Zeynep Tufekci

TWITTER AND TEAR GAS Zeynep Tufekci Twitter and Tear Gas The power and fragiliTy of neTworked proTesT new haven & london Copyright © 2017 by Zeynep Tufekci. All rights reserved. Subject to the exception immediately following, this book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, including illustrations, in any form (beyond that copying permitted by Sections 107 and 108 of the U.S. Copyright Law and except by reviewers for the public press), without written permission from the publishers. The author has made an online version of this work available under a Creative Commons Attribution- Noncommercial- ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License. It can be accessed through the author’s website at http:// www . twitterandteargas.com. Yale University Press books may be purchased in quantity for educa- tional, business, or promotional use. For information, please e- mail sales . press@yale . edu (U.S. office) or sales@yaleup . co . uk (U.K. office). Set in Scala type by Westchester Publishing Services. Printed in the United States of Amer i ca. Library of Congress Control Number: 2016963570 ISBN 978-0-300-21512-0 (hardcover : alk. paper) A cata logue rec ord for this book is available from the British Library. This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper). 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To my grand mother, whose love and devotion made every thing else pos si ble. CONTENTS Preface ix Introduction xxi parT one: Making a MoveMenT 1 A Networked Public 3 2 Censorship and Attention 28 3 Leading the Leaderless 49 4 Movement Cultures 83 parT Two: a proTesTer’s Tools 5 Technology and People 115 6 Platforms and Algorithms 132 7 Names and Connections 164 viii CONTENTS parT Three: AfTer The proTesTs 8 Signaling Power and Signaling to Power 189 9 Governments Strike Back 223 Epilogue: The Uncertain Climb 261 Notes 279 Acknowl edgments 309 Index 313 PREFACE in 2011, as the nascent uprisings of the Arab Spring shook the world, I marveled at the new abilities the internet seemed to provide dissidents. Perhaps I appreciated the won ders of digital connectivity more because I had come of age in Turkey after the 1980 military coup. I had witnessed how effective censorship could be when all mass communication was cen- tralized and subject to government control: radio, tele vi sion, and newspa- pers. In the early 1990s, working at IBM as a programmer, I had glimpsed the future through IBM’s internal global “intranet” network, which allowed me to talk with colleagues around the world. In the mid-1990s, when the internet was fi nally introduced in Turkey, I eagerly enrolled as one of its earliest users. I hoped that digital connectivity would help change the state of affairs in which the power ful could jet- set and freely connect with one another while also controlling how the rest of us could communicate. With my newfound power to connect through a shaky, sputtering modem, and full of curiosity, I participated in the earliest global social movement of the internet era. In 1997, through contacts made online, I arranged to attend an “Encuentro”—an encounter, a physical meeting of activists from around the globe— called by the Zapatistas, an indigenous rebel group in the south- ern Mexican highlands. They had begun their rebellion on the very day the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) among the United States, Mexico, and Canada was enacted. Passage of NAFTA had required ix x PREFACE the cancellation of a clause in the Mexican constitution that protected com- munal tribal lands from privatization. The indigenous farmers feared that power ful transnational corporations would swoop down and steal their lands. Because of the timing of the rebellion and the nature of their demands— asking that the new global world order prioritize human devel- opment and values, not corporate profits— they had become a focal point of re sis tance to a form of globalization that further empowered those who were already power ful. I met people from all over the world through this movement; I am still in touch with some of them almost twenty years later, both in person and now sometimes through Facebook, Twitter, and WhatsApp. I watched the internet evolve and connectivity explode. In 1999, my e- mail networks in- formed me of the upcoming World Trade Organ ization demonstrations in Seattle. These demonstrations would manage to shut down the meetings, to the profound surprise of many power ful people and pundits. The Seattle protests and the massive direct action that disrupted the meeting were among the earliest manifestations of an emerging, networked global movement— “networked” here refers to the reconfiguration of publics and movements through assimilation of digital technologies into their fabric. This movement was empowered by emerging technologies and driven by people all over the world who were hungry for accountability from the transnational institutions and corporations that held so much sway and authority, but were so opaque and unresponsive. Now, the people, too, could talk among each other easily and relatively cheaply. In the first de cade of the twenty- first century, I saw social media rise, and phones capable of much more than my bulky early computers make their way into almost every pocket. It was hard not to be hopeful. Fi nally, 2011 seemed to herald the true beginning of a new era, with a transformed communication landscape. The 2011 uprisings across the Middle East and North Africa had taken the scholarly community— and the activists themselves— mostly by surprise. Ebullient crowds celebrated, wav- ing their phones and flags and taking selfies. As regimeafter regime fell, the world watched transfixed, glued to the social media feeds of thousands of young people from the region who had taken to tweeting, streaming, and reporting from the ground. At the time, the pro cess, of disenfranchised PREFACE xi peoples rising up and shaking off aging autocracies, modes of rule on which history had already seemingly rendered its verdict long before, seemed unstoppable, even irreversible. As my own experience in Turkey had taught me, however, pro gress rarely proceeds in a linear fashion. Just two years later, in 2013, I stood in the midst of tear- gas clouds circulating in and out of Gezi Park in Istanbul, Turkey, a few blocks from the hospital of my birth. As I stood among yet another ebullient crowd of protesters who had used the internet to great effect to stage a massive protest, my sense of both the strengths and the weaknesses of these digital technologies had shifted dramatically. I had become much less optimistic and significantly more cognizant of the ten- sions between these protesters’ digitally fueled methods of organ izing and the long- term odds of their having the type of po liti cal impact, proportional to their energy, that they sought. Over the years, both the latent weaknesses of these movements and the inherent strengths of their opponents had substantially emerged. I had come to understand the historical transition I was witnessing as part of a broad shift in how social movements operate and how they are opposed by those in power. This is a story not only about technology but also about long- standing trends in culture, politics, and civics in many protest movements that converged with more recent technological affordances— the actions a given technology facilitates or makes pos si ble. (For example, the ability to talk to people far away is an affordance of telephones— one could shout or use smoke signals or send messages with pigeons before, but it was much harder and limited in scope). This is a story of intertwined fragility and empowerment, of mass participation and rebellion, playing out in a po liti cal era characterized by mistrust, failures of elites, and weakened institutions of electoral democracy. I had begun to think of social movements’ abilities in terms of “capacities”— like the muscles one develops while exercising but could be used for other purposes like carry ing groceries or walking long distances— and their repertoire of protest, like marches, rallies, and occupations as “signals” of those capacities. These signals of under lying capacities often derived their power from being threats or promises of what else their participants could do—if you could hold a large march, you could also change the narrative, threaten disruption, xii PREFACE or bring about electoral or institutional change. And now, digital technologies were profoundly altering the relationship between movement capacities and their signals. In 2013, neither social movement participants nor those in power had yet fully adjusted. I conceptualize the relationship of the internet to networked protests of the 21st century as similar to the relationship of Nepalese Sherpas to climbers attempting to scale Mount Everest. Not merely guides, the Sherpas give a boost to people who might not other wise be fully equipped to face the chal- lenges that routinely occur above eight thousand meters. As climbing Mount Everest became a staple on the bucket lists of relatively privileged adventurers, a whole industry sprang up, employing the mountaineering people of Nepal— the Sherpas—to assist inexperienced people in making the climb. The hardy Sherpas carry extra oxygen for the climbers, lay out ladders and ropes, set up tents, cook their food, and even carry their back- packs along the way. In an ironic twist, the very last part of the climb before reaching the summit, the Hillary- Tenzing steps, has permanent ropes on it— and thus shares a feature with climbing walls in indoor gyms. Ben- efiting from this aid, so manypeople without much mountaineering experience attempted the climb that Everest started experiencing traffic congestion! Too many people were crowding narrow passages on shaky gla- cial icefalls or on ladders that connect the deep crevasses.

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