And she is also the author of twitter and tear gas, which is for sale after tonights program. And for those of you who are not familiar with World Affairs, we are an organization that seeks to explore problems and expand opportunities at the intersection of international policy, philanthropy and commerce where solutions to hard problems lie. We are recording tonights event with both via cspan, as well as more radio. So please do take a moment to silence your cell phones. Ask is we would like to thank kqeds audio engineer who is joining us this evening. Youll notice that we have blue question cards on your seats, so please do make use of them and write your questions down, and i will bring your questions up to the moderator. And given that we will be talking about social media in tonights program, we invite you all to get involved in our online conversation. You can use the hashtag World Affairs live if youd like to engage in online discussion. And id now like to introduce our moderator this evening. He is an adjunct professor at the school of information at ucberkeley where he teaches a course on digital activism. He is also the founder and editorinchief of China Digital times. We are delighted to have him here this evening, and so if you can all join me now in welcoming him, and he will introduce tonights speaker. [applause] thank you very much. Good evening. Its a pleasure to introduce our guest. Ill try my best, zeynep tufekci. [laughter] its a contributing opinion writer at new york times, we heard from anna. And what im most amazed is that she has been published widely on interactions about new technology, society, politics, culture. And new book and this new book, do we have a book . Twitter and tear gas the power and fragility of networked protests. Yeah. Of course, she is also a fellow Academic Research person, assistant professor at the school of information and library science, university of north carolina. And she is also faculty associate at Berkman Center for internet and the society at harvard. Okay. Please join me to welcome zeynep tufekci. [applause] so our topic is really social media and the political mobilization, a topic thats very close to my own heart. Zeynep, could you just share with us a little bit about yourself and how you came to write this book . Because not only because you are a scholar, but also you have been engaging with the movement. So, and you are from turkey. Yes. Im from turkey, and im actually startedded out as a technology person. I started out as a programmer. Of so what happened is i grew up in turkey, istanbul mostly, in the period following the 1980 military coup. I was a child, and the military coup, the postcoup era had very heavy seven veryship censorship. We had one tv channel. And it was also like even before, we had one tv channel, and all you could watch was mostly american shows. We watched little house on the prairie. I have to tell you, it makes no sense if youre from istanbul. [laughter] its about the frontier, its supposed to be middle of no where, and where im from, theres no middle of nowhere. Im, like, where are these people . [laughter] and we would watch things like that. And it made no sense to me. But what made sense to, for the people who controlled the tv was to show that instead of any kind of news, because there was a major conflict in the southeast part of turkey with the kurdish minority, there were all these other things going on, you know . The jails were full. So the military coup had instituted this heavy censorship regime. So for i was always a kid that was interested in math, science, i thought i was going to be a physicist. And then i, what happened to me was what happens to lots of kids who grow up thinking theyre going to be physicists, is that you learn about the atom bomb. And you have this atom bomb question like, whoa. Because youre a kid, and it seems like this and it is this horrible, annihilative technology. And i thought, you know what . I want a job that i can do, i can do quickly, i wanted to work very quickly, and i thought i wanted a profession that i would enjoy, that i would be connected to math and science and that wouldnt have ethical implications. So i accidentally picked computers and computer programming. It turns out they have ethical by the way, i studied physics as well. So there you go. How did you become interested in the movement . Yes. So it starts with me becoming a computer person, right . So when i started working as a programmer, one of my early jobs, i think my second or third job as a programmer, i was very young. Im still a teenager. It was working for ibm, okay . And i was supposed to have project where they had a mainframe that was made before i was born that was being used to localize a midilevel machine which ibm had. I couldnt figure out what to do with it, and ibm had an intranet. There is no internet in turkey, right . 80s . 90s, right . Were early 90s. And all of a sudden i could just get on ibms intranet, and i would be, like, this mainframe, theres this thing i need to figure to out. I dont know what i need to do. And somebody from japan would say, oh, look. I wrote that. Heres how you do it. So a couple of things happened. I the still had one tv channel in heavy censorship, but i had glimpsed that. And also because i was the still a teenager and working at big company, and there was a lot of who is this girl working here . Back then things were more formal even among programmers. But i had experiences the promise of internet as this place where people didnt know who you were, and you could just talk. Its not like that anymore at all. Right . It was just so liberating. And i thought this is going to change everything. And then the internet came to turkey, and i was, like, sign me up, right . So i signed up. And i got really interested in how this could be used to break censorship and how to and i wanted to study the social science. So i switched my major. I studied sociology, i used my programming skills mostly to pay for college, and then i wanted the really come to the United States partly because i thought thats where its happening. Im going to study all this. Its going to be so interesting. And i got accepted to grad School Without even knowing what grad school was really, because i, you know, just kind of and i started trying to understand how this could change, you know, for positive social change. So thats kind of my journey. And it started with the First Movement i encountered with my online contacts was that early . Yes, its early. But i caught the tail end of it, so i wasnt i didnt get the beginning of it, i caught the tail end of it. I was so curious, because i wanted to see things for myself. I went to [inaudible] i was, like, im going to go to those mountains, and im going to find out how these people are using the internet in mexico. Right. And one of the first things i realized was what people think is happening and whats happening are so different, because theres all this discussion and hype about on the internet. And i went to these mountain villages. They didnt have electricity, let alone the internet, right . So they what was happening was the antinafta networks that had formed and had just started using the internet had grabbed this new, like, this peasant revolution, indigenous peasant revolution, and kind of sort of had taken it. So instead of these indigenous peasants using the internet story that we were hearing, i found something really different. And it was my first glimpse into, okay, this is really important. This changes everything. Because it was very important that they were afforded a level of protection because of the publicity. Youd had contemporaneous movements that were crush by the mexican military while there was so much attention on it. But it wasnt really happening the way the popular accounts were portraying what was happening. I found a very traditional indigenous peasant uprising. So that sort of got me started thinking about all the things that the public sphere changing too, and then i followed that i chronicle in the book i read the book, right. Yeah. There is so much vivid stories and cases that you put in in addition to the excellent theoretical framework. So that, to me, is your book is really stands out. Lets fast forward. Yes, the early internet, you know, the antiglobalization movement, and then arab spring. Then turkey. Right, then turkey. So heres what happened is when the arab spring, arab uprising started, i saw, wow, this is such a historic thing. And i went, right . You know, because im a programmer, so i can study big data, i can study online, but i also really like to study both surveys and observations just being there. So i started following the arab spring as it sort of blossomed and then started collapsing by both the repression and what happened with the movement. So as i was following it in my home country, in istanbul, there was a major movement. And, in fact, they happened, like, three blocks from where i born. Like, if i was made to study a thing in the world, this is it, right . I jumped on a plane, i went there. And this, thats where i started sort of figuring out the analytic framework that you find in the book. Because until then with every movement i was telling myself a casebycase story. I was saying, you know, occupy p, its in new york, a lot of u. S. Characteristics. Barcelona, spain has a tradition of an around kim, so a anarchism. Civil society was crushed in e egypt, so then when i saw the protest in a country that i know very well im obviously from there in a city thats my city, and i saw something that i had never seen in turkey before, this leaderless, euphoric, very occupation, to no prior organization, comes from nowhere, and i thought this doesnt happen in turkey. And this looks like the other movements im following. Like, this looks so much of course, every country has specific things. So i started thinking about how the political culture, and part of it is globalization from below. But i started also thinking about there is a framework to how technology afford meaning things that it enables, kind of allows movements to do certain things in certain ways, and its impacting their trajectories. So thats kind of, that started got me thinking about the book. And since then, of course, this is been other movements dub. Yes, thats really wonderful that you have this technology background, you came from a country with a censorship, and activism is part of, you know, your, how growing up experiences. And then you studied in america and followed the movement not only intellectually, but also physically. Then you actively participated. Then you came this book. But share with us what are the main things that in the book, especially you quoted so much examples, cases in arabic spring and politically in turkey. We all know, we are all being empowered by technology here. Everybody here in the bay area Knows Technology was ad good thing. Just a good thing . What you learn . So heres the framework. Technologys absolutely empowering, right . You know, because right now if you want to censor something, its really hard. You can get on twitter, you can get on facebook, you can get your, get the word out. You can, look at the postelection United States, right . The womens march, which wases a really large march, was organized starting with a Facebook Post. You know, it went from Facebook Post to a Million People in the streets, a couple months. Of course, the organizers did a lot of work. But, and heres the but, theres a misleading sense to this empowerment. Its not that it doesnt empower in some ways. Change the conversation, get around censorship, organize a large march, right . Technology can really help, social media can really help do this. But to understand what it, that thats why my book title is also the fragilities, it introduces some weaknesses. Let me put it this way, there are weaknesses to doing things this fast. And, i mean, think about climbing Mount Everest, right . A lot of people want to climb Mount Everest because its in their list of things they would like to do. And theres an industry that helps you climb Mount Everest. There are sherpas who are local mountaineer people. They know how to climb Mount Everest, and they will carry your stuff for you. They will carry your backpack, extra oxygen. Because if youre above 8,000 feet, thin air is very dangerous, so they will carry oxygen, you dont experience that. So it all sounds great. Youre empowered to climb Mount Everest. But the problem is you havent really had the time to learn how to be a mountaineer. If youve got the sherpas carrying all your stuff, right, and you get above 8,000 feet, and if nothing goes wrong, great. But oxygen tanks malfunction, the weather turns, theres some queuing because so many people are climbing, and you get, you know, you kind of have temperature issues. If you havent climbed ten mountains before and if you havent learned how to be a mountaineer and you find yourself above 8,000 feet with the help of sherpas, youre in trouble. And in fact, i started using this metaphor, and right after i started using the metaphor, there were a lot of deaths on everest, and i thought maybe i should stop using this metaphor. But then i thought, you know what . A lot of my friends are in jail in egypt and elsewhere, so maybe its an apt metaphor today. The problem is when you scale up from zero to hundred miles from a Facebook Post to big march, womens march, a Million People maybe, maybe more, what you dont have, it looks like kind of street protests in the past, say, march on washington 1963. But the march on washington in 1963 took ten years to get there. Right . Is when you march like that, youre not just marching. You built this infrastructure. So if youre in power, youre looking at these people and youre thinking, huh, if they can pull off this march because it wasnt easy to pull off, right . If they can pull off this march, the power they built, they can do other things. Its like being a real mountaineer. If you can climb k2, another big mountain, you can do other things. Its a capacity you built over time. If youre using Digital Technology to scale up really fast, its a great thing if you recognize its the very first moment. But if you think it prepared you the same way years and years of bidding capacity infrastructure prepared you, youre misled. And thats what i found with a lot of movements today, including in the u. S. Right now. They see this huge march and theyre thinking, wow, we can pull this off. And, of course, people have worked hard. I march. Im not belittling i watched, i saw how people had put so much work in it. But three months of work will only build so much capacity. And what you also dont have when you do this leaderless, big thing is you dont have a means to do collective decision making, right . You cannot change tactics. You. Go from, like, the march. Whats next . Theres always a whats next. Successful movements go from one thing to another as the time changes. A lot of these sort of networked, Leaderless Movements starts with a hashtag, have the big march. Great. Whats next, is the big question. How are you going to decide the . You cannot decide this on facebook. You cannot decide this on twitter. Because the commercial platforms are not designed for decision making. I mean, facebook has the setup and algorithms, and its designed to keep you on the site. Have you ever been on facebook and thought, whoa, i just spent more time than i thought i would . Its designed to do that for you, right . The whole structure is like that. Now, if youre in a meeting, what do you want to happen . You want it to end. [laughter] right . A meeting, the thing you want most from meetings is for them to conclude. Whereas the thing facebook is design for is to keep you there forever. Like, that is not a platform you can just use to make decisions. So a lot of these movements, i feel, sometimes i say they have the internet is like springs in your feet. Youre jumping very high. The problem is you dont have the muscles necessarily to run fast. Its great if jumping is all youre going to do. Big marches, we can do that. But the kind of infrastructure building and tactical turns, movements need in collective decision making, not only does the internet not, like, scaling up very fast with digital tech not allow you to do that easily, it may even hinder you. Because now everybodys got a twitter account, and everybodys got a facebook account, and then you have everybody speaking how do we make collective decisions at scale. Those are things that i think these movements are really weak at. So its a very interesting combination. I cant say it hasnt empowered movements, because its empowered movements. But i also cant say it hasnt weakened movements because in some ways if you didnt have all this tech, youd have to do things sort of this longer way. And by the time you pulled off the march, youd have had to build that capacity. So thats kind of why the, why the title is this yes. And thats what this book has, to me, the value. Its also addressing both the strength and the weakness of those technologyempowered movement today. But lets even go a little further. I have so many questions to ask. For example, were talking about those instantaneously Leaderless Movement. You have them everywhere. America, turkey, middle east, hong kong, taiwan, name it. Does technology only empower protesters . No. No, no, no. It empowers the state. It empowers the state this so many ways. So, for example, when i grew up and when i found the internet, i thought, wow, censorship will never really be a thing, right . This is great. We can circumvent the censorship blogs. We have these networks. Which is not false. Even to this day even with all the censorship technologies, circumvention is widely practiced, and people get around censorship. What i didnt anticipate with the early internet which i see today is that if you cant break the link between information and people, what you can do is break the link between information and credibility. You can break the link between information and figuring out whats important. So you basically, government isnt terribly interested in keeping you from information, its interested this keeping you from doing certain things. And they can confuse you, flood you with information, use misinformation as a deliberate tactic, use credibility challenges and claims of hoaxes and fraud so that people are confused or distracted or misinformed to the point that they dont know what to do.