Is there no such thing as risk taking in social media, as Malcolm Gladwell suggested? Hacktivist actions and successes suggest otherwise.

1. (H)ac(k)tivism
Lecture 3

2. Gladwell: “Small Change”
• The world, we are told, is in the midst of a
revolution. The new tools of social media have
reinvented social activism. With Facebook and
Twitter and the like, the traditional
relationship between political authority and
popular will has been upended, making it
easier for the powerless to collaborate,
coördinate, and give voice to their concerns.
• But…

3. Gladwell 1
• At four-thirty in the afternoon on Monday,
February 1, 1960, four college students sat
down at the lunch counter at the Woolworth’s
in downtown Greensboro, North Carolina.
They were freshmen at North Carolina A. & T.,
a black college a mile or so away.
• “I’d like a cup of coffee, please,” one of the
four, Ezell Blair, said to the waitress.
• “We don’t serve Negroes here,” she replied.

4. Gladwell 2
• The Woolworth’s lunch counter was a long L-
shaped bar that could seat sixty-six people,
with a standup snack bar at one end. The
seats were for whites. The snack bar was for
blacks. Another employee, a black woman
who worked at the steam table, approached
the students and tried to warn them away.
“You’re acting stupid, ignorant!” she said.
They didn’t move.

5. Gladwell 3
• Around five-thirty, the front doors to the store
were locked. The four still didn’t move. Finally,
they left by a side door. Outside, a small crowd
had gathered, including a photographer from
the Greensboro Record. “I’ll be back tomorrow
with A. & T. College,” one of the students said.

6. Gladwell 4
• By next morning, the protest had grown to
twenty-seven men and four women, most
from the same dormitory as the original four.
The men were dressed in suits and ties. The
students had brought their schoolwork, and
studied as they sat at the counter. On
Wednesday, students from Greensboro’s
“Negro” secondary school, Dudley High,
joined in, and the number of protesters
swelled to eighty.

7. Gladwell 5
• By Thursday, the protesters numbered three
hundred, including three white women, from
the Greensboro campus of the University of
North Carolina. By Saturday, the sit-in had
reached six hundred. People spilled out onto
the street. White teen-agers waved
Confederate flags. Someone threw a
firecracker. At noon, the A. & T. football team
arrived. “Here comes the wrecking crew,” one
of the white students shouted.

8. Gladwell 6
• By the following Monday, sit-ins had spread to
Winston-Salem, twenty-five miles away, and Durham,
fifty miles away. The day after that, students at
Fayetteville State Teachers College and at Johnson C.
Smith College, in Charlotte, joined in, followed on
Wednesday by students at St. Augustine’s College and
Shaw University, in Raleigh. On Thursday and Friday,
the protest crossed state lines, surfacing in Hampton
and Portsmouth, Virginia, in Rock Hill, South Carolina,
and in Chattanooga, Tennessee. By the end of the
month, there were sit-ins throughout the South, as far
west as Texas.

9. Gladwell 7
• “I asked every student I met what the first day
of the sitdowns had been like on his campus,”
the political theorist Michael Walzer wrote
in Dissent. “The answer was always the same:
‘It was like a fever. Everyone wanted to go.’ ”
Some seventy thousand students eventually
took part. Thousands were arrested and
untold thousands more radicalized.

10. Gladwell 8
• These events in the early sixties became a
civil-rights war that engulfed the South for the
rest of the decade—and it happened without
e-mail, texting, Facebook, or Twitter.

11. Gladwell 9
• When ten thousand protesters took to the streets in
Moldova in the spring of 2009 to protest against their
country’s Communist government, the action was
dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the means
by which the demonstrators had been brought
together. A few months after that, when student
protests rocked Tehran, the State Department took the
unusual step of asking Twitter to suspend scheduled
maintenance of its Web site, because the
Administration didn’t want such a critical organizing
tool out of service at the height of the demonstrations.
• But…

12. Gladwell 9
• Are people who log on to their Facebook page
really the best hope for us all? As for
Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution,
Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who
has been the most persistent of digital
evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter
had scant internal significance in Moldova, a
country where very few Twitter accounts exist.

13. Morozov, Ludlow, x, Domscheit-Berg, y

14. Gladwell 10
• In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people
tweeting about the demonstrations were
almost all in the West. “It is time to get
Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,”
Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer,
in Foreign Policy. “Simply put: There was no
Twitter Revolution inside Iran.”

15. Gladwell 11
• The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew
Sullivan, who championed the role of social
media in Iran, Esfandiari continued,
misunderstood the situation. “Western
journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother
reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply
scrolled through the English-language tweets
post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through
it all, no one seemed to wonder why people
trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be
writing in any language other than Farsi.”

16. Gladwell 12
• Fifty years after one of the most extraordinary
episodes of social upheaval in American history,
we seem to have forgotten what activism is.
• Greensboro in the early nineteen-sixties was the
kind of place where racial insubordination was
routinely met with violence. The four students
who first sat down at the lunch counter were
terrified. “I suppose if anyone had come up
behind me and yelled ‘Boo,’ I think I would have
fallen off my seat,” one of them said later.

17. Gladwell 13
• On the first day, the store manager notified the
police chief, who immediately sent two officers to
the store. On the third day, a gang of white
toughs showed up at the lunch counter and stood
ostentatiously behind the protesters, ominously
muttering epithets such as “burr-head nigger.” A
local Ku Klux Klan leader made an appearance.
On Saturday, as tensions grew, someone called in
a bomb threat, and the entire store had to be
evacuated.

18. Gladwell 14
• The dangers were even clearer in the Mississippi
Freedom Summer Project of 1964, another of the
sentinel campaigns of the civil-rights movement.
Within days of arriving in Mississippi, three
volunteers—Michael Schwerner, James Chaney,
and Andrew Goodman—were kidnapped and
killed, and, during the rest of the summer, thirty-
seven black churches were set on fire and dozens
of safe houses were bombed; volunteers were
beaten, shot at, arrested, and trailed by pickup
trucks full of armed men. A quarter of those in
the program dropped out.

19. Gladwell 15
• What makes people capable of this kind of
activism? The Stanford sociologist Doug
McAdam compared the Freedom Summer
dropouts with the participants who stayed,
and discovered that the key difference wasn’t,
as might be expected, ideological fervor.
“All of the applicants—participants and
withdrawals alike—emerge as highly
committed, articulate supporters of the goals
and values of the summer program,”

20. Gladwell 16
• What mattered more was an applicant’s
degree of personal connection to the civil-
rights movement. All the volunteers were
required to provide a list of personal
contacts—the people they wanted kept
apprised of their activities—and participants
were far more likely than dropouts to have
close friends who were also going to
Mississippi. High-risk activism, McAdam
concluded, is a “strong-tie” phenomenon.

21. Gladwell 17
• This pattern shows up again and again. One
study of the Red Brigades, the Italian terrorist
group of the nineteen-seventies, found that
seventy per cent of recruits had at least one
good friend already in the organization. The
same is true of the men who joined the
mujahideen in Afghanistan.

22. Gladwell 18
• So one crucial fact about the four freshmen at
the Greensboro lunch counter—David
Richmond, Franklin McCain, Ezell Blair, and
Joseph McNeil—was their relationship with
one another. McNeil was a roommate of
Blair’s in A. & T.’s Scott Hall dormitory.
Richmond roomed with McCain one floor up,
and Blair, Richmond, and McCain had all gone
to Dudley High School.

23. Gladwell 19
• The kind of activism associated with social
media isn’t like this at all. The platforms of
social media are built around weak ties.
Twitter is a way of following (or being followed
by) people you may never have met. Facebook
is a tool for efficiently managing your
acquaintances, for keeping up with the people
you would not otherwise be able to stay in
touch with.

24. Gladwell 20
• 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.

25. Bakioglu and Ludlow
• On January 14, 2011, Tunisian strongman Zine El
Abidine Ben Ali was forced from office, and by some
accounts he thereby became the first political casualty
of the age of Wikileaks and social media. Social media
sites such as Facebook and Twitter provided
communication outlets for many of Tunisia's
unemployed youths. Tunisians posted amateur videos
of police repression, firing squads and riots on their
personal profiles from their homes and cybercafes.
Relatives living abroad were then able to view the
videos that were posted on Facebook and linked them
to profiles that subsequently appeared on newsfeeds
back in Tunisia.

26. Bakioglu and Ludlow 2
• It rapidly became impossible for Ben Ali to
control the information flow within Tunisia
despite his ability to control all other media
outlets. So important were the social media
reports, that for the first two weeks of the
protests, Al Jazeera and France24's footage
was exclusively provided by Tunisian social
media users.

27. Bakioglu and Ludlow 3
• the revolution seemed to have jelled days
days after Wikileaks released a secret cable,
written in 2008 by Ambassador Robert F.
Godec that seemed to make it vivid that the
external world saw his corruption as clearly as
the Tunisians did.

28. Bakioglu and Ludlow 4
• As Godec put it in the leaked cable, “...beyond
the stories of the First Family's shady dealings,
Tunisians report encountering low-level
corruption as well in interactions with the
police, customs, and a variety of government
ministries… With those at the top believed to
be the worst offenders, and likely to remain in
power, there are no checks in the system.” The
Tunisian Government, the Ambassador wrote,
seemed to believe that “what’s yours is mine”.

29. Bakioglu and Ludlow 5
• Was the leaked document significant?Libya’s
Moammar Khadaffi certainly thought so,
speculating that the US Government had
leaked the cables through Wikileaks
specifically to foment revolution in Tunisia.

30. Bakioglu and Ludlow 6
• No sooner did talk of a Wikileaks revolution or
Facebook revolution surface than pushback
came. Laila Lalami, a Los Angeles-based writer
from Morocco, wrote on Twitter, "Please stop
trying to give credit to WikiLeaks, or Twitter,
or YouTube for the toppling of Ben Ali. The
Tunisian people did it." Later, she tweeted that
"The Internet facilitates communication, but it
alone doesn't keep people in the streets
for four weeks."

31. Bakioglu and Ludlow 7
• Gladwell’s point was not entirely off target.
Risk-taking political action probably does
require close social ties. However it would be
a blunder to think that social media are only
utilized by people with weak ties. As we will
see, in this case social media were valuable
tools for people with close ties and much at
risk.

32. Bakioglu and Ludlow 8
• It would also be a blunder to claim that the social
media by themselves caused or created or was
even a sufficient condition for the revolution in
Tunisia. But to our knowledge, no one has ever
claimed that, even though people may toss
around vacuous phrases like “twitter revolution”.
The serious question is whether social media
played an important role in Tunisia – whether
they were valuable tools that saved the lives of
protestors and made the fall of a government
possible or at least quicker and less painful.

33. Bakioglu and Ludlow 9
• It is impossible to pinpoint the exact causes of
an event like this. Surely there was enough
economic desperation and pent up anger over
the corrupt government to fuel a revolution,
but the world is full of people in economic
desperation under the thumb of corrupt
governments. That is not enough for a
revolution. Regime change also requires an
igniter and an accelerant.

34. Bakioglu and Ludlow 10
• The igniter surely came when Mohammed
Bouazizi, a 26-year-old unemployed graduate in
the central town of Sidi Bouzid, immolated
himself after his produce was confiscated by the
police because he was selling without a permit.
Bouazizi's act of desperation was followed by
another suicide, that of Houcine Falhi, a 22-year-
old, who electrocuted himself in the midst of
another demonstration over unemployment in
Sidi Bouzid, after shouting out "No to misery, no
to unemployment!" From then on, rallies quickly
spread across the state.

35. Bakioglu and Ludlow 11
• But there was also the accelerant. As a response
to the aforementioned cable releases, the
Tunisian government blocked Wikileaks, a
Tunisian WikiLeaks mirror, and several media
outlets reporting on the cables. In response to
this action, late December and early January,
Anonymous, a loosely organized group of
hacktivists famous for its support of freedom of
expression, started recruiting for #optunisia
(Operation: Tunisia).

36. Bakioglu and Ludlow 12
• On January 2, Anonymous proceeded to hack
a number of Tunisian state-run websites,
temporarily defacing them and shutting them
down. In an open letter to the Tunisian
government, the Anons said “attacks at the
freedom of speech and information of its
citizens will not be tolerated.”

37. Bakioglu and Ludlow 13
• “The Tunisian government wants to control the
present with falsehoods and misinformation in
order to impose the future by keeping the truth
hidden from its citizens. We will not remain silent
while this happens. Anonymous has heard the
claim for freedom of the Tunisian people.
Anonymous is willing to help the Tunisian people
in this fight against oppression. It will be done.”
Curiously, most of these DDoS attacks were from
within Tunisia itself and were in support of those
on the ground protesting.

38. Bakioglu and Ludlow 14
• Whether or not the actions of Anonymous and social
media activists were having consequential effects, the
Tunisian government treated them as though they
were. It was discovered that the Tunisian Internet
Agency (ATI) was injecting JavaScript into web forms,
using it to harvest usernames and passwords. In
response to this surveillance operation, Anonymous
released a browser add-on that stripped the added
JavaScript code, thereby allowing the Tunisian internet
users to access Blogger, Facebook, Gmail, Yahoo, and
Twitter without exposing their login details.

39. Bakioglu and Ludlow 15
• Meanwhile, in an effort to support the
protestors in Tunisia, members of Anonymous
also provided links to what they called a “care
package” for protestors. In it, they included
how-to guides for a number of things
including how to make homemade gas masks,
as well as links to Tunisian proxy servers,
instructions for LiveCD usage, and they
uploaded a book titled Bypassing Internet
Censorship.

40. Bakioglu and Ludlow 16
• No risk in social media?
• “Hamadi Kaloutcha, a blogger and activist, was
arrested at his home. While arresting him, police
confiscated his computer equipment. Sleh Edine
Kchouk, a student activist, was also arrested.
They have not been seen since.
• Hamada Ben Aoun, a rapper who recently
released two songs on his Facebook account
criticizing the Tunisian regime and its social
policies, was arrested around the same time as
the others.

41. Bakioglu and Ludlow 17
• No risk in social media?
• Slim Amamou, one of the more visible Tunisian
bloggers online, has also dropped off the grid. There
has been no word of his status since Thursday. In their
story, Reporters Without Borders said that sources told
them he was being held at the Ministry of Interior. Azyz
Amamy, who had covered the Tunisian protests from
the beginning, has also gone missing, presumably
arrested. His Blogger account and Facebook account
have both been deactivated. There is no word as to his
status.

42. Bakioglu and Ludlow 18
• All of this shows that the events in Tunisia
were not the stereotypical “Facebook
activism” critiqued by the likes of Gladwell.
Tunisian social media activists Kaloutcha,
Kchouk, Amamou, Aoun, and Amamy, all
arrested, certainly had risked much. Their
activism was certainly not the kind of stuff
“that people do when they are not motivated
enough to make a real sacrifice.”

43. Bakioglu and Ludlow 19
• The error in play seems to be the assumption
that just because social media allows for weak
ties, it is only used for communication that
creates weak ties. As everyone who uses
social media knows, we also use it to regularly
communicate with our BFFs and family
members. When other lines of communication
fail in times of crisis, social media can be the
only means of sharing information that we
have.

44. Bakioglu and Ludlow 20
• The critique also gets things backwards when it
supposes that the importance of social media is
concocted by Westerners who are overimpressed
by their own technology. It gets things backwards
because social media is not our technology –
people in the developing world are not too poor
or ignorant to use social media – they have
embraced social media at least to the degree that
we have and they have extended its applications
and retasked it to be political tool. Social media is
not Western media; it is world media