DigiActive.org

Tool: push out your content with widgets

Tool: the widget

Tool Description: A widget is a piece of HTML code that can be embedded into a blog or web site to display content from another source. For example, the widget on the left, from the American site http://jobs.change.org, pulls content about recent social change job postings from the Change.org database and displays them on this page. Other widgets which work in the same way include event count-down clocks and DigiActive’s comment and Twitter feeds, which you’ll find on our left and right-hand toolbars.

Activist Application: As activists, we are often looking to bring useful content to our web sites in order to attract readers or to push out content we have created to other platforms so we can get as many “eyes” on that content as possible. According Danny Moldovan of Jobs for Change, “Our goal is to spark a nationwide movement toward careers in the common good.” Their methods for achieving this goal is to bring together lots of these jobs in a single place (their site) and then send job-seekers to that site.  If they can push out these job posting to other sites and blogs through their “featured jobs” widget, that means that  more people will find  those positions.

Ease of Use: Embedding a widget is quite easy.  If you have a blog, you just create a new box on one of your tool bars, copy and paste the HTML of whatever widget you want to add to your site into that box, and then save your changes.   The widget will appear on your toolbar next time you load your site.

Creating your own widget is also easier than it once was, thanks to free online services.  The  Free Kareem campaign, for example, created a Free Kareem widget of news update on Kareem’s imprisonment using the free application WidgetBox.com.

Hat-tip: Danny Moldovan

Why LinkedOut Syrians are LinkedIn again

Although professional networking site LinkedIn remains blocked for Sudanese users, Syrian users recently got their access to the site back.  Let’s take a look at how that happened.

Background: In early April, Syrian users of LinkedIn found that their accounts had been blocked.  Initially,  it seems that LinkedIn simply blocked Syrian IP addresses, since Syrian users could still access their accounts through proxy servers like TOR.  However, a few days ago LinkedIn (I’m guessing here) figured out that Syrian users (no strangers to Internet censorship) had found a way around their basic block and started shutting down individual accounts.  Syrian blogger Anas received the following explanation for this denial of service on April 17th from LinkedIn Customer Service:

Per the terms of our User Agreement, use of LinkedIn services, including our software, is subject to export and re-export control laws and regulations. This includes the Export Administration Regulations maintained by the United States Department of Commerce and sanctions programs maintained by the Treasury Department’s Office of Foreign Assets Control. Under the User Agreement, LinkedIn Users warrant that they are not prohibited from receiving U.S. origin products, including services or software. As such, and as a matter of corporate policy, we do not allow member accounts or access to our site from Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, or Syria.

Apparently, this reference to “sanctions” refers to a 2003 law which limited software exports to the above-mentioned countries.  Other online services, like Google, Amazon, and the domain site GoDaddy have totally or partially blocked Syrian access to their services in accordance with this these sanctions.  But why did LinkedIn act now, six years after the sanctions were passed?

Activist Response:  Not surprisingly, when the blockage first occurred, Syrian bloggers spoke out.  However, this did not result in a lift of the block, but in making the blockage more effective by cutting off user accounts.   Then, two actions began after this story broke on Global Voice Advocacy on April 18th. First, Jillian York, writer on Global Voices, started  a small Twitter meme using the hashtags #boycottlinkedin (22 tweets) and #linkedinfail (3 tweets).  This was an attempt to recreate the recent hype of the hashtag #amazonfail (over 1500 tweets), which occurred when gay-themed books were removed from Amazon’s rankings.

Second, Jillian  wrote a piece on the blockage in the prominent American political blog Huffington Post and Evgeny Morozov mentioned the case in a piece for Foreign Policy’s Net Effects blog.

LinkedIn’s Response: What’s surprising is that, small as it was, it seems that the Twitter campaign was what finally got a reaction from LinkedIn.  According to Jillian:

kluo (Kay Luo), Senior Director of Corporate Communications for LinkedIn (or as she refers to herself, LinkedIn employee #99) contacted me and others on Twitter to find out what was going on. After a few short back-and-forths, she announced that the deletion of Syrian user accounts was in fact an error and would be fixed.

And it was fixed. According to Jillian, LinkedIn is still honoring the sanctions in that they do not allow Syrians to download applications from their site, but they have scaled back their limitations, so Syrians once more have access to their LinkedIn accounts.

Why it Worked:  While Jillian credits the cumulative effect of Syiran bloggers + Huffington post + the 2 Twitter hashtags, I think what caused LinkedIn to capitulate  so quickly (and so obsequiously) was fear of another #amazonfail fiasco.  (Noted one popular blog, “The only thing anyone can agree on was Amazon.com PR’s complete mishandling of the situation.”)   Though Kay mentioned Jillian’s Huffington Post article in a tweet, it seems that Twitter was where LinkedIn’s attention was, since that’s how Kay contacted Jillian and that’s where she issued her mea culpa (left).

Though I credit LinkedIn with their decision to enforce their sanction obligation with a surgical blade rather than a battle ax, I question their decision not to address this in their response to Jillian.   LinkedIn Customer Service gave a very clear reason why Syrian users were blocked (the sanctions), which is quite different from “human error bug from a release last month” which Kay provided as an explanation.  (Ethan Zuckerman is more sympathetic to LinkedIn’s response to the sanctions.)

Implications:  Why am I being critical, since LinkedIn did, in Jillian’s words, “do the right thing”?  First off, because they are still blocking users in Sudan and, since the customer service response also mentioned Cuba, Iran, and North Korea, we can assume that they are still blocking users in those countries as well.  (Readers, please confirm if you have contacts.)

Unlike blocking Google Gears, blocking  a social network is particularly insidious because these platforms are extremely useful organizing tools for activists.  And, while DigiActive is the first to admit to the drawbacks of these tools, anyone in the US government interested in supporting open societies should seek to increase access to social networks in repressive countries, not block them with sanctions.  President Obama’s recent policy of granting access the of US telecom companies to Cuba makes LinkedIn’s actions towards Syria all the more perplexing.

Another sad lesson from this story is that this Syrian issue really only gained traction when it hit the US/English media.  Kay makes specific reference to Jillian’s Huffington Post article, so we can assume that this kind of high-profile attention was one of the warning signs for LinkedIn of this-might-turn-into-#amazonfail. Good news is that, thanks to blogs like Huffington Post and Global Voices Advocacy, which broke the story, raising the profile of a foreign injustice is more accessible than it was in the days when you needed to convince a newspaper reporter with a deadline that your story mattered.  These new media outlets, particularly Global Voices, are much more accessible to the world’s activists.

Lessons for Activists: I think this case has 4 lessons for digital activists.  Here they are:

1. Think like your target:  What was LinkedIn’s greatest fear?  Another #amazonfail.  Jillian’s Twitter campaign was a realization of that fear and LinkedIn reacted quickly.
2. Use media your target is using: It’s almost a cliche to say that you need to meet your supporters where they are, but this is also true for your target.  Twitter was only an effective means of pressuring LinkedIn because their PR person was keeping a close watch on her Twitter feed.  This is actually rather surprising.  (Clearly, LinkedIn is quite hip.)  A better bet was the article on Huffington Post.  If you publish in a place where influential people seek information, chances are your target will see it too.
3. Link your campaign to the news cycle:  Again, #linkedinfail built off the embarrassment of #amazonfail, which had been leading tech news only a few days before.
4. Go to where your target is: Blocked users live in Syria.  LinkedIn is an American company.  LinkedIn reacted when the news hit in America.  This is no coincidence.  Get into the media market where your opponent is.

LinkedIn has been very responsive about lifting the account block on Syria and I hope it will lift the blocks on Cuba, Sudan, Iran, and North Korea as well, or at least give an explanation of why it is choosing to lift some bans while leaving others in place.

Image credits: (from top) DigiActive, Jillian York, DigiActive

What Pew’s 2008 Election Poll Means for Digital Activism

Last week the Pew Research Center,  a nonpartisan American “fact tank” that studies social trends,  released their report on the Internet’s role in the 2008 presidential elections.   The results of the poll were not surprising.  Political use of the Internet increased from 2004, both in the sense of Web 1.0 information-seeking and Web 2.0 content-generation.  The Internet has also moved up in the media rankings;  it’s tied with newspapers as a source for political information, though TV still leads.

However, what I am most interested in is the implications of these trends for digital activism.  Does online political activity during the election reveal any trends in the likelihood of Americans to use the Internet in organizing for social or political change?   While information about the proliferation of online communities and an increase in “participation” (as opposed passive information-seeking) made me optimistic, the poll did not seek to ascertain the effect of online activity on offline outcomes or to differentiate between participative activities I would consider activism (creating strategic communities of interest and organizing actions) from more passive participation, like joining an email list.

This is not to say that there wasn’t plently of cause for pessimism as well.  The increase in partisanship online  became the Associated Press’ headline for their story on the poll.  People who engage with politics online are more likely than they were in 2004 to visit sites that share their point of view.   This seems to vindicate Nicholas Negroponte’s theory of the Daily Me and Cass Sunstein’s theory of echo chambers, both of which imply that current online political behaviors are detrimental to democracy because they feed narrow-mindedness and create fragmentation.  (This is the cyber-skeptic side of the Internet-and-democracy debate, the optimistic side being  represented by Yochai Benkler and his theory of the networked public sphere, among others.)

The participative Internet is good for pluralism, but pluralism is a double-edged sword.   While the Pew report does give support to a theory of echo-chambers, it also clarifies that there are many echo chambers, not just the left and right poles made famous by the map (left) of the US political blogosphere presented in the 2005 by researchers Lada Adamic and Natalie Glance.

The Pew poll notes that those who are “most information hungry” (let’s call them political junkies)  “are delving more deeply into the ‘long tail‘ of online political content, where they frequently seek out information that carries a distinct partisan slant….”   So the politically engaged Internet user of today is likely to find a community of like-minded people who share her views.   This could be positive if these online communities  give their members the power to lobby decision-makers on the issues that matter to them.  It could be negative if these more fragmented communities merely replicate the polarized online world of Sunstein and Negroponte: pro-life vs. pro-choice, gay marriage supporters vs. NOM.

I tend to believe in the positive interpretation of online pluralism: more communities of interest means more sources of collective power and more influence from ordinary citizens.  Part of the reason I believe this is that there was so much online participation this cycle (see graph below).

Although Obama supporters were more politically engaged than McCain supporters, probably due to the Obama campaign’s more robust new media operation (full disclosure - I was an OFA new media employee), both sets of supporters were “participating” actively online.  I use the word “participating” in quotes, because the Pew poll makes no distinction between “engaging politically in an online social network,” which implied, at least for the Obama campaign, the ability to form groups, plan events, and exercise significant agency, from “signing up for email news alerts,” which in this context means being the recipient of a broadcasted signal.

Another reason it’s difficult to get at the implications for digital activism, as I stated earlier, is because the poll does not seek to ascertain the effect of online participation or its connection to offline events.  Were people who participated online more likely to vote, canvass, or convince a friend to take political action?  We don’t know.  I hope the next Pew election poll in 2012 recognizes that the most salient forms of online political participation have effects offline, and that in order to gauge the effects of online action, we need to look for the effects of that action in the real world.

image sources: Adamic and Glance via www.futureofthebook.org; the Pew Internet and American Life Project

Campaign: Sinclair Broadcasting Boycott of 2004

NOTE: This post is an excerpt from The Wealth of Networks by Yochai Benkler. It is rather unusual for DigiActive to reproduce an extended excerpt from another source. (The sub-headings and links have been added, but the text is unedited.) The reason is because 1) the author permits reproduction of the online version of the book under a Creative Commons Noncommercial Sharealike license and 2) this case study is so well written, we really could not improve on it. We encourage you to read and annotate this spectacular book at http://yupnet.org/benkler/ and buy a copy through Yale University Press or Amazon.

Figure 7.1: Sinclair Stock, October 8-November 5, 2004

Description: Sinclair, which owns major television stations in a number of what were considered the most competitive and important states in the 2004 election— including Ohio, Florida, Wisconsin, and Iowa—informed its staff and stations that it planned to preempt the normal schedule of its sixty-two stations to air a documentary called Stolen Honor: The Wounds That Never Heal, as a news program, a week and a half before the elections. ² The documentary was reported to be a strident attack on Democratic candidate John Kerry’s Vietnam War service. One reporter in Sinclair’s Washington bureau, who objected to the program and described it as “blatant political propaganda,” was promptly fired. ³ The fact that Sinclair owns stations reaching one quarter of U.S. households, that it used its ownership to preempt local broadcast schedules, and that it fired a reporter who objected to its decision, make this a classic “Berlusconi effect” story, coupled with a poster-child case against media concentration and the ownership of more than a small number of outlets by any single owner. The story of Sinclair’s plans broke on Saturday, October 9, 2004, in the Los Angeles Times. Over the weekend, “official” responses were beginning to emerge in the Democratic Party. The Kerry campaign raised questions about whether the program violated election laws as an undeclared “in-kind” contribution to the Bush campaign. By Tuesday, October 12, the Democratic National Committee announced that it was filing a complaint with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC), while seventeen Democratic senators wrote a letter to the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission (FCC), demanding that the commission investigate whether Sinclair was abusing the public trust in the airwaves. Neither the FEC nor the FCC, however, acted or intervened throughout the episode.

Digital Tools: cross-referencing blogs (in particular talkingpointsmemo.com, MyDD.com, dailyKos.com), web sites (stopsinclair.org, BoycottSBG.com)

How These Tools Were Used: Alongside these standard avenues of response in the traditional public sphere of commercial mass media, their regulators, and established parties, a very different kind of response was brewing on the Net, in the blogosphere. On the morning of October 9, 2004, the Los Angeles Times story was blogged on a number of political blogs—Josh Marshall on talkingpointsmemo.com, Chris Bower on MyDD.com, and Markos Moulitsas on dailyKos.com. By midday that Saturday, October 9, two efforts aimed at organizing opposition to Sinclair were posted in the dailyKos and MyDD. A “boycottSinclair” site was set up by one individual, and was pointed to by these blogs.

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Digitally Active Org: The U.S. Campaign for Burma

Web site: www.uscampaignforburma.org

What is it?: The U.S. Campaign for Burma (USCB) is “a U.S.-based membership organization dedicated to empowering grassroots activists around the world to bring about an end to the military dictatorship in Burma through public education, leadership development initiatives, conferences, and advocacy campaigns at local, national and international levels.” With a small staff and smaller budget, USCB has grown its membership from a few hundred people to over 60,000 in the past three years. New media outreach was a key component in this growth, used to organize activists and raise awareness about the cause of Burma.

Tools: instant messaging, e-newsletters, blog, digital video, online social networks (Facebook, Myspace, Change.org, etc.), Ustream live video conferences, teleconferences, listservs, user-created media (photos, videos, t-shirt designs).

USCB has managed to dramatically increase their outreach by combining online with offline organizing. A coordinated YouTube campaign to launch 30 produced videos in 30 days helped increase exposure to the general public, since the spots starred Hollywood celebrities. But public reaction to the spots was mixed. Also, traditional media played a role in the successes and challenges of USCB’s outreach: with Burma often in the news this year (monks’ protest, Cyclone Nargis), more people became aware of the cause and eager to connect with USCB, but media of these events also somewhat overshadowed the organizational work of USCB. The full slideshow goes into more detail, with quotes from people at USCB.

Event: DigiActive’s 1st meet-up - Boston

What? DigiActive’s first meet-up
When? Tuesday, December 2nd, 2008
Where? Diesel Café (click for map) in Boston, USA
Why? meet DigiActive team members Mary (Co-Founder), Patrick (Director of Applied Research), and Kate (Correspondent) to talk about digital activism over a warm cappuccino.
How? If you’d like to come, please sign up on the event’s Facebook page.

Campaign: Mommy Bloggers Halt Motrin Ad

Description: When Motrin, an American company that sells pain medication, released a web ad (above) implying that moms who wear their infants in a sling or snuggly were making a fashion statement, moms got mad. Using a variety of online tools, tech-savvy moms protested the ad and called for Motrin to remove it from their site.

Digital Activism Tools: blogs, Youtube (to spread the offensive ad and post commentary), Twitter (a dedicated channel and lots of discussion)

How These Tools Are Being Used: Blogger Amy Gates of Crunchy Domestic Goddess was the first to post about the offensive nature of the Motrin ad on the night of Saturday the 15th. On Sunday afternoon, a dedicated Twitter feed, http://twitter.com/motrinmoms, was created specifically to spread information (and outrage) about the ad.

Youtube also played a role. Different users uploaded recordings of the offensive ad to make sure it was seen and at least one Mom uploaded a video commentary, calling on Motrin to stop their ad campaign. “My headaches have nothing to do with wearing my baby,” says the vlogger. “That, in fact, actually makes me feel better. My headache, right now, was caused by you.” In addition, one interesting mash-up video, created by One True Media, is composed of tweets from the Twitterfeed and photos of moms wearing their babies.

Outcome: Motrin pulled down the ad on Sunday night (day after the protest began) and issued a blanket apology on their web site (screen shot after the jump).

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Theory: The Streisand Effect

The Streisand Effect refers to instances when Internet censorship has the opposite effect, actually increasing distribution and awareness of the censored material.

Origin of the Term: In 2003 singer Barbra Streisand sued photographer Kenneth Adelman and Pictopia.com for $50 million dollars to force them to remove a picture of her home (see above) from a series of 12,000 pictures of the California coast taken to study the effects of beach erosion. As a result of this peculiar law suit, the picture of her home was disseminated on the Internet and many more people saw it than would have if she had not tried to censor the image.

Application for Activists: How can activists apply the Streisand Effect as a means of countering Internet censorship? The key to the Streisand Effect is distributing the censored material and publicizing the instance of censorship. Without these two elements - distribution and publicity - censored material will not be viewed by a wide enough audience to counteract the original effect of the censorship. The end goal is to show your government that censoring content has the reverse effect, and thus discourage your government from censoring

From a technical perspective, the best way to distribute censored content is by e-mail, though feeds can also be used, as in the case of Amnesty International’s Irrepressible campaign, which allows bloggers to publish a feed of censored blog content on their own blog.

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Guide: Designing an Advocacy Video

All the cool digital tools in the world aren’t much help without an effective strategy. Posts in the new “Strategy” topic will present ideas for how to fit digital tools into your overarching strategy for change.

In this first post, we will present a strategy for designing a YouTube-style video to promote your cause. A good advocacy video should contain the following elements:

1. Start With Background Info

Assume the person viewing the video knows nothing about your cause. You need to tell the viewer who, what, when, why, and where of the cause you are fighting for. The goal of presenting this information is for the person to understand the injustice that has occurred and why action is needed.

There are two options for presenting this information: slides and voice-over. If you are using slides, just type the information (white text on a back background looks nice). Then animate the slides. For voice-over, you need to write a script of the information and then record it and layer the audio over the video. The slides option is easier as you do not need to edit the audio track.

• EXAMPLE: Video Denouncing Homophobia

This video denounces the homophobic statements of Sally Kern, an elected representative from the state of Oklahoma in the USA. The first 33 seconds show the use of black-and-white slides to give background information about the issue. Specifically: Who? a State Legislator. What? a speech delivered at a gathering in her district. When? (doesn’t say) Why? she thought only 50 people were listening to her speech. Where? the state of Oklahoma. Read more »

Digitally Active Org: The Sex Workers Project

Web site: www.sexworkersproject.org
What was it?: The Sex Workers Project, based in New York, has used technology in its mission to defend the rights of sex workers around the world. One of their goals is to remove a rule prohibiting organizations that work with prostitutes from receiving money from the PEPFAR AIDS prevention fund and the federal development agency USAID.
Where is it?: New York, USA
Tools: podcasts, digital video, blog, listservs, SMS

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