DigiActive.org

The Green Meme: is Switching your Twitter Icon Activism?

Background: Does turning your twitter avatar green make you into an activist?  Does it constitute an effective protest against the suppression of rights of civilians in Iran?  On June 17th, 2009 many Twitter users began turning their avatars green. This was their way of showing solidarity with those Iranians protesting the questionable election results which returned the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to power.  Some Twitter users uploaded solid green squares in place of their avatars; another 230,000 used the website (http://helpiranelection.com/) created by @arikfr to tweet their support and either turn their icons a shade of green or to add a green ribbon to their picture. This trend spread like wildfire and soon most of my followers were riding this wave.

Tools: Twitter, external web site

How These Tools are Used: After seeing pictures of protestors in Iran wearing green, many Twitter users began to manually change their Twitter pictures. This individual process was then streamlined by the self proclaimed “creative geek” Arik (@arikfr ) in creating his website. He had seen what people were doing, liked it and so “decided to simplify the process to allow it to reach [a] wider audience.” This worked, as my twitter stream was soon filled with the simple message “Show support for #iranelection add green overlay to your Twitter avatar with 1-click – http://helpiranelection.com/”. From twitter juggernauts like @garyvee to smaller scale users; the green icon fad had permeated twitter.

Analysis: Recently there has been much discussion around the phenomenon of average people participating, or attempting to participate in online activism. Mary Joyce, cofounder of this web site, was recently quoted in the Washington Post article stating that the ease of creating or joining a cause online sadly resulted in only “a maximum of 5 percent [who] are going to take action”. This problem is mirrored on Twitter as members can feel as though they’ve done their moral duty by expressing their anger at the situation by turning their icons green. To many, they feel like that is enough, they are spreading the word and showing solidarity. But how many of them donated even $1 to help organizations in Iran? Now THAT would have helped. Other skeptics of this movement, such as Martin Bryant, made their frustration with these activities clear as well.

The real question stems from the implications of digital activism. Digital activism is a progressive way of tackling the injustices in the world, but is the internet making it too easy for the average person to feel like he/she has sufficiently participated and so relieving them from any feeling that they should do more? Were people using the green meme to try and convey what humane and politically active people they were whether or not there was any truth to it? The last thing we need as a culture is another easy way out of hard work. I would have preferred to see a system where to turn your icon green a $20 donation was required. While it is not a lot, it would have resulted in only the truly concerned tweeters participating.

During the protests in Iran Twitter was very useful as a communication device with the western world. The concept of the “citizen journalist” was extremely important as all information coming out of Iran came from the people. The New York Times writer Noam Cohen noted that “Twitter is a tool and thus difficult to censor”. Retweeted updates and pictures from Iran became my main news source on the situation and I know that I wasn’t alone. There were many inaccuracies, but social tools gave the American people the coverage that wasn’t available anywhere else.

In the past month, Twitter has proven that it is far more than a narcissistic platform. As seen when the hashtag #CNNfail was used to criticize CNN for their coverage of the election in Iran. The trending topic gained so much support that it provoked a written and spoken apology from the network. When the New York Times profiled Twitter as a company they acknowledged its ability to “disseminate information in the face of a press crackdown” during the Iranian election.

I contacted some Twitter users who still had green avatars to pose the question: “Why did you change your avatar green?”

Daniel @dwplanit

“A few reasons: I am strongly for populist democratic uprisings; it was easy; there isn’t much more I can do to support democracy in Iran…Another effect the avatar changes might have is simply encouraging Iranians to continue to fight for democracy. And that could be a positive side effect.”

Alejandro @successfool

“Because I want to use my twitter id/following to attract attention to the cause.”

Jimmy @loyaleagle

“I figured it would show solidarity among tweeps and might even help in some small way (though now I’m a little sick of it).”

Tee @TeeMonster

“When I found out about the “elected” government shutting down Social Media outlets, I was outraged. I turned the avatar green to show my support for the opposition and also as a statement for freedom of information. If Iran wants to be taken seriously as a nation, they need to realize that information cannot be blocked. Not in this age.”

Gina @gminks

“To me it was more about getting the word out, drawing attention. I don’t really think that is activism. But then again, I knew there was nothing I could do to change things in Iran.”

Arik @arikfr

“The idea of the campaign was to make it easy for people to show support and to raise awareness to the issue. To date over 230,000 people used the application to add green overlay/ribbon to their avatar, which means that most of Twitter users (if not all of them) have noticed it.”

Impact: I have mixed feelings about how quickly the fad of green avatars spread. It can be interpreted as honorable how fast Twitter became a seemingly outraged activist community or disheartening that our culture is happy to click a link to change their picture but nothing more. How can we modify what is expected of would-be online activists to engage them in making a concrete difference?

Caste Based Communities on Orkut Mirror India’s Splintered Society

One of the main themes of my research on digital activism is that social technologies are value-agnostic.

At each of the four levels of Content, Collaboration, Community and Collective Intelligence, social technologies can lead to both good and bad outcomes.

I have written before about Shiv Sena’s militant approach towards Orkut communities critical of the party, its leader Bal Thakeray, or its Hindutva ideology. Caste-based communities on Orkut are another disturbing example of online communities mirroring the dysfunctions in Indian society.

For instance, there are more than 1000 communities for Brahmins on Orkut. There are 461 Brahmin communities listed under culture and community, 591 under religion and beliefs, 87 under activities and 117 under others.

One of the most popular Brahmin community, with 28, 726 members, randomly claims: “we r clever & hardworking .no one can fool us…” The Brahmans community with 41952 members and the Brahmins of India community with 30588 members are also very popular.

The other popular Brahmin communities are those for the various Brahmin sub-castes like Gawd Saraswat Brahmin (GSB) (12,189 members), Kokanastha Brahmin (4038 members), Deshashtha Brahmin (4083 members), Garhwali Brahmin (3067 members), Daivadnya Brahmin (2654 members) and Gaur Brahmin (2055 members). Another group, Brahmin Culture and Tradition is “dedicated to the purpose of uniting Brahmins to revive, preserve, protect and propagate the Brahmin culture to descendants without intimidation or dilution from anti-Brahminical forces.”

Interestingly, it seems that most of the threads under topics related to Brahmins have to do with defining the different types of Brahmins under various sub-castes.

There are also more than 1000 communities for Yadavs on Orkut, including gems like modern yadav girls and boys (5759 members).

Similarly, there are more than a 1000 Rajput communities on Orkut, including the Rajput the Royal Family community with 35,481 mebers, which asks people to join the group “if your soul justifies that you are Rajput both by soul and by nature.”

Dalits have about 200 mostly small communities on Orkut.

Perhaps, the low number of Dalit communities on Orkut says something about Indian society in general, and Orkut users in particular. Higher, more powerful, castes like Brahmins, Rajputs and Yadavs tend to have more money and easier access to the internet and old disparities are further accentuated by the internet.

Caste-based communities, however, aren’t unique to Orkut.

Brahminsamaj.org is “a global platform for the Brahmin Community where you will learn, share and find lot of information, knowledge and fun.” Thambraas Muhurtham wants that “all Brahmins should come forward to marry breaking the sects and subsects within Brahmins, particularly Brahmins of Thamizhnadu.” It also points out that “the entire sects and subsects of South Indian brahmin population are totally vegetarians unlike certain brahmins of other parts of India.” A couple on the homepage of Marry A Brahmin claim that its “focused approach on Brahmin matches helped us find each other as true soul mates.” Brahmin Connections is “proud to present an opportunity and a platform to our young Brahmins and their parents to connect with each other across the world for the matrimonial purpose.” Brahmins Matrimony says that “it is the right place to search for your life partner!”

There are dedicated websites for sub-castes as well. Sakhdwipi aims “to provide a common forum for the Shakdwipis to know each other and interact with each other.” KeralaIyers aims “to delve into the history, trace the roots, portray the life of modern day Kerala Iyers, and chronicle the achievements of this community.” iKalyanam claims to be “the only exclusive site for Iyer matrimonials.” Shivalli Brahmins wishes “to bring together all Shivalli Brahmins residing in different parts of the world, through meaningful discussions about their traditions.” GSBMatch is a matrimonial website for the Gowd and Saraswat Brahmin community. ModhBrahmin.org and BrahmanSamaj.org claim that “history proves that the people of Modh Brahmin Samaj are very enterprising and very resourceful” and aims to “bring all brothers and sisters of Samaj close.” Jangid Brahmin Samaj is a community for Jangid Brahmins. RSBNet is “a single stop source of information regarding the origin, customs, culture, history of Rajapur Saraswath Brahmins.”

Similarly, there are dedicated websites for other castes as well.

Kayastha Matrimonial is a matrimonial website for the Kayastha community. Rajput Samaj is “presently predominately taking care of the Rajputs of Rajasthan” but in near future aims to be “taking care of the Rajputs living in India, Pakistan and abroad.” JatLand, “the online home for the Jats” is especially proud of its wiki.

The Dalit community is fairly active on the internet, even though it’s miniiscule on Orkut. The International Dalit Solidarity Network, which has the most sophisticated of all these websites, “works on a global level for the elimination of caste discrimination.” Dalit Solidarity Network “brings together organizations and individuals in the UK who are concerned with caste-based discrimination.” Dalit India has “papers on various specific issues of the Dalits of India living in India and abroad.” Dalit Freedom Network “partners with the Dalits in their quest for religious freedom, social justice, and human rights by mobilizing human, informational, and financial resources.” Dalit Solidarity is “committed to the principles of justice and equality for all Indians, regardless of caste, race, gender or religion.” Dalit Voice claims that India is “the original home of racism” as Dalits and Tribals, who “constitute the core of India’s original inhabitants”, are kept enslaved by “alien Aryans”. Dalit Education aims to “transform lives and communities through the Christian message.” Indian Dalit Muslims Voice is a platform to discuss issues concerning Indian Dalit Muslims. Rohit Chopra has written about the tension between the elite Hindu nationalists and the disadvantaged Dalits on the internet.

In terms of content, the majority of these websites are focused on matrimonial match-making, but several of them seek to build international communities based on caste affiliations and offer tools like directories, bulletin boards and forums to their members. I have also noticed a tendency to establish a rather embellished history of the caste, with detailed biographies of the important personalities belonging to the caste. Ashok Kumar at Express India has a great description of the common features on these caste based websites.

Not surprisingly, Facebook has only 46 small Brahmin groups, 60 small Yadav groups, 126 smal Rajput groups and 41 small Dalit groups. The absence of caste based groups from Facebook is in line with its cosmopolitan user base. Orkut, on the other hand, should be a little concerned about its tendency to attract loonies of all types.

In the end, however, the cosmopolitanism of Facebook is an anomaly, and Orkut’s crude caste communities merely mirror India’s splintered society.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics, my blog on social media and social change.

The Perils of Facebook Activism: Walled Gardens, Serial Activists and Hackers

I have written before about the brilliant Pink Chaddi Campaign and highlighted the important role played by Facebook in helping the campaign go viral.

Briefly, journalist Nisha Susan set up The Consortium of Pubgoing, Loose, and Forward Women on Facebook and urged women to gift pink panties to Pramod Mutalik, the head of the ultra-conservative Hindu group Shri Ram Sena, in order to shame him into backing down from his threats to disrupt Valentine’s Day celebrations.

The campaign has become one of the best Indian examples of how a grassroots community can come together, collaborate and take collective action using social media tools.

The Pink Chaddi Facebook Group has been getting hacked throughout last month, and, instead of dealing with the hackers, Facebook suspended both the group and Nisha’s account last week.

Before the group was suspended, the hackers changed the name of the group to ‘A Good Bong is a Dead Bong’ and posted vulgar and violent messages on the group. Over the month, the hackers had used names like ‘Nathuram Godse Appreciation Society’, ‘Dara Singh Appreciation Group’ and other vulgar names.

In an open letter to Facebook posted on Kafila, Nisha wondered if the first rule of Facebook activism is to not use Facebook.

In an update on the Pink Chaddi blog, Nisha warned her supporters against joining a fake Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women group created by the hackers.

In fact, several groups supporting and impersonating the Consortium of Pub-going, Loose and Forward Women have sprung up on Facebook.

While Facebook activism has become an important part of any activist’s technology toolkit, it comes with its own perils.

To begin with, Facebook allows you very little flexibility in changing the design of your cause, group, page or event. Each of these options come with in-built limitations and once you have chosen one, you are wedded to it.

Facebook also gives you very little control over the content created by you or your supporters. For instance, you can’t highlight wall messages as important or sticky and you can’t export them.

Most importantly, you can’t export the names or contact details of your supporters, so the support base you build within Facebook stays within Facebook.

Then, there is the question of the involvement of your Facebook supporters. Ethan Zuckerman has wondered if Facebook protests are glorified petitions that attract serial activists. Beth Kanter has written about the difficulty of moving casual Facebook activists to higher levels of engagement.

We have also seen in the case of Egypt’s April 6 Youth Movement that Facebook activism groups come together for a specific protest, but lose the momentum thereafter.

Finally, there are serious security concerns associated with Facebook protests which have become all too clear in the case of the Pink Chaddi campaign.

Facebook groups can be hacked into, in spite of reasonable security measures, and the Facebook team is often not responsive to pleas of redressal. The FACThai Blog had written about the possibility of such attacks on the Pink Chaddi group last month and now, the attacks have really gone out of control.

Beyond the threat of hacking, detractors or even well meaning supporters can create duplicate groups, pages, causes, or events with similar sounding names, leading to confusion and a dilution of message.

So, if you are an activist, do leverage the virality of Facebook, but use it with an eye on its many limitations.

By all means, use Facebook as part of your campaign but don’t build your campaign around it. Use all the social media tools at your disposal and interlink them to increase their virality. In the US, it would mean using Facebook with MySpace, YouTube and Twitter. In India it would mean using at least Orkut, apart from Facebook.

Whichever tool you use, have a plan to transition your supporters to a traditional mailing list, so that you have more control over how you communicate with them. If you have been able to build a large and vibrant community, it might even make sense to move to a proprietary social network built on Drupal or Ning. I’m not implying that such a transition will be easy, or even successful, but it’s definitely worth a try.

Finally, do take basic security precautions like using strong passwords and changing them often, logging out of public computers after using them, and having more than one admin so that the group is not orphaned if your account gets hacked.

If your Facebook account, and your group, does get hacked, I guess the first step will be to try the Forgot Your Password? link, which will send the new password to your email ID, unless the hacker has already changed it.

If that doesn’t work, your next resort should be the Login Problems Help Page,which will lead you to one of two forms based on whether you have or don’t have access to your login email.

If you are lucky, the Facebook support team will respond quickly, otherwise you would do well to quickly move on to step three, and start an online campaign to put pressure on Facebook to restore your access.

Coming back to the Pink Chaddi Campaign, Nisha Susan has taken all these three steps and still doesn’t have access to her Facebook group.

If you know a way to help Nisha regain control of the Facebook group and avoid such hacking attacks in the future, do leave a comment below.

I’m convinced that someone should write a blog post titled “three steps to get your hacked Facebook activism group back”. Perhaps, we can write that post together here.

Cross-posted at Gauravonomics, my blog on social media and social change.

Moldovan Protests: Was it really a “Twitter Revolution”?

source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/creepysleepy/3429118253/

Since Tuesday’s protests and riots in the Moldovan capital Chisinau, there has been much analysis on how this group of protesters was formed.  Initial reports focused primarily on the use of Twitter, while paying scant reference to other social media tools, let alone the still relevant power of human mobilization.  The extent to which Twitter has been connected to the event has even led to unfortunate outcomes such as the charging of Natalia Morar, a Moldovan activist blamed for starting the “revolution” using the application.

The analysis on the technological aspects of this event in the past few days have revealed a different story.  It still involves Twitter, but Twitter has a different role.  While Twitter had a part in the pre-protest mobilization in and around Chisinau on Monday night, it may not have necessarily turned the protests into mobs or rioters, nor did it necessarily invoke the violence that occurred on Tuesday, as some believe.

As Evegeny Morozov, a fellow at the Open Society Institute, pointed out, Twitter’s more important role was getting the information out to the world, bringing it international attention and keeping the story alive and buzzing, as well as acting as a channel to push out user-generated content from on the ground.  After some great immediate analysis of the Twitter scene in Moldova (which was a follow up to his initial, but still quite insightful assessment on Tuesday), Morozov found that there were actually very few registered Twitter users in the country, and he suspects that most of the Tweets on #pman were not on the ground and were elsewhere in the world, taking information and pushing it along.

Aside from the fact that the government of Moldova quickly shut down cell phone service for the square where the riots took place, it seems there is limited use for Twitter in terms of mobilization efforts once you already have people in the square.  The violence was somewhat self-contained and more of a product of human beings being human beings than a technologically enhanced provocation.  As you might predict, the use of a megaphone became more useful than using Twitter.

However, the broader set of social media tools beyond Twitter seems to have played a greater part in the process of mobilization than originally thought, as Daniel Bennett hints at in his blog post discussing the events.  One commenter to Bennet’s blog, Julien, stated that “If it were social media, I’d say it were rather social networks like Facebook. I saw messages from Moldovan contacts the evening before asking to gather for the first meetings on Monday.”  Even more telling was this comment by zerolab:

“As evisoft stated, Twitter was used for the initial organization and consequent spread of information. Add facebook statuses tied to twitter updates and a few other means like SMSes, word of mouth, LiveJournal.

There is no doubt about Twitter’s role on starting/organizing the protests, but they’ve evolved into something bigger and way too hard to coordinate anything.”

There’s no doubt that there was a complex system of social media tools that were being used prior to and during the event, but they went beyond Twitter, and included blog aggregators like blogosfera.md, Facebook, and regionally-specific social networks such as Odnoklassniki.

The use of Twitter cannot, however, be discounted.  This is a very interesting case of more sophisticated tactics for activism.  People have realized the ability of the tool not only to draw people to your cause, mobilize efforts or provide information, but they were able to harness it’s ability to spread information with the explicit goal of attracting attention to a particular event that otherwise may have gone largely unnoticed.  For them, personally, this means international pressure on a government and an election that determines their very well-being.

Related articles by Zemanta

• Activist Charged for Inciting ‘Twitter Revolution’ (wired.com)
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• Gallery: Moldova Protesters Take to the Streets … and Tweets (wired.com)

Discussion: Infanticide and ethical video sharing

Topic: Human rights group Survival International has accused American evangelical missionaries of inciting racism and presenting false information with a controversial online video denouncing infanticide among Brazilian indigenous tribes called “Hakani,” which has been viewed on YouTube over 350,000 times. The incident has put a spotlight on the fine line between digital activism and ethical responsibility.

Digital Tools Being Used: Video, Facebook

What is the Debate: The video depicts scenes, now deemed to be reenactments, of Indians in an Amazon village digging graves and burying several live children in them. It was directed by David Cunningham, the son of the founder of an American fundamentalist missionary organisation called ‘Youth with a Mission’, which has a branch in Brazil known as Jocum. The “Hakani” campaign also maintains a website and a Facebook group with more than 13,000 members. The campaign is urging people to donate money and write letters in support of the Muwaji’s Law, which is a proposed Brazilian law that would make infanticide by indigenous groups illegal. Survival said the film is “faked, that the earth covering the children’s faces is actually chocolate cake, and that the film’s claim that infanticide among Brazilian Indians is widespread is false.” While infanticide is common with some indigenous tribes with ill children, the practice has become more rare as medical access to rural communities has improved.

“I think the missionaries are stirring up hatred against the Indians, who they profess to be concerned about,” said Fiona Watson, a Brazil campaigner for Survival, in a Reuters interview. “The infanticide is not being explained, it’s being taken out of context. They have now suddenly become baby-killers.”