularly devoted to advocacy, who stir up intense social media fervor when particular things happen, i.e. Ferguson or Baltimore. This was also the approach of many of the Arab Spring movements. Social media helped mobilize protesters, but without the activities of the strongly tied organizers, the protests would have been yet another internet-mediated flash in the pan.

So Gladwell was perhaps a bit more dismal than he needed to be in his criticism of the internet as a tool for change.  It is an effective tool, and if utilized well can be a powerful ally to any social movement. But it is also inherently bad at confronting structural problems, and any halfway serious movement would be well served by taking to heart Gladwell’s love of strong ties.

As mentioned in class, I think Gladwell is trying to create a false dichotomy between in-person, strong-tie based organizing and its social media counterpart. There is no reason why the two cannot complement one another as part of a single organizing effort. I completely agree that strong ties are required to inspire the vast majority of people to take large risks; I personally would be very unlikely to participate in a sit-in unless at least a few people I knew were going along with me and believed just as strongly in the cause. But that does not mean that social media does not have the power to tap into strong ties that might otherwise lie dormant.

Some of the most important supporting examples here come from after 2010, when Gladwell wrote the article. I think it is worth returning to the example of Egypt. Attending a protest in Tahrir Square, where injury or death due to police brutality or fighting among protesters was entirely possible, is certainly on par with participating in a sit-in at Woolworth’s. Yet it is unreasonable to say that Twitter, Facebook, and social media organizing did not play a significant role in bringing hundreds of thousands of Egyptians to the streets. The beauty of Twitter and Facebook here was that they connected people who already tended to activism and for whom weak ties were a sufficient inspiration to participate. These people in turn went out to their close friends and relatives and convinced them to join. But there is no way such strong ties alone could have led to the organization of such a large protest in a such a small timeframe. Networks of strong ties are by nature much sparser (e.g. each person only has a few close friends) than those of weak ties, and information flow through them is much slower. So while the Woolworth’s sit-ins may have occurred primarily due to word of mouth through strong ties, they took far longer to get off the ground than they would have in the Internet era. In effect, social networks in one fell swoop seeded many networks of strong ties with the idea of protesting, parallelizing the spread of the message.

I would also like to argue that social networks alone, without any help from strong ties, can effect significant change if the number of people who need to take bold action is small. For example, a large-scale social media effort to find an organ donor for a sick person may reach many people who, because there are no strong ties involved, choose to ignore the call. But if at just one of the thousands or millions of people who are reached is selfless enough to donate, the effort is a success. In essence, social networks dramatically increase the likelihood of reaching such outliers who, contrary to Gladwell’s accurate generalization, respond strongly to requests from weak ties. In fact, such a response probably could not be obtained just by resorting to strong ties – sometimes even people who are close to us may be either be incapable of or unwilling to do something that a complete stranger might. Now, if Gladwell means to focus solely on large-scale organizing then this sort of search for outliers is irrelevant, as the few outliers who may exist are not sufficient to achieve the goals at hand. But he speaks more broadly about change and the inability of weak ties to do anything nontrivial, and I think on those fronts these points directly refute him.

The main argument of Gladwell is based in the strength of the ties of the networks, he argues that the social movements that are based on strong ties could perform better and accomplish something more significant than the ones that are based on weak ties, the main difference between them as Gladwell put it is the use of internet and digital social networks, but that couldn’t be that simple.

I agree with him that internet has been a new tool to reach more people and to get information from other social circles, as described by Granovetter the weak ties are great to reach a large corpus of people in social networks and to get the news to a bigger audience, and in the other hand the strong ties are based on confidence on other people and they are helpful to involve closes friends in different issues. But I don’t agree in the some of the criticism that he does to the networks with weak ties.

First of all all networks have weak and strong ties, it is in that mix of ties that the power of networks is, the weak ties help to reach a larger audience, meanwhile the stronger ones help to organize the network. On the other hand, the social movements that had been happening in the last years have both dimensions, a physical one in the public space and a digital one, and in both the use of networks has been a key point.

The example that I’m more familiar with is the Ayotzinapa movement in Mexico, in this case the use of twitter and facebook helped to spread the word of what has happened, it was in the social networks that the news started to flow, people were sharing news, videos, images and opinions of the tragedy in Guerrero, in this case the weak ties that were in twitter and facebook were useful to reach a larger audience and also to show some information that wasn’t flowing in traditional media outlets, and the strong ties where useful to collect information that was trustworthy, it was easier to trust in and article shared by a close friend, or to aim to go to the streets when a close friend or a family member share the information on this sites.

The social networks also helped to start organizing the people, they were the new dorms, were people talk ad share ideas, and they were, also, were people organized to get out to the streets, where the word were spread, the demonstrations organised and where people talked to get out. Then there’s the moment to get to the streets, and here is where the strong ties also played a role, people where more likely to get out to the streets knowing that their friends where going to be there.

Then during the demonstrations the use of social networks and the presence of weak ties where crucial to get information of what was going on and to spread it in cases of police abuse, during the events the networks helped to follow in real time what was happening, getting photos, tweets and videos from different cities and to coordinate the actions, get information of police presence, etc. At the end of the demonstrations there were some arbitrary detentions by the police in those cases the use of internet was helpful to spread the word, getting video of police abuse and posting it online played a key role to gain attention and to get the people out of jail. In those cases the weak ties between networks and individuals helped.

One last thing is that even if networks are distributed and they don’t have a hierarchy, they have centralities and preferential attachment, this means that some nodes (people) are going to get more exposure on the networks, so they could take a decision a pass it along the network, also the messages that are posted by one of the central nodes are more visible than those that are from nodes with least ties.

The use of networks in social movements isn’t something new, the networks had been present since always, the main difference is that now we have new tools to build them and to create larger ones, this could be problematic, but also this could help to get more attention to other issues, to get more people out in the streets (as we saw in Mexico some months ago) and to coordinate larger movements.

Gladwell finds fault with the idea of social media being transformative to how activism is done. High-risk activities that actually effect change, he insists, rely on “strong-tie” relationships – bonds that usually form from lengthy face-to-face interactions fostered by physical proximity. The friendships that result are what give people the inspiration necessary to participate in activities where they face the possibility of arrest, violence, or even death.

The claim that the “weak-tie” networks generated by social media are ill-suited for the hierarchy-driven, heavily invested work of running large campaigns or highly-coordinated responses is probably correct. Physical locality or at least a preexisting interest is required for digital platforms to fulfill any goals; this means that just because you build it doesn’t mean that people will come. The failure of Americans Elect is a perfect example of a costly digital space that was created to cater to what turned out to be a vacuum of interest. Even many of the volunteers behind Rynda, a movement that turned out to be relatively successful, admitted that the participants were mostly those who were inclined towards volunteerism in the first place, and that the existence of the platform did little to recruit people who weren’t previously civically engaged. The availability of interest was therefore critical to the respective failure and success of these two platforms – interest that Gladwell would probably claim to be most readily engendered by strong-tie relationships.

But Gladwell seems to conveniently ignore everything on the Internet beyond Twitter and Facebook, which serve as a pair of colossal and conspicuous straw men which he can dispatch with ease. Ignored are things such as forums where netizens can operate under the aegis of anonymity and therefore perform acts that while may not lead to bodily harm, are certainly not zero-risk. Anonymous and its LOIC attacks come to mind, as do the many darknet markets, which can be argued to be the components of a protest against what their clientele see as overbearing national governments. If we are to measure effectiveness by Gladwell’s standards, which seem to lean towards the quantitative, then the billions of dollars of commerce have flowed through sites such as Agora and the Silk Road should be clear evidence of how transformative digital technologies can be.

And this is all without bringing up an unfortunate movement that has gained prominence since he wrote his article: ISIS. The terror group’s adeptness at using social media to recruit disgruntled youth across the world cannot be ignored. Traveling across the world to fight in causes that one feels aligned with is not something new – many Americans, for example, went to Europe to fight in the Spanish Civil War and even the Second World War before the United States joined the conflict. On the other hand, the scale, rigor, and scope of what ISIS does – Youtube channels, FAQs and message boards for those looking to join, responsive recruiters eager for outreach – is unprecedented and feasible only due to digital media platforms. So while social media might not have revolutionized how effective movements are fundamentally organized, they certainly serve as a transformative force multiplier, allowing in this case for the radicalization of young adults across the world and prompting them to take part in unequivocally high-risk activities.

Yet putting life and limb on the line isn’t usually necessary to shape how things are. Gladwell seems to equate activism with inherently higher-risk actions such as taking to the streets in protest or sitting-in at adversarial environments. In reality, those whose blood is less inclined to boil can still be activists. Change.org, which takes advantage of the maligned weak-tie networks and the worst parts of slacktivism, has waged successful campaigns against large corporation and influenced the decisions of lawmakers. Open-source projects, employing a mixture of both hierarchies and unstructured collaboration, have led to invaluable and complex pieces of software such as Linux. Gladwell’s assessment is ultimately correct in spirit but highly reductionist. Will activism always require those who are deeply invested in the cause and some degree of organization? Absolutely. But the internet and the bevy of things that it brings – anonymity, weak-tie networks, and ease of dissemination – are indeed game-changers.

1) “Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools.”

Yes, of course. It’s not like we call them “picketers” because they use sticks for their signs.

2) “Innovators tend to be solipsists. They often want to cram every stray fact and experience into their new model.”

… and you sir tend to be a lexicomane. Excuse us while we save the world.

3) “Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary episodes of social upheaval in American history, we seem to have forgotten what activism is.”

#blacklivesmatter, because that is happening right now

4) “What mattered more was an applicant’s degree of personal connection to the civil-rights movement.”

Knowing someone affected is often critical. Father’s often become feminists when they have daughters! (http://thestir.cafemom.com/baby/132384/men_who_have_baby_girls)

5) “The kind of activism associated with social media isn’t like this at all.” [This being, are you chicken or not, backing because of peer support]

6) “The platforms of social media are built around weak ties.”

“But weak ties seldom lead to high-risk activism.”

Ramsey Orta was the filmer of the Eric Garner murder. He made the decision to film the arrest; which was high risk because he later found himself arrested by the police. While Orta had strong ties to Garner, video has a way of creating strong ties because it is a very expressive platform. Oftentimes, the filmer does not have strong ties and may just be a passer by, but is willing to engage because video is strong evidence.

7) “By not asking too much of them. That’s the only way you can get someone you don’t really know to do something on your behalf.”

Right. Because people don’t give to charity and things like that. Sometimes people are willing to do a lot; for a lot of people. Does philanthropy do nothing?

8) “it’s the kind of commitment that will bring only social acknowledgment and praise.”

Tell that to 4chan and reddit! They often engage in activism which brings a lot of scorn!

9) “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.”

“We are a long way from the lunch counters of Greensboro.”

As a programmer, I probably spend more time on the internet than I do in cafes… so if the internet is the place where people are spending time, what’s wrong with that being an unsegregated place? If people are spending more time in fora where they are free to be who they want to be; what’s the wrong. Who needs lunch?

10) “The civil-rights movement was high-risk activism.”

But it was also high reward.

11) “Facebook and the like are tools for building networks, which are the opposite, in structure and character, of hierarchies.”

This seems fair. The main units of organization are pages, groups, and events. None have a layered permission scheme, most likely because it is too complicated for most users. This seems not really fundamental to the technology though; perhaps things like DemocracyOS can change this!

12) “There are many things, though, that networks don’t do well. Car companies sensibly use a network to organize their hundreds of suppliers, but not to design their cars. No one believes that the articulation of a coherent design philosophy is best handled by a sprawling, leaderless organizational system. Because networks don’t have a centralized leadership structure and clear lines of authority, they have real difficulty reaching consensus and setting goals. They can’t think strategically; they are chronically prone to conflict and error. How do you make difficult choices about tactics or strategy or philosophical direction when everyone has an equal say?”

Not everyone needs an equal say in a meritocracy — your voice is louder if your opinion is correct. International Telegraph and Telephone Consultative Committee didn’t do so great with the internet, but TCP/IP seems to be doing well! It was very much designed by network as opposed to central leaders; that’s why it is so great; it meets the needs of lots of users!

13) “Similarly, Al Qaeda was most dangerous when it was a unified hierarchy. Now that it has dissipated into a network, it has proved far less effective.”

I think this is just wrong. Al Qaeda, like all terrorist organizations used decentralized cells to isolate groups… central control wasn’t that important, decentralization made it more of a hydra than anything.

The online social movement that I´m going to address is the “Vem pra Rua Brasil” (Come to the streets, Brazil), that helped to bring 210,000 people to the streets of Sao Paulo in March 15, according to the Datafolha institute (not counting the thousands in other capitals), and I´m going to describe how I was fooled by it. While doing this, I´ll try to identify how the uses of social media involved the classic principles of political organizing (based on Ganz and Hilton reading) and where they may have transformed these principles into something new.

“Come to the streets” was the battle cry of the movement against corruption in June 2013, which claimed better conditions in the areas of transportation, health, education, among others. Society in general saw no major changes since 2013. In 2014 we had elections for president and Brazil revealed itself divided, but the result was the re-election of the President Dilma Rousseff. In the midst of all that, corruption scandals only increased (ie became public, which is not to say that corruption has increased). In early 2015, the gasoline increased, the Brazilian currency (Real) devalued and there were budget cuts in education. It was the last straw for a population avid for change.

In 2013, “The Giant woke up” (another battle cry, referring to the country), but then the Giant went back to take a nap in 2014. Now it is time to wake up for real. That was (and is) the general feeling of the population.

This is how the Vem Pra Rua movement called on people on twitter and facebook (starting from November 2014): “come to the streets to express your outrage with us. Our flag is democracy, ethics in politics and an efficient and less swollen State”. In their facebook page, they affirmed that they were a non-partisan movement, and were not pro impeachment, but they “could be pro impeachment if there were legal conditions to this (if the corruption of the president was legitimately proven)”.

Why should I distrust?

• Political parties are important for democracy. I´m not sure if it is emerging a new kind of democracy nowadays that could be self-organized and would not need parties anymore. But at this transition moment I should consider that currently there may not be conditions to that, and this particular movement just wasn´t taking a political “side”. Apparently, it was neutral in order to agglomerate the largest possible number of people, even with different views (which could be interesting itself)

• In a social movement, agenda is important. The definition of the claims of this movement were (are) very general, nothing is actually being proposed, much less being detailed. This makes room for happening what happened in 2013, when people started to protest against a mixed sort of themes, losing the focus and thus losing the force of the original movement (which was originally related to public transportation mismanagement).

• Vem Pra Rua Brasil movement didn´t even mention the most important issue of the moment for those concerned with democracy in Brazil: political reform.

Among my social cycles, I do not consider myself as a so uninformed person and even though, I supported the movement, sharing it within my social networks, believing that this movement would create a space of discussion in order to define strategies towards those barely defined goals.

What actually happened

This movement revealed itself as a politically right sided movement, essentially supported by middle and upper classes that are against the policy of wealth distribution, made by the current government, and I daresay that they just fear losing privileges. At the March 15 protests, people claimed for impeachment and military intervention, despite the bloody history of military dictatorship in Brazil (1964-1985). Mass media covered the whole day of protests with live broadcast. In Sao Paulo, state government even released the subway turnstiles for people to participate in the protests.

“Impeachment: take out Dilma. Military intervention. SOS Armed Forces. Take out all the bandits”

Also, people were just uninformed: a) people who supported or participated in the movement and did NOT want impeachment or military intervention, and b) people who participated to it, claiming for impeachment and military intervention.  According to Schudson, three types of democracy (the democracy of solid citizen, the democracy of partisanship and the democracy of rights) “offer approaches to citizenship that are not in the first instance information centered models”, but then he highlights that any discussion of digital democracy has to find a place for “expertise and institutions”. This presupposes information.

Disguised as a pro-democracy movement, this movement tries to manipulate public opinion in order to put most Brazilians against the government, creating instability and an impression of weakness of the democratic institutions.

How the uses of social media involved the classic principles of political organizing:

• Build a public narrative: in this case, the narrative is being built by mass media and social networks. According to the Brazilian scholar André Lemos (UFBA), it is not the media itself that can be massive or post-massive. One can make a massive use of a post-massive media (like facebook and twitter) and one can also make a post-massive use of a media that is considered massive (it is the case of the radios, that can be local). So what exists are just functions that can be massive or post-massive. In the case of the analyzed movement, a massive use of a media that is considered post-massive was made in order to construct a narrative that took advantage of the context of a widespread discontent of the population.

• Establish relationships: in this case, the relationships were established in different ways: ‘one-to-one’, ‘one-to-many’, ‘many-to-one’ and ‘many-to-many’. It was also in person and remotely. The relationships were based on trust, but it was broken for some of the members (considering the different types of membership) when this event occurred. It was on March 15th when the movement revealed itself, with the State government support (which party is opposed to the federal government party), and had broad support from traditional media.

• A team approach: in this movement, I did not identify the establishment of discussion teams. I only noticed everybody expressing opinions and nobody listening to each other. I directly questioned the agenda of the movement via facebook, but had no official response. The lack of a team approach may be another disinformation strategy. Due to the fact that some people who participated in the protests were neither pro impeachment nor pro military intervention, the purposes of this movement were not even shared within participants.

• Form a strategy: there was a strategy, but not for democracy. On the contrary: a real strategy for democracy in Brazil should at least discuss political reform. A political reform proposal is to be voted on in the House of Representatives on May 15, without any participation of the population. No one is aware or disclosing this process that should be of number 1 interest of a movement that considers itself for democracy.

• Take action: on the second protest of this movement (on April 12nd), the number of participants was much lower. Politicians started to express opinions against the military intervention and the impeachment of the president. Thus, I’m not sure how this movement is going to reinvent itself.

“Privatize everything”

Where the basic principles of political organizing were transformed into something new:

The shortest answer to this is that in this case, the principles were not transformed into something new, once manipulation of public opinion is not new. The movement was not even created by the population, as it seems. It is a sponsored link on facebook and the domain .net belongs to people linked to one of the richest Brazilian enterprises. The hardest answer would actually be about making questions regarding what´s really going on and then to take a position, either individually or collectively.