>> c-span, where history unfolds daley. in 1979, c-span was created as a public service by cable companies and is brought to you today by your cable or satellite provider. [inaudible conversations] >> welcome to tonight's program of we are very pleased and is a contributing opinion writer at "the new york times" as well as the school of information and library science and also of the offer of "twitter and tear gas" which is for sale for good you are not familiar we are an organization that speaks to expand opportunities with

international policy and commerce. we are recording tonight's event through a c-span and as well as radio so take a moment to silence your cell phones. we have question cards are your seats so write your questions down and given that we will be talked about social meet -- media we invite you to get involved with the conversation. however like to introduce our moderator. with an adjunct professor teaching a course on digital

we are delighted to have him here this evening. [applause] >> good evening. is a pleasure to introduce our guest. and as we heard from them that she has been published with their interactions of new technology and this new book of

"twitter and tear gas" of course, as the assistant professor of library science and also faculty associate for internet and society at harvard. please join me to welcome zeynep tufekci. [applause] >> so the topic is social media and the political mood of is it how did you come

to write this book? movement from turkey. >> yes i actually started as a technology programmer. in the period following the military coup i was a child but that era had very heavy censorship even before with one tv channel mostly american shows i have to tell you what makes no sense because about the frontier is the middle of nowhere where i am from there is no middle of nowhere.

where are these people? we would watch things like that but what made sense is to show that because there was a major conflict in the part of turkey and all these other things going on with the heavy censorship regime. i was always the kid that was interested and then to learn about the atom bomb. so it seems like as oracle technology but then i thought and that i wanted a profession. that would not have ethical

implications. well. >> so when i started as a programmer one of my early jobs i was very young, still a teenager, to have a project with the mainframe but to figure aisle to do with it with that internal internet there is no

internet id and turkey. not in the early '90s. that i could just get on the i am internet. so i still have one tv channel with censorship. what is global communication like? like? but looking as a love those companies could live is the girl working your? but to experience that promise it is like that anymore at all. to say this will change

everything than the internet came to turkey and i was like sign me up. and i was really interested in censorship and wanted to study a the social side so i studied sociology using my programming skills and i really wanted to come to the united states and i got accepted to grad school and started to try to understand how this could change a positive social change so the person that i a contacted i caught the tail end not the beginning but i want

to see things for myself. and i will find out how old these people are using the internet to in mexico. then what i feet is happening is happening because there is all this discussion but they did not have electricity so those

networks that have formed to networks that have formed to grab this peasant revolution as a solidarity movement but instead of that story we were that this changes everything. so it afforded them say level of protection and that was crushed by a the mexican military but it was at the a new wave of popular accounts portrayed was happening so that got me started thinking about all the things of the public sphere of what the i chronicle in the book.

>> i cannot -- with that excellent framework so that stevens out if your book. the anti-globalization movement. so what happened is when the arab spring uprising started this is so historic, i went i could study of mind -- of mine but i started to follow the arab spring and then it started to rule collapsed with the oppression and what happened but

it macomb country it had bid three blocks from where i was born. i jumped on the plane so that is why started to figure out that analytical framework as a case by case story as a tradition of anarchy. so i was explaining that so is a country that i know very well that is my city and i saw something that was euphoric with fad occupation read no prior authorization and i thought this doesn't happen in turkey. of course every country has

specific things but part of of globalization from below. so there is a framework that enables to do a certain vagueness in certain ways. so that got the faking about the book.

>> bad is wonderful that you have this technology background. was organized starting with a facebook post. 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 here's the but, there's a misleading sense to this empowerment. it's not that it doesn't empower in some ways. change the conversation, get around censorship, organize a large march, right in technology can really help, social media can really help do this. but to the understand what it, 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 it's in their list of things they would

like to do, and there's an industry that helps you climb mount everest. there are sherpas or the local mount near people -- mountaineer people, and they will carry your stuff for you, your backpack, extra oxygen. because if you're above 8,000 feet, thin air is very dangerous. they will carry oxygen. so it all sounds great. you're empowered to climb mount everest. but the problem is you haven't really had the time to learn. if you've 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, there's some queuing because so many people are climbing, and you kind of have temperature issues. if you haven't climbed ten mountains before and if you haven't learned how to be a mountaineer and you find yourself above 8,000 feet with the help of sherpas, you're 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 you should stop using this metaphor. but then i thought a lot of my friends are in jail in egypt and elsewhere, so maybe it's an apt metaphor. the problem is when you scale up from 0 to 100 miles, from a facebook post to a big march, women's march, a million people maybe, maybe more, what you don't have, it looks like the kind of street protests in the past, say march on washington 1963. but the march on washington 1963 took ten years to get there, right? so when you march like that, you're not just marching. you built this infrastructure. so if you're in power, you're looking at these people and you're thinking, huh, if they can pull off this march -- because it wasn't easy to pull off, right? if they can pull off this march, the power they built, they can do other things. it's like being a real mountaineer.

other things. it's a capacity you've built over time. if you're using digital technology to scale up really fast, it's a great thing the you recognize it's the very first moment. but if you think it prepared you the same way years and years of building capacity infrastructure prepared you, you're misled x. that's what i find with a lot of movements today, including in the u.s. right now, is that they see in this huge march, and they're thinking, wow, we can pull this off. and, of course, people have worked hard. i watched, i saw how people had put so much work in it. but three months of work will only build so much catty. so much capacity. and what you also don't have when you do this leaderless, big thing, you don't have a means to do collective decision making. you cannot change tactics. you go from the march, what's next? there's always a what's next.

successful moves go from one thing to another as the time changes. a lot of these sort of networked, leaderless movements, start with a hashtag. have a big march. great. what's next, is the big question. how are you going to decide? 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 set up and algorithms, and it's designed to keep you on the site. have you ever thought, whoa, i just spent more time than i thought i would? it's designed to do that for you, right? the whole structure is like that. now, if you're in a meeting, what do you want to happen in you want it to end, right? a meeting -- [laughter] the thing you want most for meetings is for them to conclude whereas the thing facebook is designed for is to keep you there forever. that is not a platform you can just use to make decisions. so a lot of these movements, i feel, sometimes the internet is like springs in your feet.

you're jumping very high. the problem is you don't have the muscles necessarily to run fast. it's great if jumping is all you're going to do. big marches, we can do that. but the kind of infrastructure building and tactical turns, movements needed in collective decision making, not only does the internet not, like, scaling up very fast with digital technology not allow you to do that easily, it may even hinter you because now everybody's got a twitter account, and everybody's got a facebook account, and you have everybody speaking how to we make collective decisions at scale. now, those are things that i think these movements are really weak at. so it's an interesting combination. i can't it hasn't empowered movements, because it has empowered movements. but in some ways if you didn't have all this tech, you'd have to do things sort of this longer way. and by the time you pulled off the march, you'd have had to building that capacity.

so that's kind of why the title is this -- >> and that's, that's what this book has, to me, the value is also addressing both the strength and the weakness of but let's go even further. i have so many questions. for example, we're talking about those instantaneously are leaderless movements. you have them everywhere; america, turkey, middle east, hong kong, taiwan, name it. does show less text technology only empower protesters? >> no. 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, 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 didn't anticipate with the early internet which i see today is that if you can't 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's important. so you basically, the government isn't terribly interested many keeping you from information. it's 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 don't know what to do. now, this is really empowering for governments, because if

you're a social movement, if you want social change, you need to convince people of certain things. whereas if you're a government, you just need to confuse them. if you want to stop change, if everybody's like i don't really know what's true, and somebody says this, and there's 50 things, and there's all these claims, and there's misinformation and fake news, all of that, i don't know what's going on, that's a very effective way to -- >> [inaudible] >> curtail and distract and to curtail the

power of social movements. >> right. >> so if anything, like, in many ways the filter failures the information overload that there's so much going on that we couldn't really figure out what's going on, that newspapers have weakened and all those things are, in many ways, disempowering not just movements, they're also, i think, strengthening a new form of authoritarianism that can use social media both to listen to without letting them have power and also to confuse them and mis-- >> or even misguide them. >> and misdivide them, that's right. -- misguide them, that's right. >> on this note, now coming back to your insight of those kind of new technology doesn't really help, at least so far, the collective capacity of collective decision making, right, etc. but let's observe, think about those movements. we see another thing which is emotion playing a huge role. >> absolutely. emotion's contentious, it's spread fast, it brings people together, but it's hard to to make decisions -- >> yeah, right.

so one of the things that -- so there's a question in, that comes more from the economists and political scientists about why does anybody protest? i mean, why don't you just let other people protest, let 'em win, and you get sort of whatever they win, you get a part of it too, right? it's called the free rider question. it sort of animates a lot of these discussions. and my answer is it's a very positive experience. i mean, protesting is, it's joyous. i mean, i'm not -- it's not joyous if there's such severe repression that you're being shot at, so that's not fun anymore. but if you're just, you know, why tear gas is part of the title, if you're just being, say, tear gassed, very annoying, to say the least. the first time you're tear gassed, you think you're going to die -- >> have you been tear gassed? >> oh, yeah. [laughter] i'm a pro at in this point. you think you're going to die because you can't breathe. it's very existential. not being able to breathe, it's why waterboarding is a form of torture. you think it's -- but, of course, you don't, right? unless you have a severe condition, it doesn't kill you.

tear gas cans shot at you may, but the tear gas yourself, very few such incidents. so you get over it. and then you get really annoyed, and your eyes are hurting. and what you find is all these people who are with you and people will pick you up, they will wash your face, and you just went through all of this together. and that kind of feeling of, like, people you don't know will come make sure you're okay and you're with people who kind of believe in something, you're part of something bigger than yourself, it is a form of -- this is why i think protesters are empowering partly because you find people like that, and you go through somewhat stressful, but it's existentially very rewarding. people protest because it's joyous to protest. but as you say, that itself doesn't lend itself without any structure to how do you decide what's next. >> right -- [inaudible] once

said i revoke, therefore, we are. >> yes. >> this is this is from me to we. >> absolutely. it's one of the -- i think this is sort of, you find if you read the french revolution, like, the role of emotion you can read, you know, the poems, the role of emotion in sort of the fraternity, sistered hood, all of those things -- show less sisterhood all of those things in protest and movement, it's a very powerful thing. martin ruther king called -- luther king called it -- >> we all remember it's spectacular and the history and also the issue is here how do you get there, is one thing. also those movement is either over nothing. or absolutely everything. everything or nothing. it's hard to negotiate, to be tactical, to be strategic show

and to compromise. oh, these necessary capacity in a political struggle -- >> right. >> those movement are lacking. please elaborate more. >> let me give an example. this is partly about the movements on the left side of the spectrum. they're very ambivalent about power. no, it's corrupting, you'll be corrupted. all of which is true, right? if you sort of get in your power, it is corrupting and co-opting. on the other hand, if you don't get near power, power can crush you. so it's not like you're saved either way.

but what happens is a lot of movements, especially on the left side of the spectrum or even in the u.s. occupy, they're very ambivalent in engaging institutions of power to change them. because they want -- they usually want to sort of create these alternative prefigurations. they want to sort of live a part of the future they wish was here, except it doesn't really sustain, right? you can only do so much because the power is encompassing you. i'll give you a different example to explain there are different paths. the tea party movement. it's not studied as much. it's a mistake. it's one of most successful movements in last 20, 30 years. i think if you looked at the united states last 20 years, you would say the gay rights movement and the tea party movement in their own way are probably the two most successful movements. so the tea party movement, too, starts with a protest. it starts as a protest on april 2009 on tax day. and there's a really nice paper looking at -- it's a national protest all over the u.s -- looking at where they were able to hold the protests because the weather was sunny and when they got rained out. and it's a perfect natural experiment because rain is random. so when you look at that, the places that were able to hold a protest, years later, they have all these downstream effects. incumbents more likely to retire. a tea party candidate more

likely to be elected. you have the same congressperson, they're more likely to vote in accordance with tea party priorities.