The Weather and the Way the Wind Blows
Learning from how disinformation affected Election 2020, and reflecting on the 10th anniversary of the Arab Spring
Dear readers:
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Now, back to our regular programming…
You May Need a Weatherman
Jen Soriano, Hermelinda Cortes and Joseph Phelan have written a very important post-mortem for Organizing Upgrade titled “What the Elections Have Taught Us About Disinformation.” The three seasoned organizers start out by situating disinformation in the historic context of propaganda, opposition attacks and dog whistles, but they argue cogently that what is now is “the speed at which disinformation travels, and the number of bad actors or chaos agents responsible for the manipulation.” They go on to argue that today’s internet-amplified disinformation is a new form of soft power playing a rising role in building up the populist right (including helping it recruit unorganized people), and make a strong case for the need for an organized progressive response.
Among their answers: new tools that movements can use to monitor the “narrative weather” and track conversations over time, in order to understanding what concepts are resonating with which audiences and to potentially intervene in real time. What I love about this work is how it builds on the “big listening” and distributed campaigning experiments first popularized by the good folks at Upwell, which I wrote about eight years ago in techPresident and then later in my book The Big Disconnect. (I got to work a bit more on this kind of effort when Civic Hall and the Narrative Initiative partnered to produce a forum and day-long retreat on narrative technology, so if you want to really go deeper on this topic, here’s the Spitfire Strategies report on that work from the fall of 2019.) Soriano and her co-authors describe how a system that Reframe and its sister c4 This is Signals worked with organizers in Florida to identify and track disinfo and other narrative trends, providing them with timely information about the storms brewing.
As we continue to sift the results of the 2020 election for insight and clues about the future, the impact of disinformation among Spanish-speaking voters in Florida is rising as a source of ongoing concern. “In Latinx communities, disinformation absolutely had an impact on voter behavior,” Natalia Jaramillo, the communications director for Florida for All, told Soriano et al. “Equis Labs research has shown that a lot of Latin American voters were afraid of the socialism disinformation. It’s a conversation that we lost.”
As Soriano and her co-authors point out, in some places people are getting more proactive about tracking and defusing disinformation in the context of political organizing. In Minnesota, they point to [Repugnant](https://medium.com/repugnant), a newsletter started by Faith in Minnesota that alerts its members to racially coded disinformation. They also offer a “strategic threat analysis and response tool,” developed in partnership with Dr. Joan Donovan of Harvard, that local groups can use to monitor and combat disinformation in their own networks of attention and influence.
Soriano, Cortes and Phelan have a bigger picture conclusion: “We need a movement approach to combating disinformation. While we integrate the fight against disinfo into organizing, we also need to combine forces with others: those who are running large-scale campaigns to hold platforms like Facebook and Twitter accountable, educating and organizing journalists, and building networks of trusted messengers, disruptors and meaning makers across all sectors of society (see our Movement Framework for Disinformation Response). It will take a whole ecosystem response, as well as implementing visions for community controlled platforms, to combat disinfo in more than just the whack-a-mole or the more you know, the more you know’ approach that dominates now.” Amen to that. (h/t to Justin Hendrix for alerting me to this article)
Living in History
If you are someone (like me) who was inspired by the “Arab Spring,” then it’s time to mark a sad anniversary, for yesterday was the 10th anniversary of the death of Mohamed Bouazizi, a 26-year-old Tunisian street vendor whose decision to set himself on fire in protest lit up the Middle East. First, a surge in protests let Tunisia’s dictator Zine El Abidine Ben Ali to flee his country, allowing the country to begin a transition to democracy. And then Egypt’s Tahrir Square movement exploded. Jack Dickens has pulled together an eminent group of commentators in Reaction magazine for a retrospective, and it’s worth considering a few of their points.
First, as Charles Kurzman of the University of North Carolina’s Center for Middle East and Islamic Studies points out, what happened ten years ago was both unimaginable and historic. “Nobody imagined that mass protests would soon topple Hosni Mubarak after twenty-nine years of dictatorial rule in Egypt and Muammar al-Qaddafi after forty-one years of dictatorial rule in Libya and Ali Abdullah Saleh after thirty-one years of dictatorial rule in Yemen; and later Abdelaziz Bouteflika after twenty years of dictatorial rule in Algeria and Omar al-Bashir after twenty-nine years of dictatorial rule in Sudan. Since that day ten years ago, all but one of the Arab presidents-for-life – all but Bashar al-Assad, now in his 21st year of dictatorial rule in Syria – were forced out of office, not by coups or foreign conquest as in previous decades, but by mass protest. Prime ministers in the corruption-ridden semi-democracies, Iraq and Lebanon, have also been forced out by mass protest. Only the monarchies have, thus far, withstood the storm.”
The reflections from Syrian writers are the most poignant. Asser Khattab shares what it was like to realize the spring had reached his home: “Looking back at the early days of the Syrian revolution still stirs my blood. I can still remember that spring day in 2011 when I walked alongside the Queiq river of Aleppo and quietly discussed what had been transpiring in Egypt and Tunisia with a friend. It was the moment that changed my country forever. It had been a normal day, or seemed as such, until I began to notice a peculiar expression worn by people on the street, most of whom were speaking on the phone, and by those in shops, who seemed as if they had been watching the news. Everyone appeared to be shocked, happy, terrified, angry, and bewildered, all at the same time. Momentarily thereafter, my own phone started to ring. ‘Have you heard the news?’ a trembling voice asked from the other end; I barely managed to recognise it as that of one of my closest friends. ‘Protest. Damascus,’ he said.”
While here in the United States, the mainstream view of the Arab Spring seems to be that the Obama Administration naively gave its support to the protest movements in places like Egypt, Syria and Libya (which cynically shoring up the despotic monarchies in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia), to the benefit of no one, the writers in this package of essays suggest that history isn’t over, and that the Arab Spring is still underway. Isma’il Kushkush, a journalist based in Khartoum, argues that the December 2018 mass nonviolent uprising that brought down the regime there was the high point of a “second wave” of the Arab Spring, which also saw mass movements for change in Algeria, Lebanon and Iraq.
That said, the swiftness of the mass protests and the subsequent challenges opposition movements had in moving an alternative platform into power remain a warning for everyone who imagined that the Arab Spring proved that the Internet was inherently a force for democracy. (Remember the “Twitter revolution”?) One book about the rise and fall of the Tahrir Square movement that I highly recommend is Thanassis Cambanis’ Once Upon a Revolution. It’s a detailed recreation of the events of 2010-2013, told mainly through the stories of a few key organizers that he befriended and followed closely. In Cambanis’ telling, “Egypt’s revolution was defeated so readily because it wasn’t organized, it wasn’t political enough, and, most fatally, it didn’t have a compelling, constructive idea at its center. It had many other significant ingredients and was led by inspiring, brave individuals. What took place was rare enough: a population pushed to the edge lost its fear and challenged a rotten regime. That along commends admiration and emulation. But it wasn’t enough to make a revolution. It wasn’t enough to change a country.”
Odds and Ends
Happy Birthday to Eli Pariser, the co-founder of Civic Signals (a new nonprofit whose advisory board I’m on). The wunderkind of digital organizing, who once estimated that his name signed something close to one billion emails to MoveOn members, did a fun interview with Politico to mark his 40th. One thing he said stuck with me: he thinks the Biden presidency needs ““A big American project; an Apollo mission for this generation. The country faces many challenges, but I believe part of the reason we are pulling apart is that we don’t have a big project, framed under a larger, compelling narrative to animate and pull us together. We cannot merely aim to survive, or to return to ‘normal’ – we need to have something uniquely American and urgent that we do together. Leading the world on green energy or dismantling systemic racism might be that – or, hey, reinventing the town square for our online reality, since it’s hard to get anything else done if we do not even know how to talk to each other.”
A few editions back, I wrote about how a big chunk of the Trump base was in the process of virtually seceding from the country, in terms of the millions who have signed up for accounts on alternative tech platforms like Parler, MeWe and Rumble. At OneZero, Sarah Emerson reports on new data from the analytics company Apptopia suggesting that “the surge was temporary, and each platform has witnessed a precipitous drop in app downloads since the middle of November.” That said, each platform seems to have reached a new plateau of monthly growth rates and daily engagement. “Parler was downloaded 16,000 times on October 25. After soaring to 340,000 downloads by mid-November, by the second week of December Parler downloads had fallen to barely more than double pre-election figures, or 39,800 downloads. MeWe witnessed an almost identical trajectory, jumping from 12,000 downloads pre-election to 207,000 by mid-November and back down to 30,000 downloads come mid-December.” Parler’s daily active users has more doubled to 2.5 million and MeWe’s tripled, to 1.6 million. So, maybe not a big chunk but definitely a large clump. More than just a Trump dingleberry, shall we say?
I don’t know any details about the implosion of Alloy, the $35 million startup funded by Reid Hoffman and other moguls that was supposed to solve the Democratic party’s data problems, but this story by Theodore Schleifer in Recode is hair-raising. According to Schliefer, after four senior employees were fired, the rest of its staff wrote to its board to protest. And then, instead of addressing the internal challenges facing the company, its board decided just to shut the whole thing down.
As the pace of technological change races ahead of generational personnel turnover in government, Nick Sinai and Chris Kuang are pushing for the Biden Administration to launch a new Digital Corps, a “two-year early-career fellowship designed for the country’s top young technology talent to serve in the Federal Government.” It’s a good idea and would fill an existing gap in how the government recruits tech talent.
Say hello (and make a donation?) to Coworker.org’s new Solidarity Fund, which is designed to support workers in the tech industry and supply chain who are fighting for safer, more equitable jobs in their industry. They will be giving workplace organizing stipends of $2500 to more than 40 applicants in their pilot round.