I’ve argued before that slacktivism is not established activists slacking but new activists emerging. Here’s one more example of that, from a comment on my recent post for the Open Society Foundations:

Thank you for validating my actions on my Facebook page. I am nearly 74 years old & making FB posts, giving funding to some activist organizations & meditation is about all I am able to do at this stage in my life. I had never heard the word “slacktivism” before reading the FB post on my news feed. Thanks for the encouragement to continue. If you have any suggestions to improve my FB page, please let me know. Thanks again!

This is the micro-activism of the internet at its best: allowing someone who would previously be unable to take political action to do so.

The dust has settled on the Kony 2012 campaign. What have we learned?

Am I still talking about Kony 2012? Yes, and with good reason. On April 20th, the campaign came to a close of sorts with Cover the Night, an effort to“make Kony famous” by plastering “every city, on every block” with “posters, stickers and murals of Kony to pressure governments into hunting down the guerrilla leader.” It was the last action of the original Kony 2012 campaign.

The Invisible Children site does not tell how many young people participated in Cover the Night (though I imagine they know). The Guardian, however, which has given excellent and critical coverage to the campaign, noted that:

The movement’s phenomenal success in mobilising young people online, following last month’s launch of a 29-minute documentary which went viral, flopped in trying to turn that into real world actions…..Paltry turnouts on Friday at locations across north America, Europe and Australia left cities largely unplastered and the movement’s credibility damaged. “What happened to all the fuss about Kony?” said one typical tweet. “Kony is so last month,” said another.

Although the campaign succeeded in increasing awareness of Kony and Western news coverage of Africa, and mobilized millions of youth to care (if briefly) about a humanitarian crisis on the other side of the world, it has so far failed in its own stated goal: the capture of Joseph Kony.

The standard discourse at this point would be to call Kony 2012 “slacktivism”: a clear example of how massive online action (millions of video views and shares) converted into modest offline action (thousands not millions of participants in Cover the Night) and no impact (Kony is still at large), and then using that observation to disprove the value of digital activism in general.

Let’s not have that conversation (again). Instead, let’s look at why the online action did not work. Sandrine Perrot, a long-time specialist on Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army at France’s Sciences Po, has an excellentexplanationon the siteThe Independent, here’s part of it:

In Congo or CAR [Central African Republic], making Kony famous by sharing the video, wearing a bracelet or sticking his poster in Western streets won’t bring any solution to the highly difficult operational terrain, to the weak coordination and raising tensions between the Ugandan, Congolese and Centrafrican militaries deployed since December 2008 (which the so far unfinanced joint UA/UN mission created on March 23rd will first have to smooth), or to the underlying strategic divisions between Washington, USAID, the State department and the defence department.

Kony 2012 has failed not because digital activism is inherently ineffective, but because their own strategy was. As Perrot points out, the reasons that Kony has not been capture are diverse and complex, including factors from difficult topography to the challenges multilateralism. Invisible Children’s theory of change -that mobilizing Western young people to increase Western awareness of the crisis would change that complex dynamic – was inaccurate. The arrest of the video’s creator, Jason Russell, while ranting and publicly naked, and the harsh criticism on the original video’s simplifications and misrepresentations did not help matters.This is how all digital activism failures (and successes)should be evaluated: by looking at the range of causal factors and placing the effect of the digital action in context.

Post-Arab Spring/Indignados/Occupy it is simply ignorant to argue that digital tools have no impact on political realities. They do, but the recipe of success and failure is far from clear. Scholars like Clay Shirky and David Faris argue that political outcomes have always been multi-causal and the introduction of digital tactics into these complex processes make them more complex, not less so.

In the case of Kony 2012 the political and logistical factors described by Perrot overwhelmed the effect of Invisible Children’s online and offline actions. The organizers mismatched context and tactics, a difficult task in any campaign, especially one as international andintractableas the ongoing crimes of the Lord’s Resistance Army.

[UPDATED] Gene Sharp pioneered the study of nonviolent civil resistance. Some argue that his books were instrumental to the success of activists in a number of revolutions over the past 20 years ranging from the overthrow of Milosevic to ousting of Mubarak. Civil resistance has often been referred to as “nonviolent guerrilla warfare” and Sharp’s manual on “The Methods of Nonviolent Action,” for example, includes a list of 198 methods that activists can use to actively disrupt a repressive regime. These methods are divided into three sections: nonviolent protest and persuasion, noncooperation, and nonviolent intervention.

While Sharp’s 198 are still as relevant today as they were some 40 years ago, the technology space has changed radically. In Sharp’s “Dictionary of Power and Struggle: Language of Civil Resistance in Conflicts” published in 2012, Gene writes that “a multitude of additional methods will be invented in the future that have characteristics of the three classes of methods: nonviolent protest and persuasion, noncooperation, and nonviolent intervention.” About four years ago, I began to think about how technology could extend Sharp’s methods and possibly generate entirely new methods as well. This blog post was my first attempt at thinking this through and while it was my intention to develop the ideas further for my dissertation, my academic focus shifted somewhat.

With the PhD out of the way, my colleague Mary Joyce suggested we launch a research project to explore how Sharp’s methods can and are being extended as a result of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The time was ripe for this kind of research so we spent the past few months building a database of civil resistance methods 2.0 based on Sharp’s original list. We also consulted a number of experts in the field to help us populate this online database. We decided not to restrict the focus of this research to ICTs only–i.e., any type of technology qualifies, such as drones, for example.

This database (http://tinyurl.com/CivRes20) will be an ongoing initiative and certainly a live document since we’ll be crowdsourcing further input. In laying the foundations for this database, we’ve realized once again just how important creativity is when thinking about civil resistance. Advances in technology and increasing access to technology provides fertile ground for the kind of creativity that is key to making civil resistance successful.

We invite you to contribute your creativity to this database and share the link (tinyURL.com/CivRes20 or tinyurl.com/CivilResistance20) widely with your own networks. We’ve added some content, but there is still a long way to go. Please share any clever uses of technology that you’ve come across that have or could be applied to civil resistance by adding them.

Our goal is to provide activists with a go-to resource where they can browse through lists of technology-assisted methods to inform their own efforts. In the future, we envision taking the database a step further by considering what sequencing of said methods are most effective.

Why is this kind of failed activism acceptable?

In the summer of 2009 the eyes of the world were on Iran, where citizens poured out into the streets of Tehran to protest a corrupt election. Solidarity rallies were held around the world, from Paris to London to Los Angeles to Melbourne. People showed solidarity on the web as well by changing their Twitter avatars or tinting them green, the color of Islam and of the protesters.

In the end, neither solidarity action had much effect. The Iranian government brutally detained, tortured, and killed their own citizens. Out of fear, the people of Iran went back home andMahmud Ahmadinejad remained president.

While few condemned the street protesters for their lack of effect, many branded the online solidarity action as “slacktivism.” Perhaps it was useful for raising awareness or showing the Iranian government that the world was watching, but it was still the absolute minimum that one could do.

...but this isn't?

While both online and offline solidarity actions were ineffective, only the online one broadly was criticized. While both online and offline actions showed international solidarity and both failed to protect Iranian citizens, the failure of the offline rallies were morally acceptable while the failure of the digital action was not. Why?

Here at the beginning of the digital age we are suffering from a functional gap between the scope of our compassion and the scope of our action. We know more about the rest of the world than we ever did before, both because we share an unprecedented global communication network (the World Wide Web) and because social media allwos us to self-broadcast across that network. We knew what was happening in Iran because Iranians were tweeting at us. We changed our icons because that was where our Iranian interlocutors were, where they could “see” us. It was less a political act than an emotional act, an act of empathy and compassion.

But our political and civil society institutions have not evolved to match this increased capacity for awareness and compassion. Even though millions of people in the US (and around the world) decided that catching Joseph Kony was a goal that mattered to them, there was little that those people (or even resource-rich governments and international NGOs) could do to make it happen. We have a new compassion gap in that our compassion is greater than our capacity to act on that compassion.

We perceive offline protest as legitimate – even when it fails – because it has been historically linked to effective outcomes. Digital activism is much newer, and its track record is more mixed, partly because of this gap between digital awareness and institutional response. Because of digital awareness we are failing at more ambitious and more global social change goals, but all skeptics see is the failure.

But this can change. We are at the beginning of a new age of digital politics and I believe we will develop new methods of action to match the increased scope of our awareness and compassion.

“The concept of slacktivism is not just naïve and condescending,
it is misinformed and misleading.”
- Zeynep Tufekci, Asst. Professor, UNC Chapel Hill

[UPDATED] Slacktivism is a widely used term for acts of supposed activism that are actually lazy and ineffective. Yet in the digital realm this term is problematic, and should be replaced with less derogatory terms like “micro-activism,” “online action” or “digital action”. Here’s why:

1) Digital technology is more likely to activate the politically inactive than to deactivate the political active.

"Slacktivism" implies that small online actions are pointless, but this is not true.

Slacktivism conveys the image of the lazy activist, a politically active person who decides to sign an e-petition rather than attend a street rally. Though it is indeed easier to join a Facebook group or make an online donation than to canvass door-to-door or participate in a sit-in, this choice rarely occurs in the real world. The politically active will be active both online and offline. They have found a new realm for their action. The politically inactive would never have canvassed or participated in a sit-in in the first place.

In a recent paper, “Political activities on the Internet : Slacktivism or political participation by other means?”,Henrik Serup Christensen reviewed the literature on slacktivism and found that “there is no evidence of the substitution thesis” that taking action online will make people less likely to take action online. “In fact,” noted blogger Luke Allnut, Christensen “concludes that the Internet has a positive effect on offline mobilization.”

Small digital options, such as “liking” a Facebook cause or re-tweeting a political slogan, are unlikely to make activists less active. However, they do provide provide a low bar to participation that makes it easier than ever for the politically inactive to take that first step into engagement. Says Tufekci, “Since these so-called ‘slacktivists’ were never activists to begin with, they are not in dereliction of their activist duties.” Everyone needs to start somewhere, and we should not diminish those first tentative steps into 21st-century citizenship.

2) Small acts of digital activism are helpful to online organizers.

According to Amy Sample Ward, Membership Director for the Nonprofit Technology Network, micro-actions, such as liking a Facebook post, show organizers two things: “First, that your supporters are listening and paying attention…. Second, that supporters are standing by to take the action you promote.” These small actions help people self-identify as supporters of a cause who are open to being mobilized for further action.

3) Derogatory terms like slacktivism discourage these first-timers.

However, if journalists identify these small actions as meaningless, the politically inactive may instead be discouraged from taking even a small step into political action. By not engaging they will cut off one easy entry point into political participation and deprive online organizers of a means of identifying new supporters.

4) Change has always happened through a “ladder of engagement.”
Now we have a new first rung.

As the previous points have implied, no one is arguing that liking a post or re-tweeting a slogan will lead directly to massive political change. This is not new to the digital age. Great change has always occurred through a “ladder of engagement” where more and more people are encouraged by organizers or by their peers to take more and more dramatic and disruptive action in pursuit of their goal.

The difference now is that we now have a new digital rung on the ladder of engagement that is easier to grab hold of than most offline alternative. Now it’s easier than ever to take that first step into participation. According to Tufekci, “today’s ‘meaningless click’ is actually a form of symbolic action which may form the basis of tomorrow’s other kind of action.”

5) Slacktivism implies that the action is ineffective, yet we often don’t know the ultimate outcome until long after the action has occurred.

In June of 2010 an innocent young Egyptian man named Khaled Said was brutally beaten to death by police. A few days later a young Google executive named Wael Ghonim started a Facebook group called “We Are All Khaled Said.” Within a few months it had grown to over 400,000 members and was the biggest dissident Facebook page in Egypt.

At the time many would have called membership in the group slacktivism. Why not go out in the streets? Why not protest? All in good time. The group became a community which intensified anti-regime feeling. According to Jillian York of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, “Prior to the murder of Khaled Said, there were blogs and YouTube videos that existed about police torture, but there wasn’t a strong community around them. This case changed that.”

When the Tunisian revolution began in December of 2010, the Khaled Said group became a mobilizing structure in which calls for change could be made and protests could be mobilized. Its founder, Wael Ghonim, became an important rallying figure during the revolution, encouraging protesters to stay in the streets despite regime violence. It was but one of many factors in the fall of Mubarak, but certainly not slacktivism.

Not every Facebook group will become We are All Khaled Said. In fact, most won’t. But it is best to reserve judgement until the final outcome is evident, rather than discourage a new form of political participation, the effects of which we are just beginning to understand.

This postby Patrick Meier originally appeared on the blog iRevolution.

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Want to know what the future of digital activism looks like? Then follow the developments in Russia. I argued a few years back that the fields of digital activism and civil resistance were converging to a point I referred to as “digital resistance.” The pace of tactical innovation and counter-innovation in the Russia digital battlefield is stunning and rapidly converging to this notion of digital resistance.

“Crisis can be a fruitful time for innovation,” writes Gregory Asmolov. Contested elections are also ripe for innovation, which is why my dissertation case studies focused on elections. “In most cases,” says Asmolov, “innovations are created by the oppressed (the opposition, in Russia’s case), who try to challenge the existing balance of power by using new tools and technologies. But the state can also adapt and adopt some of these technologies to protect the status quo.” These innovations stem not only from the new technologies themselves but are embodied in the creative ways they are used. In other words, tactical innovation (and counter-innovation) is taking place alongside technological innovation. Indeed, “innovation can be seen not only in the new tools, but also in the new forms of protest enabled by the technology.”

Some of my favorite tactics from Russia include the YouTube video of Vladimir Putin arrested for fraud and corruption. The video was made to look like a real “breaking news” announcement on Russian television. The site got millions of viewers in just a few days. Another tactic is the use of DIY drones, mobile phone live-streaming and/or 360-degree 3D photo installations to more accurately relay the size of protests. A third tactic entails the use of a twitter username that resembles that of a well-known individual. Michael McFaul, the US Ambassador to Russia, has the twitter handle @McFaul. Activists set up the twitter handle @McFauI that appears identical but actually uses a capital “i” instead of a lower case “L” for the last letter in McFaul.

Asmolov lists a number of additional innovations in the Russian context in this excellent write-up. From coordination tools such as the “League of Voters” website, the “Street Art” group on Facebook and the car-based flashmob protests which attracted more than one thousand cars in one case, to the crowdsourced violations map “Karta Narusheniy“, the “SMS Golos” and “Svodny Protocol” platforms used to collect, analyze and/or map reports from trusted election observers (using bounded crowdsourcing).

One of my favorite tactics is the “solo protest.” According to Russian law, “a protest by one person does not require special permission. So activist Olesya Shmagun stood in from of Putin’s office with a poster that read “Putin, go and take part in public debates!” While she was questioned by the police and security service, she was not detained since one-person protests are not illegal. Even though she only caught the attention of several dozen people walking by at the time, she published the story of her protests and a few photos on her LiveJournal blog, which drew considerable attention after being shared on many blogs and media outlets. As Asmolov writes, “this story shows the power of what is known as Manuel Castell’s ‘mass self-communication’. Thanks to the presence of one camera, an offline one-person protest found a way to a [much wider] audience online.”

This innovative tactic lead to another challenge: how to turn a one-person protests into a massive number of one-person protests? So on top of this original innovation came yet another innovation, the Big White Circle action. The dedicated online tool Feb26.ru was developed specifically to coordinate many simultaneous one-person protests. The platform,

“[…] allowed people to check in at locations of their choice on the map of the Garden Ring circle, and showed what locations were already occupied. Unlike other protests, the Big White Circle did not have any organizational committee or a particular leader. The role of the leader was played by a website. The website suffered from DDoS attacks; as a result, it was closed and deleted by the provider; a day later, it was restored. The practice of creating special dedicated websites for specific protest events is one of the most interesting innovations of the Russian protests. The initial idea belongs to Ilya Klishin, who launched the dec24.ru website (which doesn’t exist anymore) for the big opposition rally that took place in Moscow on December 24, 2011.”

The reason I like this tactic is because it takes a perfectly legal action and simply multiplies it, thus forcing the regime to potentially come up with a new set of laws that will clearly appear absurd and ridiculed by a larger segment of the population.

Citizen-based journalism played a pivotal role by “increasing transparency of the coverage of pro-government rallies.” As Asmolov notes, “Internet users were able to provide much content, including high quality YouTube reports that showed that many of those who took a part in these rallies had been forced or paid to participate, without really having any political stance.” This relates to my earlier blog post, “Wag the Dog, or Why Falsifying Crowdsourced Information Can be a Pain.”

Of course, there is plenty of “counter-innovation” coming from the Kremlin and friends. Take this case of pro-Kremlin activists producing an instructional YouTube video on how to manipulate a crowdsourced election-monitoring platform. In addition, Putin loyalists have adapted some of the same tactics as opposition activists, such as the car-based flash-mob protest. The Russian government also decided to create an online system of their own for election monitoring:

“Following an order from Putin, the state communication company Rostelecom developed a website webvybory2012.ru, which allowed people to follow the majority of the Russian polling stations (some 95,000) online on the day of the March 4 presidential election. Every polling station was equipped with two cameras: one has to be focused on the ballot box and the other has to give the general picture of the polling station. Once the voting was over, one of the cameras broadcasted the counting of the votes. The cost of this project is at least 13 billion rubles (around $500 million). Many bloggers have criticized this system, claiming that it creates an imitation of transparency, when actually the most common election violations cannot be monitored through webcameras (more detailed analysis can be found here). Despite this, the cameras allowed to spot numerous violations (1, 2).”

From the perspective of digital resistance strategies, this is exactly the kind of reaction you want to provoke from a repressive regime. Force them to decen-tralize, spend hundreds of millions of dollars and hundreds of labor-hours to adopt similar “technologies of liberation” and in the process document voting irregularities on their own websites. In other words, leverage and integrate the regime’s technologies within the election-monitoring ecosystem being created, as this will spawn additional innovation. For example, one Russian activist proposed that this webcam network be complemented by a network of citizen mobile phones. In fact, a group of activists developed a smartphone app that could do just this. “The application Webnablyudatel has a classification of all the violations and makes it possible to instantly share video, photos and reports of violations.”

Putin supporters also made an innovative use of crowdsourcing during the recent elections. “What Putin has done is based on a map of Russia where anyone can submit information about Putin’s good deeds.” Just like pro-Kremlin activists can game pro-democracy crowdsourcing platforms, so can supporters of the opposition game a platform like this Putin map. In addition, activists could have easily created a Crowdmap and called it “What Putin Has Not Done” and crowdsource that map, which no doubt would be far more populated than the original good deed map.

One question that comes to mind is how the regime will deal with disinformation on crowdsourcing platforms they set up? Will they need to hire more supporters to vet the information submitted to said platform? Or will they close up the reporting and use “bounded crowdsourcing” instead? If so, will they have a communications challenge on their hands in trying to convince that trusted reporters are indeed legitimate? Another question has to do with collective action. Pro-Kremlin activists are already innovating on their own but will this create a collective-action challenge for the Russian government? Take the example of the pro-regime “Putin Alarm Clock” (Budilnikputina.ru) tactic which backfired and even prompted Putin’s chief of elections staff to dismiss the initiative as “a provocation organized by the protestors.”

There has always been an interesting asymmetric dynamic in digital activism, with activists as first-movers innovating under oppression and regimes counter-innovating. How will this asymmetry change as digital activism and civil resistance tactics and strategies increasingly converge? Will repressive regimes be pushed to decentralize their digital resistance innovations in order to keep pace with the distributed pro-democracy innovations springing up? Does innovation require less coordination than counter-innovation? And as Gregory Asmolov concludes in his post-script, how will the future ubiquity of crowd-funding platforms and tools for micro-donations/payments online change digital resistance?

I spend most of my time on this blog defending digital activism, but when I heard about the Kony 2012 video, even before I watched it, I decided toexpress my opinion by posting this picture on my Facebook page:

After posting it I was immediately shocked at my self. The message in the image was exactly the kind of snide digital-doesn’t-matter nay-saying that I constantly criticize on this blog.

I know that reposting the Kony video does matter. As Amy Sample Ward of NTEN has pointed out, even tiny acts of digital activism like re-tweeting, re-posting, or joining a Facebook group are a way of 1) identifying oneself publicly as caring about the issue, which can be useful to online organizers and 2) spreads the message to others within one’s social network.

This kind of activity also falls squarely within the first activist function of digital technology: shaping public opinion. People who were previously unaware of the situation in Northern Uganda now are. They are also aware of what it might be like to be a child living in a war zone, what the International Criminal Court is, what it does, and the importance and possibility of taking action to address a distant and intractable wrong. Also, given the strong positive response (the video has 97% positive feedback on YouTube), it made people not only aware but, on some level, made them care as well.

So it’s not worthless. In many ways it is valuable. Still, it annoyed me. Why? There are rational reasons to dislike the campaign:

1) The organization that produced the film, Invisible Children, is problematic.

• “Last year, the organization spent $8,676,614. Only 32% went to direct services with much of the rest going to staff salaries, travel and transport, and film production.” (source)
• “Charity Navigator rates their accountability 2/4 stars because they haven’t had their finances externally audited.” (source)
• “In their campaigns, such organizations [as Invisible Children] have manipulated facts for strategic purposes, exaggerating the scale of LRA abductions and murders.” (source)

2) The solution proposed in the video won’t work.

• The video demands the arrest of Joseph Kony, leader of the Lord’s Resistance Army, but the situation is more complex. Arresting Kony will not have the dramatic impact the video creators propose.
• “It is no longer clear that the LRA represents a major threat to stability in the region.” (source)
• “The LRA is now reduced to about 200 fighters…. Rather than occupying villages, as the LRA did when they were stronger, they now primarily conduct 5-6 person raids on villages to steal food.” (source)
• “Finding Kony isn’t a simple thing to do. The areas in which he and his forces operate are dense jungle with little infrastructure.” (source)
• “Russell argues that the only entity that can find and arrest Kony is the Ugandan army. Given that the Ugandan army has been trying, off and on, since 1987 to find Kony, that seems like a troublesome strategy.” (source)
• “Kony continues to rely on child soldiers. That means that a military assault… would likely result in the death of abducted children.” (source)
• The big action they propose in the video, blanketing the cities of the world with Kony posters, supports this oversimplification of the problem. It proposes a fun and slightly deviant action, but in pursuit of an ultimate goal that has more symbolic than practical value for Ugandans.

3) The video and campaign are unintentionally racist.

• It robs Ugandans of agency. (source)
• Invisible Children has no Africans on its board of directors and collects money for itself rather than for Ugandan organizations. (source)
• The heroes of the film are white young people and adults from the US and Europe, particularly video narrator and campaigner Jason Russell.
• The victims are Ugandan children. Ugandan adults appear in the film to validate the work of Invisible Children, not to represent their own work.
• The video embodies the outdated idea of the “white man’s burden,” that white people improve the countries of the global south by intervening and enforcing their values, that the people who live in these countries cannot improve their countries alone.

These are the rational reasons for disliking the video, though, to be honest, my reaction was visceral and emotional. I think what bugs me the most is my own culture, the fact that the most successful recent attempt to raise awareness about a human rights abuse in Africa starred and was narrated by a handsome white man, came in the form of a high-concept, high-cost video with a booming rock soundtrack, titled to hook the 2012 US presidential race, and happily simplified its cause for the sake of an easy-to-absorb and appealing emotional narrative (protagonist, antagonist, easy solution, your role).

And it worked. Or is so far. If this is the new recipe for engaging Americans in the problems of the rest of the world, this makes me sad. Are we only able to engage with others’ suffering through the glitzy flashing lens of our own popular culture?