And commerce where solutions to hard problems lie. We are recording tonights event both by cspan and for radio, so take a moment to silence your cell phones and we would like to thank jane. Your question cards on your seats, so please make use of them and write your questions down and given we will be talking about social media and tonights program we invite you to get involved in our online conversation using the World Affairs alive, if youd like to engage in online discussion. I would now like to introduce our moderator this evening who is an adjunct professor at the school of information at uc berkeley where he teaches a course on digital activism. Hes also the founder and editor in chief of China Digital times. We are delighted to have him here this evening and if you could all join me in welcoming him who introduced tonights speaker. [applause]. Good evening. Pleasure. I will try my best. Zeynep tufekci, a contributing up in your and writer of the new york times. What i am most amazed is that she has been published wildly about the technology, society, politics, culture. This new book do we have a book . Twitter and tear gas the power and fragility of networked protest. Of course, she is also a fellow Academic Research person, assistant professor at a school of information and it Library Science university and shes also faculty associate at center for internet and society at harvard. Please join me to welcome zeynep tufekci. [applause]. Our topic is really social media and the political mobilization, a topic that is close to my own heart. Can you share with us a bit about yourself, how you came to write this book because not only because you are scholar, but also you have been in gauging and you are from turkey. Yes, im from turkey and actually started out as a technology person. I started out as a programmer. I grew up in turkey, istanbul mostly, following the 1982 i was a child in the military coup had very heady heavy censorship. We had one tv channel and it 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 you are from istanbul because its about the frontier in the middle of nowhere and where i am from there is no middle of nowhere like you dig theres empire in needed more and theres another empire and im like where are these people and we would watch things like that and it made no sense to me, but what made sense 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, the jails are full, so the military coup had instituted this heavy censorship so for i was a kid that was interested in math, science and that i would be a physicist and what happened to me is what happens to a lot of kids who grow up thinking they will be since assist is that you learn about the atom bomb and you have this at a bomb question like because you are kidding it seems like this and it is this horrible annihilator of technology and i thought i want a job that i can do quickly. I wanted to work quickly and i thought i wanted a profession that i would enjoy connected to math and science and not have ethical implications, so i accidentally picked computer and computer programming. By the way, i studied physics as well. There you go. It started with me 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 still very young and i was working for ibm and i was supposed to have this project where they had a mainframe that was made before i was born that was used to localize a machine that ibm had come as i couldnt figure out what to do with it and ibm back then had like a little internal intranet. Theres no internet in turkey. 80s . 90s or early 90s and all of a sudden i could just get on ibms internet and i would be like this mainframe is this thing i need to figure out. I dont know what to do and someone from the japan would here is i do it i wrote that, so a couple things happen to. I still had like one tv channel and heavy center syrup, but all of a sudden i had a glimpse of a Global Communication would be like and also because i was still a teenager and like working at the company. Is temporal . Istanbul, yes. There was this who is this girl working here because back then things were more formal, but i experience the promise of internet, a place where people didnt know who you were you could talk. Its not like that anymore at all, 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 how to i wanted to study the social sites i switch my major. I studied sociology. I use my programmer skills mostly to pay for college and then i wanted to really come to the us partly because i wanted to study this and it would be interesting. I got accepted to grad School Without even knowing what to grad school was because i just kind of i started trying to understand how this could change it, you know, for possible change. My journey started with the First Movement i encountered with my online contact early. Yes. I didnt get the beginning of it. I got the tail end of it, i was so curious because i want to see things for myself. I was like im going to those mountains and im going to find out how these people are using the internet. In mexico . In mexico. One of the first things i realized is what people think is happening and what is happening is so different and because there is all of this discussion and hype about the internet and i went to these mountain villages. Didnt have electricity let alone the internet. What was happening was the anti nasty networks that had formed and had started using internet and had grabbed new places like this revolution and kind of had sort of taken it as a solidarity movement, but they were the ones using the internet. I found something really different and it was my first glance into okay this is really important and changes everything afforded them a level of protection because of the publicity. You had contemporaneous movements crushed by the mexican military while focusing much attention on it. Wasnt really happening the way the popular accounts were portraying what was happening. I found a traditional uprising, so that sort of got me started thinking about all the things that the publics changing to and then i chronicle in the book i read the book. There is so much vivid stories and cases you put in in addition to the excellent theoretical framework, so that means your book really stands out. Lets fastforward. Early internet, Globalization Movement and in erebus spring. And then turkey. What happens is when the arab spring, arab uprising started i thought this is such a historic thing because im a programmer and i can do data and study online, but id like to study surveys and just being there, so i started following the arab spring and as a sort of kind of blossomed and collapsing by both the repression and what happened so i was following it in my own country and there is a major movement. In fact, they happened at like three blocks from where i was born. If i was made to study a thing in the world, this is it. I jumped on a plane and went there and 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. You know, occupy it is in new york and a lot of us characters. Spain has in our curses. Tahir is very leaderless, so i was explaining the characters country by country and then when i started the protests in a country i know very well in a city that is my city and i saw something that i had never seen in turkey before, leaderless, euphoric, very occupation, no prior organization, come from nowhere and i thought this doesnt happen in turkey and this looks like the other movements im following like of course every country has specific things, so i started thinking about how the political culture and part of this globalization from below, but i started thinking about there is a framework to how technology is afforded this, meaning things like it enables and allowing movements to do certain things in certain ways and impacting their trajectory, so that is kind of that got me thinking and of course there have been other movements. Pretty wonderful that you have technology by ground. You came from a country with a sensor set and activism is part of your growing up experience and then you studied in america and follow the movement not only intellectually, but also physically. Then you actively participated and then came this book, but share with us what are the main things that in the book especially you call it so much example and arabic spring, turkey and we are all empowered by technology here. Everyone in the bay area notes technology was a good thing. What did you learn . Heres the framework. Technology is empowering because right now if you want to censor something its hard. You can get an twitter, facebook you can get the word out. Look at the post election United States. The womens march which was large was organized starting with a Facebook Post to a Million People in the streets in a couple months. Of course the organizers did a lot of work. Heres the butt, theres a misleading sense of this empowerment. Its not that it doesnt empower in some ways. Change the conversation. Get around censorship. Technology can really help do this. To understand thats why my book also introduces some weaknesses. There are weaknesses to doing things this fast, i mean, think about climbing mount everest. A lot of people want to climb out everest because its in their list of things they would like to do and theres an industry to help you mount everest. For local mountaineer people they know how to climb out at first and they will carry your stuff for you. They will care your backpack, extraction. About 8000 feet, thin areas dangerous, so they will are oxygen. So you are empowered to climb mount everest, but the problem is you havent really had the time to learn how to be a mountaineer. If you have sherpas carrying all your stuff and you get above 8000 feet and if nothing goes wrong, great, but oxygen tanks malfunction. The weather turns. So may people are climbing and you kind of have temperature issues. If you have not climbed 10 the mountains before and if you havent learned how to be a mountaineer you find yourself above 8000 feet with the help of sherpas you are in trouble and in fact i started using this metaphor right after there were a lot of deaths on everest and i thought maybe i should stop using this metaphor, but that i found a lot of friends are in jail in egypt and elsewhere, so maybe its a metaphor. The problem is when you scale up from zero to 100 miles from a Facebook Post to a big march, womens march, william Million People maybe more what you dont have it looks like the kind of protest on the past. The march on washington in 1963 to 10 years to get there, so when you march like that youre not just marching. You build this infrastructure. If you are in power you are looking at these people thinking if they can pull off this march because it was not easy to pull off. If they can pull off this march the power they built they can do other things like being a real mountaineer. If you can climb a big mountain you can do other things. Its the capacity you built over time. Where as if use Digital Technology to scale up fast its a great thing if you recognize that the first moment, but if you think it prepares you the same way years and years of building capacity and infrastructure prepares you you are misled and thats what i found with a lot of movements today including in the us right now is that they see this huge march and they are thinking we can pull this off and of course people work hard like i march and im not belittling. I watch. 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 of a collective decisionmaking. You cannot change tactics. You go from the march. Whats next . Theres always a whats next. A lot of these sort of network Leaderless Movements start with a. Having a big march, great. Whats next is the big question and how you decide this. You cannot decide this on facebook or twitter because the commercial platforms are not designed for decisionmaking. I mean, facebook has been set up an algorithm and is designed to keep you on the site. Have you ever been on facebook just but i spent more time than i thought i would. Its designed to do that. The whole structure is like that. If you are in a meeting, what you want and . You want it to end. The thing you want most from meetings is for them to conclude where the thing facebook is designed for is to keep you there forever. Thats not a platform you can just use to make decisions. A lot of these movements i feel the internet is like spring in your feet. You are jumping very high in the problem is you dont have the muscles necessary to run fast. Great if jumping is all you are going to do. Big marches, you can do that, but the kind of infrastructure building as tactical turns, movement and collective decisionmaking, not only does internet not like scaling up fast does not allow you to do that easily, it may hinder you because now everyone has a twitter account and everyone has a facebook account and you have everyone speaking how do we make collective decisions at scale. Those are things i think these movements are we. Its interesting, nation. I cant say it hasnt empowered movements because it has, but i also cant say it hasnt weakened movements because in some ways if you didnt have all of this tech you would have to do things this longer wait and by the time he pulled off the march you would have time to build that capacity, so thats kind of why the title is the title. Thats why this book to me is its addressing both strength and weakness of those technology empowered movements today. Lets go further. I have so many questions. We were talking about the instantly and you have it everywhere america, turkey, middle east, hong kong, taiwan, you name it. Does technology only empower protesters . No. It also empowers the states . It empowers the state in it so many, so for example when i grew up and wind down the internet i thought censorship will never really be a thing. This is great. We can circumvent the censorship blocks. Even to this day with all the Censorship Technology circumvention is widely practiced and people get around the censorship. What i didnt anticipate with the early internet, which i see todays that 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 what is 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, pledge you with information, use misinformation as a deliverance tactic. Use card ability challenges and claims of fraud so that people are confused or distracted or misinformed to the point that they dont know what to do. Now, this is empowering for governments because if you are social movement anyone social change you need to convince people of certain things whereas if you are a government you just need to confuse them. If you want to stop a change and everyone is like i dont know what is true and someone says this and theres all these claims and misinformation and fake news and all of that i dont know is going on. Thats a very effective way to curtail and distract and curtail the power of social movements, so in many ways the filter bill year, information overload that there is so much going on that we couldnt really figure out whats going on adult dosage in many ways just as empowering, it also i think strengthening the new form of authoritarianism that can use social media to listen to the population without letting them use power and also to confuse them and missing for them. Misguide them. Misguide them. Coming back to your insights over those new technology doesnt really help at least so far for collective decisionmaking etc. , but lets observe think about those movements. We see another thing, which is emotion playing a huge role in those protests. It brings people together, but its hard to make a decision. One of the things it comes more from economist and Political Science about why does anyone protest i mean why dont you let other people protest and win and you get sort of a part of it also. Its called the free rider question and animating a lot of these discussions and my answer is, its a very positive experience i mean protesting is joyous, i mean, its not joyous if you are being shot at. Thats not fun anymore, but if you just say tear gas, annoying to say the least. The first time you are teargas to you think you will die. Have you been tear gassed . Oh, yeah. Im a pro at this point. You think youre going to die because you cant breathe. Not being able to breathe is why waterboarding is a form of torture. You think of course you dont unless you have a severe condition it doesnt kill you. Teargas can maybe shot at you, but teargas itself you get over it and then you get really annoyed in your eyes are hurting what you find is all these people will pick you up. They will wash your face if you just went through all of this together and that kind of a feeling of the people you dont know like they will come and make sure you are okay and you are with people who kind of believe in something. You are part of something bigger than yourself. Its a form of this is why i think protests are empowering partly because you find people like that and you through a somewhat stressful, but very rewarding. People protest because of the joys of protest, but if you said that his cell doesnt itself with not any structure to how do you decide . A writer once a said i revoke therefore we are turkey went from me to we process. If you read the french revolution its like the role of emotion. You can read that poland polands. The motion sort of the fraternity, sisterhood things and its very powerful, a positive thing. Martin luther king called it the love of the community. We remember the moment because revolutionists tactical and changes history and also the issue here is how do you get there is one thing. Also, the movement is either or nothing. Everything or nothing. Its hard to negotiate tactics and to compromise these neces