DigiActive.org

Tool: SMS

Tool Description: SMS (short message service) is the technical name for text messaging - notes sent between mobile phone users. Think of it as e-mail for mobile phones.

Activist Application: There are so many activist applications for SMS that we’ve put most of them after the jump. Here they are in brief: organize a protest in minutes, evade censorship by using SMS for communication that you cannot speak or e-mail (only true is some countries), election monitoring, activist security (”If I don’t text you every 2 hours, it means something is wrong), citizen journalism, and more to come….

Ease of Use: Easy. All mobile phones now have SMS built in. Just choose a phone number to send the message to, type the message, and press send. Pricing varies by country and carrier.

thousands of phones, thousands of uses for activists

Organize a Protest in Minutes

You receive an SMS from a friend telling you that a protest will occur in one hour in a given location. You send that message to all your friends and they send the message to all their friends. People act faster than authorities can react and a mass rally is successfully organized. This is how the 2001 protests that brought down President Joseph Estrada in the Philippines were organized. President Estrada was on trial for impeachment and was extremely unpopular. At a key moment in the trial, civic groups decided to organize a protest on the EDSA highway which encircles Manila. Young people sent their friends text messages, urging them to show up. “Wear red. Bring banners,” the messages said. Hundreds of thousands of people showed up to protest, and President Estrada called for a new elections and stated that he would run for re-election. He called the protests a “coup de text.”

Evade Censorship

Even repressive countries have loopholes. In Iran, for example, SMS is used for communication that cannot be spoken or emailed. According to Middle East Online, “[SMS] has ceased to be merely a way of sending a quick alert, and become a method of political and cultural discourse, filling the gap left by the dearth of free and independent media of the conventional sort. Texting is now a potent way of distributing information, critical remarks and above all jokes about politics. With no censorship and no holds barred, it allows people to break taboos, criticise the authorities, have some fun or chat someone up.” However, beware that SMS is not a safe vehicle for free speech in all countries. In China, for example, SMS is also under surveillance.

Election Monitoring

Using online applications, like FrontlineSMS, text messaging can be used for election monitoring. Professional monitors or ordinary citizens can report election irregularities by SMS. Activists keep an eye on the messages that are sent in an then send out investigators to respond to the most egregious cases.

Activist Security

For activists who often get arrested, SMS can act as a way to alert their friends that they are OK. In particular, the SMS application Twitter can be useful, as it allows multiple people to subscribe to an activist’s SMS “channel,” so that that persons SMS are relayed to many people, not just a small group of friends. Blogger Ethan Zuckerman gives an example: “When I saw [Egyptian blogger] Alaa a few weeks ago in Doha, the first thing he did was grab my computer, log into Twitter and, as he put it, ‘let everyone know I’m still alive.’ This is a good thing to do when you’re an activist who routinely gets detained or arrested. Alaa’s Twitter feed includes updates for his compatriots every time he goes to the police or to a demonstration so he can let people know where he is… and if they don’t hear from him, perhaps they need to reopen the FreeAlaa blog.”

Citizen Journalism

Moblogging (posting articles to an online blog via SMS) is only one way that people can use SMS for citizen journalism. Less direct methods are also possible. In June of 2007, 1 million people in the Chinese city of Xiamen protested a proposed toxic chemical plant near the city center. The local blogger collective Bullog used SMS to promote the protests. When the protest took place, many members of Bullog attended in order to record what was happening. One member of Bullog stayed home to update the blog while other members sent him SMS updates from the scene. This live SMS account of the protest was the best news coverage available. So many people went to the Bullog site in search of news that their server was soon overloaded.

photo credit: gaetan lee