Review: Twitter and Tear Gas, by Zeynep Tufekci

[Russ Allbery]

Twitter and Tear Gas
by Zeynep Tufekci

Publisher: Yale University Press
Copyright: 2017
ISBN:      0-300-21512-6
Format:    Kindle
Pages:     312

Subtitled The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest, Twitter and
Tear Gas is a close look at the effect of social media (particularly,
but not exclusively, Twitter and Facebook) on protest movements around
the world. Tufekci pays significant attention to the Tahrir Square
protests in Egypt, the Gezi Park protests in Turkey, Occupy Wall Street
and the Tea Party in the United States, Black Lives Matter also in the
United States, and the Zapatista uprising in Mexico early in the
Internet era, as well as more glancing attention to multiple other
protest movements since the advent of the Internet. She avoids both
extremes of dismissal of largely on-line movements and the hailing of
social media as a new era of mass power, instead taking a detailed
political and sociological look at how protest movements organized and
fueled via social media differ in both strengths and weaknesses from
the movements that came before.

This is the kind of book that could be dense and technical but isn't.
Tufekci's approach is analytical but not dry or disengaged. She wants
to know why some protests work and others fail, what the governance and
communication mechanisms of protest movements say about their
robustness and capabilities, and how social media has changed the tools
and landscape used by protest movements. She's also been directly
involved: she's visited the Zapatistas, grew up in Istanbul and is
directly familiar with the politics of the Gezi Park protests, and
includes in this book a memorable story of being caught in the Antalya
airport in Turkey during the 2016 attempted coup. There are some drier
and more technical chapters where she's laying the foundations of
terminology and analysis, but they just add rigor to an engaging,
thoughtful examination of what a protest is and why it works or doesn't
work.

My favorite part of this book, by far, was the intellectual structure
it gave me for understanding the effectiveness of a protest. That's
something about which media coverage tends to be murky, at least in
situations short of a full-blown revolutionary uprising (which are
incredibly rare). The goal of a protest is to force a change, and
clearly sometimes this works. (The US Civil Rights movement and the
Indian independence movement are obvious examples. The Arab Spring is a
more recent if more mixed example.) However, sometimes it doesn't;
Tufekci's example is the protests against the Iraq War. Why?

A key concept of this book is that protests signal capacity,
particularly in democracies. That can be capacity to shape a social
narrative and spread a point of view, capacity to disrupt the regular
operations of a system of authority, or capacity to force institutional
change through the ballot box or other political process. Often,
protests succeed to the degree that they signal capacity sufficient to
scare those currently in power into compromising or acquiescing to the
demands of the protest movement. Large numbers of people in the streets
matter, but not usually as a show of force. Violent uprisings are rare
and generally undesirable for everyone. Rather, they matter because
they demand and hold media attention (allowing them to spread a point
of view), can shut down normal business and force an institutional
response, and because they represent people who can exert political
power or be tapped by political rivals.

This highlights one of the key differences between protest in the
modern age and protest in a pre-Internet age. The March on Washington
at the height of the Civil Rights movement was an impressive
demonstration of capacity largely because of the underlying
organization required to pull off a large and successful protest in
that era. Behind the scenes were impressive logistical and governance
capabilities. The same organizational structure that created the March
could register people to vote, hold politicians accountable, demand
media attention, and take significant and effective economic action.
And the government knew it.

One thing that social media does is make organizing large protests far
easier. It allows self-organizing, with viral scale, which can create
numerically large movements far easier than the dedicated
organizational work required prior to the Internet. This makes protest
movements more dynamic and more responsive to events, but it also calls
into question how much sustained capacity the movement has. The
government non-reaction to the anti-war protests in the run-up to the
Iraq War was an arguably correct estimation of the signaled capacity: a
bet that the anti-war sentiment would not turn into sustained
institutional pressure because large-scale street protests no longer
indicated the same underlying strength.

Signaling capacity is not, of course, the only purpose of protests.
Tufekci also spends a good deal of time discussing the sense of
empowerment that protests can create. There is a real sense in which
protests are for the protesters, entirely apart from whether the
protest itself forces changes to government policies. One of the
strongest tools of institutional powers is to make each individual
dissenter feel isolated and unimportant, to feel powerless. Meeting,
particularly in person, with hundreds of other people who share the
same views can break that illusion of isolation and give people the
enthusiasm and sense of power to do something about their beliefs.
This, however, only becomes successful if the protesters then take
further actions, and successful movements have to provide some
mechanism to guide and unify that action and retain that momentum.

Tufekci also provides a fascinating analysis of the evolution of
government responses to mass protests. The first reaction was media
blackouts and repression, often by violence. Although we still see some
of that, particularly against out groups, it's a risky and ham-handed
strategy that dramatically backfired for both the US Civil Rights
movement (due to an independent press that became willing to publish
pictures of the violence) and the Arab Spring (due to social media
providing easy bypass of government censorship attempts). Governments
do learn, however, and have become increasingly adept at taking
advantage of the structural flaws of social media. Censorship doesn't
work; there are too many ways to get a message out. But social media
has very little natural defense against information glut, and the
people who benefit from the status quo have caught on.

Flooding social media forums with government propaganda or even just
random conspiratorial nonsense is startlingly effective. The same lack
of institutional gatekeepers that destroys the effectiveness of central
censorship also means there are few trusted ways to determine what is
true and what is fake on social media. Governments and other
institutional powers don't need to convince people of their point of
view. All they need to do is create enough chaos and disinformation
that people give up on the concept of objective truth, until they
become too demoralized to try to weed through the nonsense and find
verifiable and actionable information. Existing power structures by
definition benefit from apathy, disengagement, delay, and confusion,
since they continue to rule by default.

Tufekci's approach throughout is to look at social media as a change
and a new tool, which is neither inherently good or bad but which
significantly changes the landscape of political discourse. In her
presentation (and she largely convinced me in this book), the social
media companies, despite controlling the algorithms and platform, don't
particularly understand or control the effects of their creation except
in some very narrow and profit-focused ways. The battlegrounds of "fake
news," political censorship, abuse, and terrorist content are murky
swamps less out of deliberate intent and more because companies have
built a platform they have no idea how to manage. They've largely
supplanted more traditional political spheres and locally-run social
media with huge international platforms, are now faced with policing
the use of those platforms, and are way out of their depth.

One specific example vividly illustrates this and will stick with me.
Facebook is now one of the centers of political conversation in Turkey,
as it is in many parts of the world. Turkey has a long history of sharp
political divisions, occasional coups, and a long-standing, simmering
conflict between the Turkish government and the Kurds, a political and
ethnic minority in southeastern Turkey. The Turkish government
classifies various Kurdish groups as terrorist organizations. Those
groups unsurprisingly disagree. The arguments over this inside Turkey
are vast and multifaceted.

Facebook has gotten deeply involved in this conflict by providing a
platform for political arguments, and is now in the position of having
to enforce their terms of service against alleged terrorist content (or
even simple abuse), in a language that Facebook engineers largely don't
speak and in a political context that they largely know nothing about.
They of course hire Turkish speakers to try to understand that content
to process abuse reports. But, as Tufekci (a Turkish native) argues, a
Turkish speaker who has the money, education, and family background to
be working in an EU Facebook office in a location like Dublin is not
randomly chosen from the spectrum of Turkish politics. They are more
likely to have connections to or at least sympathies for the Turkish
government or business elites than to be related to a family of poor
and politically ostracized Kurds. It's therefore inevitable that bias
will be seen in Facebook's abuse report handling, even if Facebook
management intends to stay neutral.

For Turkey, you can substitute just about any other country about which
US engineers tend to know little. (Speaking as a US native, that's a
very long list.) You may even be able to substitute the US for Turkey
in some situations, given that social media companies tend to outsource
the bulk of the work to countries that can provide low-paid workers
willing to do the awful job of wading through the worst of humanity and
attempting to apply confusing and vague terms of service. Much of
Facebook's content moderation is done in the Philippines, by people who
may or may not understand the cultural nuances of US political fights
(and, regardless, are rarely given enough time to do more than
cursorily glance at each report).

This is already a long review and there still more important topics in
this book I've not touched on, such as movement governance. (As both an
advocate for and critic of consensus-based decision-making, Tufekci's
example of governance in Occupy Wall Street had me both fascinated and
cringing.) This is excellent stuff, full of personal anecdotes and
entertaining story-telling backed by thoughtful and structured
analysis. If you have felt mystified by the role that protests play in
modern politics, I highly recommend reading this.

Rating: 9 out of 10

Reviewed: 2018-05-13

-- 
Russ Allbery (eagle at eyrie.org)              <http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/>