Ed: Josh, political science has long posed a distinction between public spaces and private ones. Yet it seems like many platforms on the Internet, such as Facebook, cannot really be categorized in such terms. If this correct, what does it mean for how we should police and govern the Internet?

Josh: I think that is right – many online spaces are neither public nor private. This is also an issue for some for privacy legal frameworks (especially in the US).. A lot of the covenants and agreements were written forty or fifty years ago, long before anyone had really thought about the Internet. That has now forced governments, societies and parliaments to adapt these existing rights and protocols for the online sphere. I think that we have some fairly clear laws about the use of human intelligence sources, and police law in the offline sphere. The interesting question is how we can take that online. How can the pre-existing standards, like the requirement that procedures are necessary and proportionate, or the ‘right to appeal’, be incorporated into online spaces? In some cases there are direct analogies. In other cases there needs to be some re-writing of the rule book to try figure out what we mean. And, of course, it is difficult because the internet itself is always changing!

Ed: So do you think that concepts like proportionality and justification need to be updated for online spaces?

Josh: I think that at a very basic level they are still useful. People know what we mean when we talk about something being necessary and proportionate, and about the importance of having oversight. I think we also have a good idea about what it means to be non-discriminatory when applying the law, though this is one of those areas that can quickly get quite tricky. Consider the use of online data sources to identify people. On the one hand, the Internet is ‘blind’ in that it does not automatically codify social demographics. In this sense it is not possible to profile people in the same way that we can offline. On the other hand, it is in some ways the complete opposite. It is very easy to directly, and often invisibly, create really firm systems of discrimination – and, most problematically, to do so opaquely.

This is particularly challenging when we are dealing with extremism because, as we pointed out in the report, extremists are generally pretty unremarkable in terms of demographics. It perhaps used to be true that extremists were more likely to be poor or to have had challenging upbringings, but many of the people going to fight for the Islamic State are middle class. So we have fewer demographic pointers to latch onto when trying to find these people. Of course, insofar as there are identifiers they won’t be released by the government. The real problem for society is that there isn’t very much openness and transparency about these processes.

Ed: Governments are increasingly working with the private sector to gain access to different types of information about the public. For example, in Australia a Telecommunications bill was recently passed which requires all telecommunication companies to keep the metadata – though not the content data – of communications for two years. A lot of people opposed the Bill because metadata is still very informative, and as such there are some clear concerns about privacy. Similar concerns have been expressed in the UK about an Investigatory Powers Bill that would require new Internet Connection Records about customers, online activities.  How much do you think private corporations should protect people’s data? And how much should concepts like proportionality apply to them?

Ian: To me the distinction between metadata and content data is fairly meaningless. For example, often just knowing when and who someone called and for how long can tell you everything you need to know! You don’t have to see the content of the call. There are a lot of examples like this which highlight the slightly ludicrous nature of distinguishing between metadata and content data. It is all data. As has been said by former US CIA and NSA Director Gen. Michael Hayden, “we kill people based on metadata.”

One issue that we identified in the report is the increased onus on companies to monitor online spaces, and all of the legal entanglements that come from this given that companies might not be based in the same country as the users. One of our interviewees called this new international situation a ‘very different ballgame’. Working out how to deal with problematic online content is incredibly difficult, and some huge issues of freedom of speech are bound up in this. On the one hand, there is a government-led approach where we use the law to take down content. On the other hand is a broader approach, whereby social networks voluntarily take down objectionable content even if it is permissible under the law. This causes much more serious problems for human rights and the rule of law.

Read the full report: Brown, I., and Cowls, J., (2015) Check the Web: Assessing the Ethics and Politics of Policing the Internet for Extremist Material. VOX-Pol Publications.

Ian Brown is Professor of Information Security and Privacy at the OII. His research is focused on surveillance, privacy-enhancing technologies, and Internet regulation.

Josh Cowls is a a student and researcher based at MIT, working to understand the impact of technology on politics, communication and the media.

Josh and Ian were talking to Blog Editor Bertie Vidgen.

To some extent the citizen-based response filled the gap left by the lack of a sufficient response from the traditional institutions.[1] This suggests that the role of ICTs in disaster response should be examined within the political context of the power relationship between members of the public who use digital tools and the traditional institutions. My experience in 2010 was the first time I was able to see that, while we would expect that in a case of natural disaster both the authorities and the citizens would be mostly concerned about the emergency, the actual situation might be different.

Apparently the emergence of independent, citizen-based collective action in response to a disaster was considered as some type of threat by the institutional actors. First, it was a threat to the image of these institutions, which didn’t want citizens to be portrayed as the leading responding actors. Second, any type of citizen-based collective action, even if not purely political, may be an issue of concern in authoritarian countries in particular. Accordingly, one can argue that, while citizens are struggling against a disaster, in some cases the traditional institutions may make substantial efforts to restrain and contain the action of citizens. In this light, the role of information technologies can include not only enhancing citizen engagement and increasing the efficiency of the response, but also controlling the digital crowd of potential volunteers.

The purpose of this paper was to conceptualize the tension between the role of ICTs in the engagement of the crowd and its resources, and the role of ICTs in controlling the resources of the crowd. The research suggests a theoretical and methodological framework that allows us to explore this tension. The paper focuses on an analysis of specific platforms and suggests empirical data about the structure of the platforms, and interviews with developers and administrators of the platforms. This data is used in order to identify how tools of engagement are transformed into tools of control, and what major differences there are between platforms that seek to achieve these two goals. That said, obviously any platform can have properties of control and properties of engagement at the same time; however the proportion of these two types of elements can differ significantly.

One of the core issues for my research is how traditional actors respond to fast, bottom-up innovation by citizens.[2]. On the one hand, the authorities try to restrict the empowerment of citizens by the new tools. On the other hand, the institutional actors also seek to innovate and develop new tools that can restore the balance of power that has been challenged by citizen-based innovation. The tension between using digital tools for the engagement of the crowd and for control of the crowd can be considered as one of the aspects of this dynamic.

That doesn’t mean that all state-backed platforms are created solely for the purpose of control. One can argue, however, that the development of digital tools that offer a mechanism of command and control over the resources of the crowd is prevalent among the projects that are supported by the authorities. This can also be approached as a means of using information technologies in order to include the digital crowd within the “vertical of power”, which is a top-down strategy of governance. That is why this paper seeks to conceptualize this phenomenon as “vertical crowdsourcing”.

The question of whether using a digital tool as a mechanism of control is intentional is to some extent secondary. What is important is that the analysis of platform structures relying on activity theory identifies a number of properties that allow us to argue that these tools are primarily tools of control. The conceptual framework introduced in the paper is used in order to follow the transformation of tools for the engagement of the crowd into tools of control over the crowd. That said, some of the interviews with the developers and administrators of the platforms may suggest the intentional nature of the development of tools of control, while crowd engagement is secondary.

[1] Asmolov G. “Natural Disasters and Alternative Modes of Governance: The Role of Social Networks and Crowdsourcing Platforms in Russia”, in Bits and Atoms Information and Communication Technology in Areas of Limited Statehood, edited by Steven Livingston and Gregor Walter-Drop, Oxford University Press, 2013.

[2] Asmolov G., “Dynamics of innovation and the balance of power in Russia”, in State Power 2.0 Authoritarian Entrenchment and Political Engagement Worldwide, edited by Muzammil M. Hussain and Philip N. Howard, Ashgate, 2013.

Read the full article: Asmolov, G. (2015) Vertical Crowdsourcing in Russia: Balancing Governance of Crowds and State–Citizen Partnership in Emergency Situations. Policy and Internet 7,3: 292–318.

Gregory Asmolov is a PhD student at the LSE, where he is studying crowdsourcing and emergence of spontaneous order in situations of limited statehood. He is examining the emerging collaborative power of ICT-enabled crowds in crisis situations, and aiming to investigate the topic drawing on evolutionary theories concerned with spontaneous action and the sustainability of voluntary networked organizations. He analyzes whether crowdsourcing practices can lead to development of bottom-up online networked institutions and “peer-to-peer” governance.

Crowdsourcing is a recent buzzword that describes efforts to use the Internet to mobilize online communities to achieve specific organizational goals. While crowdsourcing serves several purposes, the most interesting potential from a democratic perspective is the ability to crowdsource legislation. By giving citizens the means to affect the legislative process more directly, crowdsourcing legislation is an example of a democratic innovation that gives citizens a say in the legislative process. Recent years have witnessed a scholarly debate on whether such new forms of participatory governance can help cure democratic deficits such as a declining political legitimacy of the political system in the eyes of the citizenry. However, it is still not clear how taking part in crowdsourcing affects the political attitudes of the participants, and the potential impact of such democratic innovations therefore remain unclear.

In our study, we contribute to this research agenda by exploring how crowdsourcing citizens’ initiatives affected political attitudes in Finland. The non-binding Citizens’ Initiative instrument in Finland was introduced in spring 2012 to give citizens the chance to influence the agenda of the political decision making. In particular, we zoom in on people active on the Internet website Avoin Ministeriö (Open Ministry), which is a site based on the idea of crowdsourcing where users can draft citizens’ initiatives and deliberate on their contents. As is frequently the case for studies of crowdsourcing, we find that only a small portion of the users are actively involved in the crowdsourcing process. The option to deliberate on the website was used by about 7% of the users; the rest were only passive readers or supported initiatives made by others. Nevertheless, Avoin Ministeriö has been instrumental in creating support for several of the most successful initiatives during the period, showing that the website has been a key actor during the introductory phase of the Citizens’ initiative in Finland.

We study how developments in political attitudes were affected by outcome satisfaction and process satisfaction. Outcome satisfaction concerns whether the participants get their preferred outcome through their involvement, and this has been emphasized by proponents of direct democracy. Since citizens get involved to achieve a specific outcome, their evaluation of the experience hinges on whether or not they achieve this outcome. Process satisfaction, on the other hand, is more concerned with the perceived quality of decision making. According to this perspective, what matters is that participants find that their concerns are given due consideration. When people find the decision making to be fair and balanced, they may even accept not getting their preferred outcome. The relative importance of these two perspectives remains disputed in the literature.

The research design consisted of two surveys administered to the users of Avoin Ministeriö before and after the decision of the Finnish Parliament on the first citizens’ initiative in concerning a ban on the fur-farming industry in Finland. This allowed us to observe how involvement in the crowdsourcing process shaped developments in central political attitudes among the users of Avoin Ministeriö and what factors determined the developments in subjective political legitimacy. The first survey was conducted in fall 2012, when the initiators were gathering signatures in support of the initiative to ban fur-farming, while the second survey was conducted in summer 2013 when Parliament rejected the initiative. Altogether 421 persons filled in both surveys, and thus comprised the sample for the analyses.

The study yielded a number of interesting findings. First of all, those who were dissatisfied with Parliament rejecting the initiative experienced a significantly more negative development in political trust compared to those who did not explicitly support the initiative. This shows that the crowdsourcing process had a negative impact on political legitimacy among the initiative’s supporters, which is in line with previous contributions emphasizing the importance of outcome legitimacy. It is worth noting that this also affected trust in the Finnish President, even if he has no formal powers in relation to the Citizens’ initiative in Finland. This shows that negative effects on political legitimacy could be more severe than just a temporary dissatisfaction with the political actors responsible for the decision.

Nevertheless, the outcome may not be the most important factor for determining developments in political legitimacy. Our second major finding indicated that those who were dissatisfied with the way Parliament handled the initiative also experienced more negative developments in political legitimacy compared to those who were satisfied. Furthermore, this effect was more pervasive than the effect for outcome satisfaction. This implies that the procedures for handling non-binding initiatives may play a strong role in citizens’ perceptions of representative institutions, which is in line with previous findings emphasising the importance of procedural aspects and evaluations for judging political authorities.

We conclude that there is a beneficial impact on political legitimacy if crowdsourced citizens’ initiatives have broad appeal so they can be passed in Parliament. However, it is important to note that positive effects on political legitimacy do not hinge on Parliament approving citizens’ initiatives. If the MPs invest time and resources in the careful, transparent and publicly justified handling of initiatives, possible negative effects of rejecting initiatives can be diminished. Citizens and activists may accept an unfavourable decision if the procedure by which it was reached seems fair and just. Finally, the results give reason to be hopeful about the role of crowdsourcing in restoring political legitimacy, since a majority of our respondents felt that the possibility of crowdsourcing citizens’ initiatives clearly improved Finnish democracy.

While all hopes may not have been fulfilled so far, crowdsourcing legislation therefore still has potential to help rebuild political legitimacy.

Read the full article: Christensen, H., Karjalainen, M., and Nurminen, L., (2015) Does Crowdsourcing Legislation Increase Political Legitimacy? The Case of Avoin Ministeriö in Finland. Policy and Internet 7 (1) 25–45.

Henrik Serup Christensen is Academy Research Fellow at SAMFORSK, Åbo Akademi University.

Maija Karjalainen is a PhD Candidate at the Department of Political Science and Contemporary History in the University of Turku, Finland.

Laura Nurminen is a Doctoral Candidate at the Department of Political and Economic Studies at Helsinki University, Finland.

These online campaigning organisations run multi-issue agendas, are geographically decentralized, and run sophisticated media strategies. The best known of these are MoveOn in the US, internationally focused Avaaz, and GetUp! in Australia. However, new online campaigning organisations are emerging all the time that more often than not have direct lineage through former staff and similar tactics to this first wave. These newer organisations include the UK-based 38 Degrees, SumOfUs that works on consumer issues to hold corporations accountable, and Change.Org, a for-profit organisation that hosts and develops petitions for grassroots groups.

Existing civil society focused organisations are also being challenged to fundamentally change their approach, to move political tactics and communications online, and to grow their member lists. David Karpf (2012) has branded this “MoveOn Effect”, where the success of online campaigning organisations like MoveOn has fundamentally changed and disrupted the advocacy organisation scene. But how has this shift occurred? How have these new organisations succeeded in being both innovative and politically successful?

One increasingly common answer is to focus on how they have developed low threshold online tactics where the risk to participants is reduced. This includes issue and campaign specific online petitions, letter writing, emails, donating money, and boycotts. The other answer is to focus more closely on the discursive tactics these organisations use in their campaigns, based on a shared commitment to a storytelling strategy, and the practical realisation of a ‘theory of change’. That is, to ask how campaigns produce successful stories that follow a concrete theory of why taking action inevitably leads to a desired result.

Storytelling is a device for explaining politics and a campaign via “cause and effect relations, through its sequencing of events, rather than by appeals to standards of logic and proof” (Polletta et al. 2011, 111). These campaign stories characteristically have a plot and identifiable characters, a beginning and middle to the story, but the recipient of the story can create, or rather act out, the end. Framing is important to understanding social movement action but a narrative or storytelling driven analysis focuses more on how language or rhetoric is used, and reveals the underlying “common sense” and emotional frames used in online campaigns’ delivery of messages (Polletta 2009). Polletta et al. (2011, 122) suggest that activists have been successful against better resourced and influential opponents and elites when they “sometimes but not always, have been able to exploit popular associations of narrative with people over power, and moral urgency over technical rationality”.

We have identified four stages of storytelling that need to occur for a campaign to be successful:

1. An emotional identification with the issue by the story recipient, to mobilize participation
2. A shared sense of community on the issue, to build solidarity (‘people over power’)
3. Moral urgency for action (rather than technical persuasion), to resolve the issue and create social change
4. Securing of public and political support by neutralising counter-movements.

The new online campaigning organisations all prioritise a storytelling approach in their campaigns, using it to build their own autobiographical story and to differentiate what they do from ‘politics as usual’, characterised as party-based, adversarial politics. Harvard scholar and organising practitioner Marshall Ganz’s ideas on the practice of storytelling underpin the philosophy of the New Organizing Institute, which provides training for increasing numbers of online activists. Having received training, these professional campaigners informally join the network of established and emerging ‘theory of change’ organisations such as MoveOn, AVAAZ, Organising for America, the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, SumOfUs, and so on.

GetUp! is a member of this network, has over 600,000 members in Australia, and has conducted high-profile public policy campaigns on issues as diverse as mental health, electoral law, same-sex marriage, and climate change. GetUp!’s communications strategy tries to use storytelling to reorient Australian political debate — and the nature of politics itself — in an affective way. And underpinning all their political tactics is the construction of effective online campaign stories. GetUp! has used stories to help citizens, and to a lesser extent, decision-makers, identify with an issue, build community, and act in recognition of the moral urgency for political change.

Yet despite GetUp!’s commitment to a storytelling technique, it does not always work — these organisations rarely publicise their failed campaigns, or those that do not even get past the initial email ‘ask’. It is important to look at how campaigns unfold to see how storytelling develops, and also to judge whether it is a success or not. This moves the analysis onto an organisation’s whole campaign, rather than studying only decontextualised emails or online petitions. In contrasting two campaigns in-depth we judged one on mental health policy to be a success in meeting the four storytelling criteria; and the other on climate change policy (which was promoted externally as a success) to actually be a storytelling failure.

The mental health story was able to build solidarity and emotional identification around families and friends of those with illness (not sufferers themselves) after celebrity experts launched the campaign to bring awareness to and increase funding for mental health. Mental health was presented by GetUp! as a purely moral dilemma, with very little mention by any opponents of the economic implications of policy reform. In the end the policy was changed, an extra $2.2 billion of funding for mental health was announced in the 2011 Federal Budget, and the Australian Prime Minister appeared with GetUp! in an online video to make the funding announcement.

GetUp’s climate change storytelling, however, failed on all four criteria. Despite national policy change taking place similar to what they had advocated, GetUp!’s climate change campaign did not achieve the level of member or public mobilisation achieved by their mental health campaign. GetUp! used partisan, adversarial tactics that can be partly attributed to climate change becoming an increasingly polarised issue in Australian political debate. This was particularly the case as the oppositional counter-movement successfully reframed climate change as solely an economic issue, focusing on the imposition of an expensive new tax. This story defeated GetUp’s moral urgency story, and their attempt to create ‘people-power’ mobilised for a shared environmental concern.

Why is thinking about this important? For a few reasons. It helps us to see online tactics within the context of a broader political campaign, and challenges us to think about how to judge both successful mobilisation and political influence of hybrid online campaign organisations. Yet it also points to the limitations of an affective approach based on moral urgency alone. Technical persuasion and, more often than not, economic reality still matter for both mobilisation and political change.

References

Chadwick, Andrew (2007) “Digital Network Repertoires and Organizational Hybridity” Political Communication, 24 (3): 283-301.

Karpf, David (2012) The MoveOn Effect: The unexpected transformation of American political advocacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Polletta, Francesca (2009) “Storytelling in social movements” in Culture, Social Movements and Protest ed. Hank Johnston Surrey: Ashgate, 33-54.

Polletta, Francesca, Pang Ching, Bobby Chen, Beth Gharrity Gardner, and Alice Motes (2011) “The sociology of storytelling” Annual Review of Sociology, 37: 109–30.

Read the full paper: Vromen, A. and Coleman, W. (2013) Online Campaigning Organizations and Storytelling Strategies: GetUp! in Australia. Policy and Internet 5 (1).

The new networks of political protest, which harness these new online technologies are often described in theoretical terms as being ‘fluid’ and ‘horizontal’, in contrast to the rigid and hierarchical structure of earlier protest organization. Yet such theoretical assumptions have seldom been tested empirically. This new language of networks may be useful as a shorthand to describe protest dynamics, but does it accurately reflect how protest networks mediate communication and coordinate support?

The global protests against austerity and inequality which took place on May 12, 2012 provide an interesting case study to test the structure and strength of a transnational online protest movement. The ‘indignados’ movement emerged as a response to the Spanish government’s politics of austerity in the aftermath of the global financial crisis. The movement flared in May 2011, when hundreds of thousands of protesters marched in Spanish cities, and many set up camps ahead of municipal elections a week later.

These protests contributed to the emergence of the worldwide Occupy movement. After the original plan to occupy New York City’s financial district mobilised thousands of protesters in September 2011, the movement spread to other cities in the US and worldwide, including London and Frankfurt, before winding down as the camp sites were dismantled weeks later. Interest in these movements was revived, however, as the first anniversary of the ‘indignados’ protests approached in May 2012.

To test whether the fluidity, horizontality and connectivity often claimed for online protest networks holds true in reality, tweets referencing these protest movements during May 2012 were collected. These tweets were then classified as relating either to the ‘indignados’ or Occupy movement, using hashtags as a proxy for content. Many tweets, however, contained hashtags relevant for the two movements, creating bridges across the two streams of information. The users behind those bridges acted as  information ‘brokers’, and are fundamentally important to the global connectivity of the two movements: they joined the two streams of information and their audiences on Twitter. Once all the tweets were classified by content and author, it emerged that around 6.5% of all users posted at least one message relevant for the two movements by using hashtags from both sides jointly.

Analysis of the Twitter data shows that this small minority of ‘brokers’ play an important role connecting users to a network that would otherwise be disconnected. Brokers are significantly more active in the contribution of messages and more visible in the stream of information, being re-tweeted and mentioned more often than other users. The analysis also shows that these brokers play an important role in the global network, by helping to keep the network together and improving global connectivity. In a simulation, the removal of brokers fragmented the network faster than the removal of random users at the same rate.

What does this tell us about global networks of protest? Firstly, it is clear that global networks are more vulnerable and fragile than is often assumed. Only a small percentage of users disseminate information across transnational divides, and if any of these users cease to perform this role, they are difficult to immediately replace, thus limiting the assumed fluidity of such networks. The decentralized nature of online networks, with no central authority imposing order or even suggesting a common strategy, make the role of ‘brokers’ all the more vital to the survival of networks which cross national borders.

Secondly, the central role performed by brokers suggests that global networks of online protest lack the ‘horizontal’ structure that is often described in the literature. Talking about horizontal structures can be useful as shorthand to refer to decentralised organisations, but not to analyse the process by which these organisations materialise in communication networks. The distribution of users in those networks reveals a strong hierarchy in terms of connections and the ability to communicate effectively.

Future research into online networks, then, should keep in mind that the language of protest networks in the digital age, particularly terms like horizontality and fluidity, do not necessarily stand up to empirical scrutiny. The study of contentious politics in the digital age should be evaluated, first and foremost, through the lens of what protesters actually reveal through their actions.

Read the paper: Sandra Gonzalez-Bailon and Ning Wang (2013) The Bridges and Brokers of Global Campaigns in the Context of Social Media.

The personal networks that are the main channels of information flow in sites such as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn mean that we don’t need to actively seek out particular information; it can be served to us with no more effort than that of maintaining a connection with our contacts. News, opinions, and calls for justice are now shared and forwarded by our friends—and their friends—in a constant churn of information, all attached to familiar names and faces. Given we are more likely to pass on information if the source belongs to our social circle, this has had an important impact on the information environment within which protest movements are initiated and develop.

Mobile connectivity is also important for understanding contemporary protest, given that the ubiquitous streams of synchronous information we access anywhere are shortening our reaction times. This is important, as the evolution of mass recruitments—whether they result in flash mobilisations, slow burns, or simply damp squibs—can only be properly understood if we have a handle on the distribution of reaction times within a population. The increasing integration of the mainstream media into our personal networks is also important, given that online networks (and independent platforms like Indymedia) are not the clear-cut alternative to corporate media they once were. We can now write on the walls or feeds of mainstream media outlets, creating two-way communication channels and public discussion.

Online petitions have also transformed political protest; lower information diffusion costs mean that support (and signatures) can be scaled up much faster. These petitions provide a mine of information for researchers interested in what makes protests succeed or fail. The study of cascading behaviour in online networks suggests that most chain reactions fail quickly, and most petitions don’t gather that much attention anyway. While large cascades tend to start at the core of networks, network centrality is not always a guarantor of success.

So what does a successful cascade look like? Work by Duncan Watts has shown that the vast majority of cascades are small and simple, terminating within one degree of an initial adopting ‘seed.’ Research has also shown that adoptions resulting from chains of referrals are extremely rare; even for the largest cascades observed, the bulk of adoptions often took place within one degree of a few dominant individuals. Conversely, research on the spreading dynamics of a petition organised in opposition to the 2002-2003 Iraq war showed a narrow but very deep tree-like distribution, progressing through many steps and complex paths. The deepness and narrowness of the observed diffusion tree meant that it was fragile—and easily broken at any of the levels required for further distribution. Chain reactions are only successful with the right alignment of factors, and this becomes more likely as more attempts are launched. The rise of social media means that there are now more attempts.

One consequence of these—very recent—developments is the blurring of the public and the private. A significant portion of political information shared online travels through networks that are not necessarily political, but that can be activated for political purposes as circumstances arise. Online protest networks are decentralised structures that pull together local sources of information and create efficient channels for a potentially global diffusion, but they replicate the recruitment dynamics that operated in social networks prior to the emergence of the Internet.

The wave of protests seen in 2011—including the Arab Spring, the Spanish Indignados, and the Global Occupy Campaign—reflects this global interdependence of localised, personal networks, with protest movements emerging spontaneously from the individual actions of many thousands (or millions) of networked users. Political protest movements are seldom stable and fixed organisational structures, and online networks are inherently suited to channeling this fluid commitment and identity. However, systematic research to uncover the bridges and precise network mechanisms that facilitate cross-border diffusion is still lacking. Decentralized networks facilitate mobilisations of unprecedented reach and speed—but are actually not very good at maintaining momentum, or creating particularly stable structures. For this, traditional organisations are still relevant, even while they struggle to maintain a critical mass.

The general failure of traditional organisations to harness the power of these personal networks results from their complex structure, which complicates any attempts at prediction, planning, and engineering. Mobilization paths are difficult to predict because they depend on the right alignment of conditions on different levels—from the local information contexts of individuals who initiate or sustain diffusion chains, to the global assembly of separate diffusion branches. The networked chain reactions that result as people jump onto bandwagons follow complex paths; furthermore, the cumulative effects of these individual actions within the network are not linear, due to feedback mechanisms that can cause sudden changes and flips in mobilisation dynamics, such as exponential growth.

Of course, protest movements are not created by social media technologies; they provide just one mechanism by which a movement can emerge, given the right social, economic, and historical circumstances. We therefore need to focus less on the specific technologies and more on how they are used if we are to explain why most mobilisations fail, but some succeed. Technology is just a part of the story—and today’s Twitter accounts will soon look as dated as the electronic gizmos used by the Zapatistas in the Chiapas jungle.

Meanwhile, less attention is paid on the fact that the Internet has raised new issues for the policy making agenda around which activists are mobilising, such as issues related to internet governance, online freedom of expression, digital privacy or copyright. Contemporary social movements serve as indicators of new core challenges within society, and can thus constitute an enriching resource for the policy debate arena, particularly with regards to the urgent issues raised by the fast development of the Internet. The literature on social movements is rich in examples of campaigns that have successfully influenced public policy. Classic works have proved how major reforms can start as a consequence of civic mobilisations, and the history provides evidence of the influence of collective action within policy debates on environmental, national security, and peace issues.

However, as mentioned above and argued by Giugni (2004), social movement research has traditionally paid more attention to the process rather than the outcomes of mobilisations. The difficulty of identifying the consequences of collective action and the factors that contribute to its success may lie behind this tendency. As Gamson (1975) argues, the notion of success is elusive and can be most usefully defined with reference to a set of outcomes; these may include the new advantages gained by the group’s beneficiaries after a challenge with targets, or they may refer to the status of the challenging group and its legitimacy.

As for the factors determining success, some scholars believe that collective action is likely to succeed when its claims are close to the aims of political elites. Others, like Kriesi (1995), note that government responses depend on the forms and tactics of contentious politics. Activists occupy different positions on the spectrum between radical and reformist, which in turn affects their willingness to engage with policy-makers. For instance, movements pursuing a type of ‘prefigurative’ politics tend to avoid direct contact with policy-makers, focusing instead on building alternatives which ‘prefigure’ the values that they would like to see on a grander scale.

The Internet has raised new questions around the outcomes of collective action and its interface with policy making. Internet governance, for instance, constitutes a new source of contentious politics, while the use of the Internet for the organisation of protest influences the forms of contemporary collective action. As a tool of collective action, the Internet facilitates the rapid organisation of protests around issues of public concern. Mobilizations can be organised without a formal hierarchy in place, and spread easily as online networking helps the creation of flexible ‘opt-in/opt-out’ coalitions. Information about protest can diffuse through online interpersonal networks and alternative media, and can capture the attention of mainstream news outlets. In addition, the Internet has expanded the ‘repertoire of contention’ of current movements. Petitions, direct action, and occupations now have their online counterparts with tactics such as email bombings, DDoS attacks, and e-petitions.

The affordances of online tools are thought to be affecting the characteristics of collective action and thus its capacities for policy change. Compared to past mobilisations, current movements tend to be more decentralised and flexible, constituted by loose coalitions between a plurality of actors. They are also more inclusive, addressing a diverse and at times incongruent combination of issues. As Della Porta (2005) points out, online mobilisations tend to have a more temporary and fleeting character as they can emerge and dissolve with equal speed; they are also more global in nature, since they can scale up easily and at a low cost.

At the same time, the Internet has facilitated the rise of a what Chadwick defines as new ‘hybrid’ type of civil society actor who combines traditional tactics, such as petitioning, with the more flexible forms of organising favoured by less institutional groups. Organizations like MoveOn in the U.S., Avaaz on the transnational level, and GetUp! in Australia use the power of the Internet to influence policy makers. The Internet helps such organisations to operate at a very low cost, which in turn allows them to be flexible and easily switch the focus of campaigns around issues that capture the public interest.

However, the Internet has become in itself an object of policy and further attention must be paid in considering its implications as a source of new contentious politics. Melucci (1996) argues that research on collective action should pay attention to the new types of inequality that generate contentious politics, rather than restricting its focus to the forms of mobilisations. Studies of online collective action should thus consider the Internet not only as a tool for practicing politics but also as a new “dominant discourse” which produces new claims and inequalities.

Current inequalities in governing digital mediated communication generate what Kriesi (1995) calls ‘windows of opportunities’ for collective action to play an important role in policy making on Internet-related issues. Within this framework, an increasing body of research is addressing collective action around the governance of the Internet, the regulation of free and open software, privacy and data retention, file sharing and copyright issues, and online freedom of expression as a fundamental human right.

Whether and to what extent these new types of actors and mobilisations organised through and around the Internet can have an effect on policy making is an issue requiring further research. For instance, the decentralised and temporary character of some movements , together with their lack of clearly identified leaders and spokespersons can make it difficult in establishing themselves as legitimate representatives of public opinion. New types of ‘hybrid’ actors may encounter problems in establishing themselves as legitimate representatives of public opinion. In addition, new online tactics like e-petitions, which require limited time and commitment from participants, tend to have a weaker impact on policy makers. At the same time, the technical nature of Internet regulation complicates efforts to influence public opinion due to the degree of knowledge necessary for the lay public to understand the issues at stake.

Despite these potential limitations, collective action through and around the internet can enrich policy making. It can help to connect local voices with policy makers and facilitate their involvement in policy-making processes. It can also contribute to new policy debates around urgent issues concerning the Internet. As the Policy and Internet special issue on ‘Online Collective Action and Policy Change’ explores, online collective action can thus constitute an important resource and participant in policy debates with whom policy makers should create new lines of dialogue.

Read the full article at: Calderaro, A. and Kavada A., (2013) “Challenges and Opportunities of Online Collective Action for Policy Change“, Policy and Internet 5(1).

Twitter: @andreacalderaro / @AnastasiaKavada
Web: Andrea’s Personal Page / Anastasia’s Personal Page

References

Giugni, Marco. 2004. Social Protest and Policy Change : Ecology, Antinuclear, and Peace Movements in Comparative Perspective. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Gamson, William A. 1975. The Strategy of Social Protest. Homewood, Ill.: Dorsey Press.

Kriesi, Hanspeter. 1995. “The Political Opportunity Structure of New Social Movements: its Impact on their Mobilization.” In The Politics of Social Protest, eds. J. Jenkins and B. Dermans. London: UCL Press, pp. 167–198.

Della Porta, Donatella, and Mario Diani. 2006. Social Movements: An Introduction. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub.

Melucci, Alberto. 1996. Challenging Codes: Collective Action in the Information Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Protesters in Libya called for their own ‘day of rage’ on February 17, 2011, marked by violent protests in several major cities, including the capitol Tripoli. As they transformed from ‘protestors’ to ‘Opposition forces’ they began pushing information onto Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, reporting their firsthand experiences of what had turned into a civil war virtually overnight. The evolving humanitarian crisis prompted the United Nations to request the creation of the Libya Crisis Map, which was made public on March 6, 2011. Other, more focused crisis maps followed, and were widely distributed on Twitter.

While the map was initially populated with humanitarian information pulled from the media and online social networks, as the imposition of an internationally enforced No Fly Zone (NFZ) over Libya became imminent, information began to appear on it that appeared to be of a tactical military nature. While many people continued to contribute conventional humanitarian information to the map, the sudden shift toward information that could aid international military intervention was unmistakable.

How useful was this information, though? Agencies in the U.S. Intelligence Community convert raw data into useable information (incorporated into finished intelligence) by utilizing some form of the Intelligence Process. As outlined in the U.S. military’s joint intelligence manual, this consists of six interrelated steps all centered on a specific mission. It is interesting that many Twitter users, though perhaps unaware of the intelligence process, replicated each step during the Libyan civil war; producing finished intelligence adequate for consumption by NATO commanders and rebel leadership.

It was clear from the beginning of the Libyan civil war that very few people knew exactly what was happening on the ground. Even NATO, according to one of the organization’s spokesmen, lacked the ground-level informants necessary to get a full picture of the situation in Libya. There is no public information about the extent to which military commanders used information from crisis maps during the Libyan civil war. According to one NATO official, “Any military campaign relies on something that we call ‘fused information’. So we will take information from every source we can… We’ll get information from open source on the internet, we’ll get Twitter, you name any source of media and our fusion centre will deliver all of that into useable intelligence.”

The data in these crisis maps came from a variety of sources, including journalists, official press releases, and civilians on the ground who updated blogs and/or maintaining telephone contact. The @feb17voices Twitter feed (translated into English and used to support the creation of The Guardian’s and the UN’s Libya Crisis Map) included accounts of live phone calls from people on the ground in areas where the Internet was blocked, and where there was little or no media coverage. Twitter users began compiling data and information; they tweeted and retweeted data they collected, information they filtered and processed, and their own requests for specific data and clarifications.

Information from various Twitter feeds was then published in detailed maps of major events that contained information pertinent to military and humanitarian operations. For example, as fighting intensified, @LibyaMap’s updates began to provide a general picture of the battlefield, including specific, sourced intelligence about the progress of fighting, humanitarian and supply needs, and the success of some NATO missions. Although it did not explicitly state its purpose as spreading mission-relevant intelligence, the nature of the information renders alternative motivations highly unlikely.

Interestingly, the Twitter users featured in a June 2011 article by the Guardian had already explicitly expressed their intention of affecting military outcomes in Libya by providing NATO forces with specific geographical coordinates to target Qadhafi regime forces. We could speculate at this point about the extent to which the Intelligence Community might have guided Twitter users to participate in the intelligence process; while NATO and the Libyan Opposition issued no explicit intelligence requirements to the public, they tweeted stories about social network users trying to help NATO, likely leading their online supporters to draw their own conclusions.

It appears from similar maps created during the ongoing uprisings in Syria that the creation of finished intelligence products by crisis mappers may become a regular occurrence. Future study should focus on determining the motivations of mappers for collecting, processing, and distributing intelligence, particularly as a better understanding of their motivations could inform research on the ethics of crisis mapping. It is reasonable to believe that some (or possibly many) crisis mappers would be averse to their efforts being used by military commanders to target “enemy” forces and infrastructure.

Indeed, some are already questioning the direction of crisis mapping in the absence of professional oversight (Global Brief 2011): “[If] crisis mappers do not develop a set of best practices and shared ethical standards, they will not only lose the trust of the populations that they seek to serve and the policymakers that they seek to influence, but (…) they could unwittingly increase the number of civilians being hurt, arrested or even killed without knowing that they are in fact doing so.”

Read the full paper: Stottlemyre, S., and Stottlemyre, S. (2012) Crisis Mapping Intelligence Information During the Libyan Civil War: An Exploratory Case Study. Policy and Internet 4 (3-4).

The Internet can be hugely useful to coordinate disaster relief efforts, or to help rebuild affected communities. Paul Millar came to the OII on 21 May 2012 to discuss the CEISMIC archive project and the role of digital humanities after a major disaster (below). We talked to him afterwards.

Ed: You have collected a huge amount of information about the earthquake and people’s experiences that would otherwise have been lost: how do you think it will be used?

Paul: From the beginning I was determined to avoid being prescriptive about eventual uses. The secret of our success has been to stick to the principles of open data, open access and collaboration — the more content we can collect, the better chance future generations have to understand and draw conclusions from our experiences, behaviour and decisions. We have already assisted a number of research projects in public health, the social and physical sciences; even accounting. One of my colleagues reads balance sheets the way I read novels, and discovers all sorts of earthquake-related signs of cause and effect in them. I’d never have envisaged such a use for the archive. We have made our ontology is as detailed and flexible as possible in order to help with re-purposing of primary material: we currently use three layers of metadata — machine generated, human-curated and crowd sourced. We also intend to work more seriously on our GIS capabilities.

Ed: How do you go about preserving this information during a period of tremendous stress and chaos? Was it difficult to convince people of the importance of this longer-term view?

Paul: There was no difficulty convincing people of the importance of what we were doing: everyone got it immediately. However, the scope of this disaster is difficult to comprehend, even for those of us who live with it every day. We’ve lost a lot of material already, and we’re losing more everyday. Our major telecommunications provider recently switched off its CDMA network — all those redundant phones are gone, and with them any earthquake pictures or texts that might have been stored. One of the things I’d encourage every community to do now is make an effort to preserve key information against a day of disaster. If we’d digitised all our architectural plans of heritage buildings and linked them electronically to building reports and engineering assessments, we might have saved more.

Ed: It seems obvious in hindsight that the Internet can (and should be) be tremendously useful in the event of this sort of disaster: how do we ensure that best use is made?

Paul: The first thing is to be prepared, even in a low-key way, for whatever might happen. Good decision-making during a disaster requires accurate, accessible, and comprehensive data: digitisation and data linking are key activities in the creation of such a resource — and robust processes to ensure that information is of high quality are vital. One of the reasons CEISMIC works is because it is a federated archive — an ideal model for this sort of event — and we were able to roll it out extremely quickly. We could also harness online expert communities, crowd-sourcing efforts, open sourcing of planning processes, and robust vetting of information and auditing of outcomes. A lot of this needs to be done before a disaster strikes, though. For years I’ve encountered the mantra ‘we support research but we don’t fund databases’. We had to build CEISMIC because there was no equivalent, off-the-shelf product — but that development process lost us a year at least.

Ed: What equivalent efforts are there to preserve information about major disasters?

Paul: The obvious ones are the world-leading projects out of Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, including their 9/11 Digital Archive. One problem for any archive of this nature is that information doesn’t exist in a free and unmediated space. For example, the only full record of the pre-quake Christchurch cityscape is historic Google Street View; one of the most immediate sources of quake information was Twitter; many people communicated with the world via Facebook, and so on. It’s a question we’re all engaging with: who owns that information? How will it be preserved and accessed? We’ve had a lot of interest in what we are doing, and plenty of consultation and discussion with groups who see our model as being of some relevance to them. The UC CEISMIC project is essentially a proof of concept — versions of it could be rolled out around the world and left to tick over in the background, quietly accumulating material in the event that it is needed one day. That’s a small cost alongside losing a community’s heritage.

Ed: What difficulties have you encountered in setting up the archive?

Paul: Where do I start? There were the personal difficulties — my home damaged, my family traumatised, the university damaged, staff and students all struggling in different ways to cope: it’s not the ideal environment to try and introduce a major IT project. But I felt I had to do something, partly as a therapeutic response. I saw my engineering and geosciences colleagues at the front of the disaster, explaining what was happening, helping to provide context and even reassurance. For quite a while I wondered what on earth a professor of literature could do. It was James Smithies – now CEISMIC’s Project Manager – who reminded me of the 9/11 Archive. The difficulties we’ve encountered since have been those that beset most under-resourced projects — trying to build a million dollar project on a much smaller budget. A lot of the future development will be funding dependent, so much of my job will be getting the word out and looking for sponsors, supporters and partners. But although we’re understaffed, over-worked and living in a shaky city, the resilience, courage, humanity and good will of so many people never ceases to amaze and hearten me.

Ed: Your own research area is English Literature: has that had any influence on the sorts of content that have been collected, or your own personal responses to it?

Paul: My interest in digital archiving started when teaching New Zealand Literature at Victoria University of Wellington. In a country this small most books have a single print run of a few hundred; and even our best writers are lucky to have a text make it to a second edition. I therefore encountered the problem that many of the texts I wanted to prescribe were out of print: digitisation seemed like a good solution. In New Zealand the digital age has negated distance — the biggest factor preventing us from immediate and meaningful engagement with the rest of the world. CEISMIC actually started life as an acronym (the Canterbury Earthquakes Images, Stories and Media Integrated Collection), and the fact that ‘stories’ sits centrally certainly represents my own interest in the way we use narratives to make sense of experience. Everyone who went through the earthquakes has a story, and every story is different. I’m fascinated by the way a collective catastrophe becomes so much more meaningful when it is broken down into individual narratives. Ironically, despite the importance of this project to me, I find the earthquakes extremely difficult to write about in any personal or creative way. I haven’t written my own earthquake story yet.

Paul Millar was talking to blog editor David Sutcliffe.

Small changes in individual actions can have large effects at the aggregate level; this opens up the potential for drawing incorrect conclusions about generative mechanisms when only aggregated patterns are analysed, as Schelling aimed to show in his classic example of racial segregation. 

Part of the reason why it has been so difficult to explore this connection between the individual and the collective — and the unintended consequences that arise from that connection — is lack of proper empirical data, particularly around the structure of interdependence that links individual actions. This relational information is what digital data is now providing; however, they present some new challenges to the social scientist, particularly those who are used to working with smaller, cross-sectional datasets. Suddenly, we can track and analyse the interactions of thousands (if not millions) of people with a time resolution that can go down to the second. The question is how to best aggregate that data and deal with the time dimension.

Interactions take place in continuous time; however, most digital interactions are recorded as events (i.e. sending or receiving messages), and different network structures emerge when those events are aggregated according to different windows (i.e. days, weeks, months). We still don’t have systematic knowledge on how transforming continuous data into discrete observation windows affects the networks of interaction we analyse. Reconstructing interpersonal networks (particularly longitudinal network data) used to be extremely time consuming and difficult; now it is relatively easy to obtain that sort of network data, but modelling and analysing them is still a challenge.

Another problem faced by social scientists using digital data is that most social networks are multiplex in nature, that is, we belong to many different networks that interact and affect each other by means of feedback effects: How do all these different network structures co-evolve? If we only focus on one network, such as Twitter, we lose information about how activity in other networks (like Facebook, or email, or offline communication) is related to changes in the network we observe. In our study on the Spanish protests, we only track part of the relevant activity: we have a good idea of what was happening on Twitter, but there were obviously lots of other communication networks simultaneously having an influence on people’s behaviour. And while it is exciting as a social scientist to be able to access and analyse huge quantities of detailed data about social movements as they happen, the Twitter network only provides part of the picture.

Finally, when analysing the cascading effects of individual actions there is also the challenge of separating out the effects of social influence and self-selection. Digital data allow us to follow cascading behaviour with better time resolution, but the observational data usually does not help discriminate if people behave similarly because they influence and follow each other or because they share similar attributes and motivations. Social scientists need to find ways of controlling for this self-selection in online networks; although digital data often lacks the demographic information that allows applying this control, digital technologies are also helping researchers conduct experiments that help them pin down the effects of social influence.

Digital data is allowing social scientists pose questions that couldn’t be answered before. However, there are many methodological challenges that need solving. This talk considers a few, emphasising that strong theoretical motivations should still direct the questions we pose to digital data.

Further reading:

Gonzalez-Bailon, S., Borge-Holthoefer, J. and Moreno, Y. (2013) Broadcasters and Hidden Influentials in Online Protest Diffusion. American Behavioural Scientist (forthcoming).

Gonzalez-Bailon, S., Wang, N., Rivero, A., Borge-Holthoefer, J., and Moreno, Y. (2012) Assessing the Bias in Communication Networks Sampled from Twitter. Working Paper.

Gonzalez-Bailon, S., Borge-Holthoefer, J., Rivero, A. and Moreno, Y. (2011) The Dynamics of Protest Recruitment Through an Online Network. Scientific Reports 1, 197. DOI: 10.1038/srep00197

González-Bailón, S., Kaltenbrunner, A. and Banchs, R.E. (2010) The Structure of Political Discussion Networks: A Model for the Analysis of Online Deliberation. Journal of Information Technology 25 (2) 230-243.