Cyberactivism and the unifying power of the internet

Are you on Facebook? Cool. Then you know social networking sites are all about mundane trivia, pointless political arguments and cute pictures of animals. Kittens, mostly.

But this year, thousands of Australians clicked on a heart-melting photo, perhaps shared by a friend, of a baby orangutan. They “liked” it, as you do. But many of them didn’t stop there. They clicked through to the link and signed an online petition to support clear labelling of food products that contain palm oil, the production of which is a mortal threat to orangutan habitats. In that moment, idle Facebookers became cyberactivists.

In July 2013, Zoos Victoria’s Zoopermarket website (zoo.org.au/zoopermarket) was able to report that, after 4000 e-petition signatures and more than 7500 emails sent to corporations, at least three major food companies — Goodman Fielder, Lindt & Sprüngli and Snack Brands Australia — had made “public, time-bound commitments to sourcing Certified Sustainable Palm Oil (CSPO)”.

A few months earlier, a similar campaign by The Orangutan Project had published a list of chocolate manufacturers that avoided the use of palm oil in their Easter products, while SBS World News Australia reported a “public backlash” against Coles and Woolworths when both voluntarily noted the presence of (non-sustainable) palm oil in their “own brand” hot cross buns.

In the past year, social media activism has wrested apologies from Sydney radio presenter Alan Jones — for his heartless comments about then-Prime Minister Gillard’s late father — and from Myer CEO Bernie Brookes for his ill-advised comment that a levy to fund the National Disability Insurance Scheme would be money “that would have been spent with us”.

While the effect on the Myer brand is not yet known, there’s no doubt the company went into immediate damage control. And in the latest Sydney radio ratings, Jones’s station 2GB, while still on top, had lost 2 per cent of its audience share.

Clearly, something is happening.

It’s just a click away

In this digital era, with the world at our fingertips, or at most a mouse click or two away, it can sometimes seem that the planet’s problems are no longer at a safe distance but clamouring for attention right there on our own computer screens. On Twitter, on our Facebook newsfeed, on YouTube and via email, friends, friends of friends, cyber-acquaintances and strangers alike urge us to boycott this, disapprove of that or sign such-and-such a petition. You could call it the dawning of the age of cyberactivism.

In fact, online activism is almost as old as the internet itself. One of the earliest e-campaigns, the so-called Intervasion of the UK, took place nearly 20 years ago when John Major’s conservative government proposed a bill to ban outdoor rave festivals and “music with a repetitive beat”. On Guy Fawkes Day, appropriately enough, in 1994, a group of hackers called The Zippies began an email-bombing campaign whereby thousands of messages jammed official mailboxes and brought down the government’s internet servers for a week.

This form of “hacktivism”, known as DDoS (distributed denial of service), has been used many times since, often by criminals — but not always. Most notably, in 2010, opponents of internet piracy, including copyright bodies, carried out DDoS attacks on torrent sites, which enable the free downloading of copyright material such as movies and music. An activist group called Anonymous — whose members wear Guy Fawkes masks in public — hit back with cyber-attacks on major copyright and anti-piracy organisations, including the Australian Federation Against Copyright Theft.

In December of that year, under pressure from the US government, credit card companies froze the assets of WikiLeaks, the most famous e-campaigners of them all. In retaliation, Anonymous mounted a DDoS attack on several credit card companies and succeeded in bringing down the websites of Mastercard and Visa.

“We neither condemn nor applaud these attacks,” stated WikiLeaks spokesman Kristinn Hrafnsson at the time. He added, somewhat disingenuously, “We believe they are a reflection of public opinion on the actions of the targets.”

In reality, of course, no matter how strong your convictions are and how much you might sympathise with the work of activists like WikiLeaks, the sophisticated technologies employed in this kind of e-warfare are beyond the reach of the average computer user — or were until relatively recently. Now, with almost universal access to email, the invention of the smartphone and the rise of social media, the basic tools of cyberactivism are in everybody’s hands.

The 99 per cent

It was only in the past four years that these tools came into their own, during Iran’s Green Revolution, the Arab Spring protests and the Occupy Wall Street movement.

In 2009, a disputed Iranian presidential election, in which Mahmoud Ahmadinejad claimed a 60 per cent victory, prompted mass demonstrations on the streets of Teheran and many other cities. The peaceful protests were met by police crackdowns, torture and even murder, some of which was documented on smartphones and broadcast on Twitter and other social-networking sites. So the world was watching when 26-year-old music student Neda Agha-Soltan was shot by a paramilitary gunman and her final moments were filmed and uploaded to YouTube.

A year later, similar protests using the unifying power of social media began to roll across the Arab world, unseating rulers in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Yemen. According to American journalist Courtney Radsch, an expert on cyberactivism who as early as 2006 began writing about the revolutionary impact of blogging and social media in Egypt, this so-called Arab Spring owed its momentum to “three key facets: citizen journalism, mobilisation and organisation”.

While the Arab uprisings were driven by popular demands for democratic change, the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) protests that began in New York in 2011 were a response to the global financial crisis — in particular, the way the US financial sector evaded responsibility for the GFC as well as the increasing wealth disparity between the richest 1 per cent and the rest of the population. Hence the OWS slogan, “We are the 99 per cent.” Like the Arab Spring protestors, OWS used the rallying power of social media and electronic messaging to drive home its objectives. Acknowledging the example of the Egyptian demonstrations in Cairo’s Tahrir Square, one organiser said, “America needs its own Tahrir.”

The establishment’s reaction was predictable. Republican presidential hopeful Mitt Romney labelled OWS as based on “envy” and “class warfare” while Naomi Wolf, writing in The Guardian, cited documents that proved the FBI and DHS (Department of Home Security) kept close tabs on the movement. Indeed, former CIA and NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden has revealed the alarming extent of the US and British governments’ surveillance of internet and telephone activity.

Repressive states, too, know the power of social media and the internet. Communist China has long struggled to monitor and control the online lives of its citizens. In the wake of Iran’s Green Revolution — also known as the “Twitter Revolution” — an unnamed “high commander” in the Iranian cyber police recently denounced Facebook as “the most disgusting spyware and the most dangerous warfare of the US”, claiming it’s also “responsible for one-third of divorces in Iran”. Social networking websites are routinely blocked by Iranian authorities as “tools to promote unrest and in favour of regime change in Iran”. Yet the country’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, has his own Twitter account and Facebook page (Khamenei.ir).

He’s not the only prominent politician with a social-media profile. Kevin Rudd (Australian Prime Minister at the time of writing) has 1.2 million followers on Twitter, with whom he recently shared a picture of a shaving cut. US President Barack Obama claims nearly 18 million followers (though, according to some sources, around 70 per cent of them are fake or “inactive” accounts). And when Hillary Clinton joined Twitter in June and attracted half a million followers within two weeks, many observers declared the move signalled the start of her run for the presidency in 2016.

In fact, social media have spawned a website and mobile app called Klout, which ranks users’ online influence according to the Klout Score, a numerical value between 1 and 100. While this is largely of use only to celebrities who tweet and retweet product names for considerable financial rewards, it does prompt a question: as a single computer or mobile user, what’s your online clout? What is the power of one — and how can you use this power for good?

The sleeping giant

In July 2013, online activist website Avaaz reported that one of its members had “created the biggest online petition in Brazilian history”, in which more than 1.6 million individual voices had been raised against corruption in the Brazilian senate. Long story short, the senators then voted to give any 500,000-citizen petition the power to directly introduce measures to the government. This gave rise to a new Twitter hashtag, #OGiganteAcordou: “the sleeping giant has awoken”.

Another successful Avaaz campaign targeted Swedish clothing brand H&M, one of many that outsource to Bangladesh where a garment factory collapsed in April of this year, killing more than a thousand workers. H&M bowed to online pressure and signed a legally enforceable safety accord, prompting 75 brands to join it, including Zara, Calvin Klein and Tommy Hilfiger. As the campaign continues, hopefully other major retailers such as GAP and WalMart will follow.

Sometimes the outcome can be disappointing. A worldwide social-media campaign by Avaaz, Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch, endorsed by many celebrities and other prominent people, may have succeeded in saving the life of Sakineh Mohammadi Ashtiani, an Iranian Azerbaijani woman sentenced to death by stoning for adultery. However, while a Facebook page in her name has been liked by nearly 80,000 people, both she and her lawyer are still in prison in Tabriz — seven years after she was convicted.

Compare this with the high-profile case of Malala Yousafzai, the Pakistani teenager and education campaigner who was shot by the Taliban last year. Just 12 months later she has been nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize, addressed the UN and launched a new online petition at Change.org calling for the United Nations “to fund new teachers, schools and books and recommit to getting every girl and boy in school by December 2015”. At the time of writing, “Stand With Malala” had attracted close to 300,000 signatures.

In another hard-won victory for online activism this year, a 15-year-old girl in the Maldives, sentenced under Shariah law to a public flogging for “fornication” when in fact she was raped by her stepfather, was spared the lash after a concerted Avaaz campaign targeted the country’s tourist industry. And in India, the gang-rape and murder of a 23-year-old student last December has led to online lobbying for a public education campaign to challenge outdated attitudes towards women.

“Sharing is the force multiplier of digital journalism,” says Scott Lamb, editorial director of news and entertainment website BuzzFeed. The same is true of social media and online activism. It’s as easy to share a picture of a cute cat as it is to share a link to a petition that just might make a difference to someone, somewhere. In the relatively new virtual community of the web, people who may have never known democracy now have a voice and their opinions and concerns can now be heard at the highest levels of government and on the boards of multinational corporations, which ignore them at their own peril.

Critics of cyberactivism often dismiss the phenomenon as mere “clicktivism” or “slacktivism”, as if it’s a peculiarly 21st-century vanity to assume one person with a mouse or a smartphone can bring about meaningful change. They talk of “cyberbalkanisation”, the “digital divide” or the “echo-chamber effect” — particularly on Facebook, where one’s friends tend to be like-minded people mutually reinforcing common beliefs and Deals.

But the flip side is the amplified impact of thousands and tens of thousands of people, each asserting the power of one, all coming together as a real social force — the sum of us, to use the name of one activist organisation. It’s even been dubbed the Fifth Estate (after the clergy, the nobility, the commoners and the press): the blogosphere, online activists and the rest of us at grassroots in the vast global village of the internet. In truth, the sleeping giant has awoken.

The power of one

While there are many advocacy organisations such as CARE, Oxfam, Amnesty International, Greenpeace, Occupy Monsanto and the like, here are some places where you can start your own petition. Think global, act local!

• Avaaz (avaaz.org). Boasting almost 25 million members, Avaaz is currently campaigning against the proposed dredging of the Barrier Reef to facilitate coal shipping as well as against the Labor Party’s refugee policy. Other campaigns have taken on mega-corporations like Bayer to ban bee-killing insecticides in Europe and successfully called for the UN to recognise Palestine as the world’s 194th state.
• Change.org. The home of e-petitions with a claimed membership of 3 million and 196,879,494 signatures collected, Change.org is campaigning against a proposed McDonald’s opposite a kindergarten in the Dandenong Ranges village of Tecoma as well as against Gina Rinehart’s attempt to compel two Fairfax journalists to reveal their sources (“Gina: Drop Your Subpoena”).
• GetUp! (getup.org.au). A self-described “independent, grassroots advocacy organisation, built to hold politicians to account”. Its Australian founders also started Avaaz. Notable achievements include the long campaign to bring David Hicks home and the fight to preserve the world’s oldest collection of rock art on WA’s Burrup Peninsula.
• SumOfUs (someofus.org). With a million-plus members worldwide, SumOfUs is dedicated to bringing corporations to account. It recently succeeded in getting ice-cream company Ben & Jerry’s to go GMO-free and is currently campaigning against Kellogg’s and its complicity in the deforestation of Indonesia for palm oil plantations.

Just because we can

Not all e-campaigns are created equal; not every online petition is about life-and-death issues. Here are some other things people care about:

• Let the Lorax Speak for the Trees. A fourth-grade class of 14 kids in Massachusetts demanded Universal Studios restore Dr Seuss’s environmental themes to its movie version of The Lorax. When their petition went viral with more than 57,000 signatures, the studio updated the movie website accordingly.
• Keep Mad Max Aussie. After AusGamers started a Change.org campaign against the use of American accents in a new Mad Max video game, the studio acceded via Twitter: “Attn. fans who want Max to have an Aussie accent in #MadMaxGame: It shall be so. We admire your loyalty. You have been heard.”
• May the Fourth be With You. A fan club called Star Walking Inc petitioned Melbourne’s Lord Mayor to consider that The Avenue in Parkville be renamed Star Wars Avenue for the Star Wars Day celebrations on May 4, 2013. Oh well, maybe next year …
• Keep Merida Brave. A quarter of a million supporters have signed up to protest Disney’s makeover of Merida — the strong but imperfect hero of the animated film Brave — with a more conventionally glamorous image for Target’s Disney Princess Collection.

Chris Stafford is a musician and writer who believes the internet and social media as the new democracy can be a force for good.