Thank you everyone and welcome to tonight program. We are very pleased to have joining us this evening zeynep tufecki. She is a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times as well as an assistant professor in the school of information and Library Science at the university of north carolina. And shes also the author of twitter and tear gas which is for sale after tonight 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 were solutions to our problems lie. We are recording ten nights event with both cspan as well as for radio. So please do take a moment to silence your cell phones, and would like to thank the audio engineer who is joining us this evening. You will notice we have a blue question cards on your seats so pleased to make use of them thought the program and writer programs that and i will bring them up to the moderator. Given that will be talking about social media in tonight 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 discussions. I would now like to introduce our moderator this evening. Qiang xiao is an adjunct professor at the school of information at uc berkeley where he teaches a course on digital activism. He is also the founder and editor in chief of China Digital times. We are delighted to have him here this evening, and so if you could all join me know in welcoming qiang xiao who will introduce tonight speaker. [applause] good evening. Its a pleasure to introduce our guest. Ill try my best, zeynep tufecki. Its a contributing opinion writer and New York Times. We heard from anna. And what i am most amazed is that she has been published widely interactions about new technology, society, politics, culture. In this new book do have a book . Twitter and tear gas. Of course she is also a fellow Economic Research person, assistant professor at school of information of Library Science, university of north carolina, and shes also faculty associate at Berkman Center for internet and society at harvard. Please join me to welcome zeynep tufecki. [applause] so our topic is really social media and the political mobilization, a topic that is 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 youre a scholar but also you have been engaging with the movement and you are from turkey. Yes, yes, i am from turkey ai actually started out as a technology person. I started out as a program. So it happened as i grew up in turkey, istanbul mainly, in the period following a 1980 military coup. I was a child, and the military coup, the postcoup era had very heavy 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 the house on the prairie. I have to tell you, it makes no sense if youre from istanbul. [laughing] because its about the frontier, supposed to be in the middle of nowhere. And where i am from there is the middle of nowhere. You did, its a part, you dig more theres another empire. Unlike where are these people . And we would watch things like that. It made no sense to me, but what made sense for the people who control 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 this heavy censorship regime. I was always a kid who is interested in Mad Scientist i i thought i was going to be a synthesis. And then what happened and he was what happened to lots of kids to grow up thinking they will be synthesis, is you learn about the atom bomb edge of this atom bomb question, like, youre a kid and it seems like, and it is, this horrible annihilated technology. And i thought you know what, i want a job that i can do, i can do quickly. I want it to work for 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 these ethical implications. I started physics as well. So when i became, starts with a becoming a computer person. When i started working as a programmer, one of my early jobs, i think my second or third job as a programmer, but im very young, still a teenager, was working for ibm. I was supposed to have this project where the heady mainframe that was made before i was born. That was being used to localize a machine which ibm had. I can really i could never figure what to do with the peer ibmhad an internet which meant it was a little internal internet and had to there is no internet in turkey, right . 90s, early 90s, and all of a sudden i could just get on ibm internet and i would be like this is the thing and did figure, i dont know what to do. Maybe somebody could japan would say i wrote that heres how you do it. A couple things happen. I still had like one tv channel in heavy censorship. I also want a glimpse of Global Communication would be like. And also because i was still a teenager and like working at the company and does a lot istanbul . Istanbul, yeah. Who is this girl working your . Actin things were more formal coming even among programs. But i had experienced the promise of internet as this place for people to know who you were and you could just talk. Its not like that anymore at all, right . But it was 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. So i signed up and i got really interested in how this could be used to break censorship, and i wanted to study the social side so i switched my major. I studied sociology. I used my programming skills mostly to pay for college, and then i wanted to really come to the United States, partly because i thought thats where its happening. Im going to study all this and it will be so interesting. I got accepted to grad School Without even knowing what grad school was, really because i just kind of, and i started to understand how this could change for positive social change. Thats kind of my journey, started with the first moment i encountered with my online context was early. Its early, but a cop the tail end of it so i wasnt come i didnt get the beginning of it. I cut the tail end of it. I was so curious because i wanted to see things myself. I was like im going to go to those bounds and im going to find out how these people using the internet. In mexico. Right. One of the first things i realize was what people think is happening and whats happening are so different because theres all this discussion and hype about the internet and went to the mountain villages. They didnt have electricity let alone the internet. But whats happening was the networks that had formed and that just are using the internet had grabbed this new pledge, like this as a revolution and kind of had sort of taken it as a solidarity movement. But they were the ones using internet. Instead of these indigenous peasants using the internet story we were hearing, i found something really different and it was my first glimpse into okay, this is really important. This changes everything because is important because it affords them a level of protection because of the places be. It contemporaneous while this is so much attention on it. It wasnt happening the way the popular accounts were portraying what was happening. I found it very traditional indigenous peasant uprising. So that sort of got me started inking about all the things that the public is fear changing, then i followed that i chronicle in the book i read the book, right, so there is so much vivid stories and cases you put in an addition to the excellent theoretical framework. So that to me is your book, really stands out. Let. Lets fastforward. The early internet, the antiglobalization movement, and then arab spring. Then turkey. So what happened is when the arab spring, arab uprising started, i thought this is such a historic thing. And i went to come right . Im the program so i can study they gave her i can study onlie but also really liked study both surveys and just being there. So i started following the arab spring and as it sort of blossomed and then started collapsing by both the repression and what happened with the movements, so as i was following it in my home country, in his temple theres major movement. And, in fact, it happened like three blocks from where i was born. If i was made to study a thing in the world, this is it, right . I jumped on a plane. I went there, and thats when 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 i casebycase story. I was saying occupy, its in new york, a lot of u. S. Characteristics, barcelona, a tradition anarchism so Leaderless Movement makes sense. So i was explaining a lot of the characters country by country pics of then when i saw the protest in a country that i know very well. Im obviously from there, in the city thats my city. And i saw something that ive never seen in turkey before. This leaderless, euphoric, very occupation, no prior organization come from nowhere. And i thought this doesnt happen in turkey. This looks like the other movements im following, like this look so much, of course every country specific things so start thinking about how the political culture, and part of it is conversation but i started also thinking about there is a framework to how technology afford, means an enables come is kind of allowing movements to do certain things in certain ways and impacting their trajectories. So thats kind of, the started, got me thinking about the book. And since then of course theres the other movements, hong kong. Wonderful that you have this technology background. You came from a country with a censorship, and activism is part of 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 our the main things that indie book especially you quote so many examples, cases and arab spring particularly in turkey, we all know, we are all being apart by technology here. Everybody in the bay area knows technology. Just a good thing . What if you learn . Heres the framework. Technology is absolutely empowering. Because right now if you want to censor something is really hard. You can get on twitter, facebook, you can get the word out. Look at the postelection United States. The womens march which was a really large of march was organized tarting with a Facebook Post. It went from Facebook Post 2 Million People in the streets, couple months. Of course the organizers did a lot of work, but, and heres the butt, theres a misleading sense of this apartment. Its not that it doesnt and power in some ways. Change the conversation, get a rent censorship, organize a large march, right . Technology can really help social media can really help do this. But to understand why my book, is also the fragility, it introduces some weakness. Let me put it this way. There are weaknesses to doing things this fast. Think about climbing out everest. A lot of people want to climb Mount Everest because its in their list of things that would like to do, and theres an industry that helps you climb Mount Everest. There are sherpas were local mountaineer people, they know how to climb Mount Everest and they will carry your stuff for you. They will carry your backpacks. They will carry extra oxygen. Because if youre above 8000 feet, then there is a dangerous so they will carry oxygen. It all sounds great. You are empowered to climb Mount Everest, but the problem is you havent really had the time to learn how to be a mountaineer. Youve got the sherpas carrying all your stuff, right, and you get above a thousand feet. And if nothing goes wrong, great. But oxygen tanks malfunction. The weather turns. Theres some cueing because so many people are climbing and you get, you kind of have temperature issues. If you happen client came hours before and if you havent learned how to be a mountaineer and you find yourself above 800f 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 a lot of my friends are in jail in egypt and elsewhere, so maybe its an apt metaphor to the dangers. The problem is when you scale up from zero to 100 miles, Facebook Post to a big march, womens march, a Million People maybe, maybe more, what you dont have, it looks like the kind of street protests in the past, say martin washington 1963. But the march on washington 1963 took ten years to get there, right . So when you march like that you are not just marching. You built this infrastructure. So if you are in power youre looking at this people and youre thinking, if they can pull off this march, because it was easy to fall off. 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 k2, anotherg mound, you can do other things. Its a capacity built over time. If youre using visual technology to scale up real 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 building capacity infrastructure prepared you, your misled. Thats what i find with a lot f movements today, including in the u. S. Right now, is it that they see the huge margin they are thinking we can pull this off. And, of course, people have worked hard. I marched. I watched. I saw people have put so much work in it, but three months of work will only build so much capacity. What you also dont have when you do this leaderless big thing is you dont have a means to do collective decisionmaking. You cannot change tactics. You go from the march, whats next . Theres always a whats next. Successful moves go from one thing to another as the time changes. A lot of these sort of network Leaderless Movement starts with a hashtag, havent march. Rape it whats next question. How are you going to decide this . You cannot decide on facebook. You cannot decide this on twitter because the commercial platforms are not design for decisionmaking. Facebook has the setup and algorithms, and its decide to keep you on the site. Ive been on facebook and i thought i just spent more time that i thought it would. Its designed to do that for you. He the whole structure is like that. If youre in a meeting, what do you want to happen . You want it to end, right . A meeting, the thing you want most from meetings is for them to conclude. Whereas the thing facebook is designed for is to keep either forever. That is not a platform you can just use to make decisions. A lot of these movements i feels, sometimes the internet is like springs in your feet. You are jumping very high. The problem is you dont have the muscles necessary 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 tactical terms, movements needed in collective decisionmaking, not only does the internet not like scaling up very fast with Digital Technology not allow you to do that easily, and may even hinder you because not everybody has got a twitter account and everybody got a facebook account and everybody speaking how do we make collective decisions at scale. Those are things i think these movements are really weak at, so its a very interesting combination. I cant say it hasnt empowered movement. Its empowered movement but also cant say it hasnt we can do this because in some ways if he didnt have all thi all the stau would have to do things sort of this longer way. And by the time you pulled off the march, youd have had to build capacity. So thats kind of why the title is this and thats what this book as, to me, the value is also addressing both the strength and thweakness of those technology empowered movements today. Lets even go further. I have so many questions. For example, were talking about those instantaneously Leaderless Movement. You have them everywhere, america, turkey, middle east, hong kong, taiwan, you name it. Does technology only empower protesters . No. No, no. It empowers the state . It empowers the state in so many ways. So for example, when i grew up and when i found the internet, i thought since a ship one never really be a thing, right . This is great. We can circumvent the censorship blogs. We had these networks. Which is not false. Even to the state even with all the censorship technology, circumvention is widely practiced in 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, the government isnt terribly interested in keeping you from information. Its interested in 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. This is really empowering for governments because if youre a social movement if your social change you need to convince people certain things. Where as if your government you just need to confuse them. Or if you want to stop change, if everybody is like i dont really know whats true, and somebody says this and theres like 50 things and all these claims, and theres misinformation and fake news and all of that, i dont know whats going on, thats a very effective way to curtail and to distract and to curtail the power of social movements. So