Social Movements and Governments in the Digital Age: Evaluating a Complex Landscape

Abstract

Recently, social movements have shaken countries around the world. Most of these movements have thoroughly integrated digital connectivity into their toolkits, especially for organizing, gaining publicity, and effectively communicating. Governments, too, have been adapting to this new reality where controlling the flow of information provides new challenges. This article examines the multiple, often novel, ways in which social media both empowers new digitally-fueled movements and contributes to their apparent weaknesses in seemingly paradoxically ways. This article also integrates the evolving governmental response into its analysis. Social media's empowering aspects are real and profound, but these impacts do not play out in a simple, linear fashion. The ability to scale-up quickly using digital infrastructure has empowered movements to embrace their horizontalist and leaderless aspirations, which in turn have engendered new weaknesses after the initial phase of street actions ebbs. Movements without organizational depth are often unable to weather such transitions. While digital media create more possibilities to evade censorship, many governments have responded by demonizing and attacking social media, thus contributing to polarized environments in which dissidents have access to a very different set of information compared to those more loyal to the regime. This makes it hard to create truly national campaigns of dissent. This article provides an overview of this complex, evolving environment with examples ranging from the Tahrir Square protests in Egypt to the Occupy movement. ********** An Egyptian activist who participated in the initial Tahrir Square uprising in Cairo, which eventually resulted in the overthrow of President Hosni Mubarak, told me that she felt as though the activists had more influence before the revolution, especially in the online world. (1) Digital infrastructure empowers protest movements in specific ways, and recent uprisings and large protests around the world have provided indications of this power. However, some of the same mechanisms of digitally-fueled empowerment have paradoxically led to disempowering side effects. Further, many governments have developed methods to respond to this new information environment, which allows for fewer gatekeeper controls, by aggressively countering these new movements, often with a combination of traditional repression as well as novel methods aimed at addressing online media. The outcomes of movements certainly vary. The Occupy movement has had great success in focusing the conversation on inequality, but has been less effective in changing the policies that sustain it. (2) Austerity policies in Europe continue despite large numbers of protesters carrying out sustained occupations in multiple countries, including Spain and Greece. (3) In Turkey, within a year of the Gezi Park protests the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) won two major elections with comfortable margins. (4) Digital infrastructure may be said to follow a trajectory common to other disruptive technologies. (5) Governments' initial waves of ignorance and misunderstanding quickly gave way to learning about the medium's strengths and weaknesses, as well as the development of new methods to counter dissent. However, changes to a movement's capabilities that broaden its ability to coordinate actions or to publicize its cause are real as well. Hence, the sense of diminishing online influence expressed by the Egyptian activist to whom I spoke is a story not only of a transformed online sphere, but also of other actors learning to play a new game by new rules. This includes both resorting to old-style repressive measures and applying novel adaptations to a more open, less easily controlled public sphere. This article follows that arc and dicusses the ways in which online social media empowers protesters and dissidents, as well as some of its weaknesses and the evolving responses of governments. …