Twitter and Tear Gas: Social Media and Political Mobilization

From #BlackLivesMatter to Trump #Resistance, from the Arab Spring to the failed Turkish coup, the world has been captivated by political movements in the digital era. But the decentralized nature of social media-fueled activism is both its greatest strength and its greatest weakness. Resilient, but leaderless. Responsive, but undisciplined. Are these new technologies truly changing the nature of protest, or are they merely updating the ways in which we observe them? And what does all this mean in the age of the Tweeter-In-Chief?

Zeynep Tufekci, a contributing opinion writer at the New York Times and one of the leading experts on collective actions coordinated by social media, examines the trajectories of these modern protests—how they form and why they have difficulty persisting in their long-term quests for change.
SPEAKER:

Zeynep Tufekci
Contributing Opinion Writer, New York Times; and Assistant Professor, School of Information and Library Science, University of North Carolina