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

This book displays a deep understanding of what constitutes mass protest in the 21st century. Tufekci manages to blend quantitative knowledge with qualitative insight. Rather than being one of the many "tech will save us" or "tech will ruin us" books already in existence this book manages a far more insightful and nuanced approach. What emerges is a complex understanding of this phenomena with some surprising conclusions and insights. As a professor of digital media I'll be using this book in my classes.

This is a remarkable book, and a rare blend of thoughtful scholarly analysis, first-hand reporting from sites of critical political importance, practical lessons for social media activists, and delightfully clear and compelling writing. Few people have the experience and perspective on social media and contemporary political activism that Zeynep Tufekci demonstrates here, and the book undercuts easy rhetorics of "Twitter-powered revolutions" or of "slacktivism". It shows that social media have hugely important roles to play in political mobilization, but that the story of the relationship between those spheres of experience is a complicated one. Great stuff.

I liked the vast expanse of her interest and how she consistently returned the reader to her core concepts. She focuses the lens of her camera from precision with little depth of field to wide angles that give a broad perspective of the many characters and factors involved. I think she clearly sees digital communications as a tool and as such, tools cut both ways. Its well worth the read to catch a glimpse at this woman's often unique look at the forces changing the world. Well done!

This is a fantastic book with some extremely useful insights on how power is being exercised and transformed through networked communication infrastructures. Tufekci begins by showing how the political power of informal social groups can expand through highly leveraged forms of networked organization. Then she shows how this leverage can be one of their vulnerabilities if they grow too fast to be able to strategize or to make crucial decisions without formal structures, established norms and strong social ties. She explains how governments and powerful institutions have learned to exploit these weaknesses to retain power by delaying, distracting and deflecting social movements with widespread disinformation campaigns. The book explores these major themes through detailed and compelling case studies written in clear and accessible prose. The book functions as a missing manual for all responsible social media users, and should be required reading for activists, journalists, politicians and academics. The academic contribution of the book is significant, and (unusually) isn't hidden away behind obscure terminology. Tufekci uses and adapts thinking from political, social and economic theory, and conceptual frameworks from studies of communication, human development and psychology to explain concrete examples with elegance and clarity - and provides her readers with their own tools for thinking about how power, politics and technology are significant in their own lives. Despite the grim subject matter, and the deeply worrying implications of the political and historical trajectories traced so well in Tufekci's book, this is one of the most hope-inducing reads of 2017. I read this book while the ink was still wet, and it provided a startlingly clear perspective on some major political, social and technological changes of the last 20 years. I'm sure that when people read this book in 20 years time, that perspective will retain its vivid clarity, its depth of experience and its essence of grim, critical optimism.

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 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!

Awesome book. Seriously insightful stuff. It's not light reading though, quite anthropological!

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.

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