2 June 2003
Techniques of Electronic Advocacy
This entry has been updated and incorporated into An Introduction to Activism on the Internet.
I’ve been searching for a list of excellent examples of Internet activism. I couldn’t find one, so I made my own.
I’ve structured much of this list around categories outlined by Sasha Costanza-Chock in “Mapping the Repertoire of Electronic Contention,” in Representing Resistance: Media, Civil Disobedience and the Global Justice Movement, eds. Andrew Opel and Donnalyn Pompper. Greenwood, in press. Unless otherwise indicated, the quoted text below has been taken from him.
Though I’ve added some of my own commentary, this is not intended to be a full analysis of the campaigns and organizations mentioned. I disagree with the politics of many of the examples listed, but think there is something to be learned from each of the them.
Many of the projects listed here also cross multiple categories, but have been organized here for the sake of demonstration. The categories are as follows:
- Representation
- Information Distribution and Independent Media
- Research
- Cultural Production
- Outreach
- Solidarity
- Lobbying
- Fundraising
- Tactical Communication
[ Because it’s taken so long for me to finish this list, I’m posting what I’ve written thus far. The second half will cover online collaboration, tech tools, and more oppositional tactics. I’ll post it as soon as I get a chance. In the meantime, do please your comments and feedback. ]
“It would be impossible to catalog the hundreds of thousands of sites devoted to social movements, but these generally present organizations in terms of mission, projects, history, membership, and links to affiliated groups, and usually include contact information. One function of such sites is to establish a kind of ongoing presence for organizations and other movement actors. In contexts of extreme repression, websites may be the only way for organizations that operate entirely underground to have a persistent visible presence at all. For example, this is the case for the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, who have spoken of how their website (www.rawa.org) has served as kind of ‘virtual base’ from which they are able to represent themselves to the world as well as engage in all the other forms of conventional electronic contention described below.”
The armed uprising of the Zapatista National Liberation Army in the Mexican state of Chiapas was one of the first social movements to use Internet effectively. On January 1, 1994, the Zapatista National Liberation Army took over 5 towns and over 500 ranches in Chiapas, one of the poorest states in Mexico. The Zapatistas say they chose this date because it marked the first day of the North Amercian Free Trade Agreement. During the long war between the Mexican Army and the Zapatistas, the Zapatista’s sent out periodic email communiques through journalists and sympathizers that described the situation on the ground and the ideals behind the movement and its critique of neoliberalism. Despite limited mainstream media coverage of the struggle, the communiques were distributed throughout Mexico and around the world, published on the Web and on gopher sites. As national and international support and solidarity for the movement grew, the actions of Mexican government were increasingly scrutinized. Protests were held around the world, meetings were organized in Chiapas and across South America, and the Mexican government was eventually pushed to accept mediation and negotiations instead of military repression. This page has a list of information resources in English.
Information Distribution and Independent Media
“This includes, but is not limited to the distribution of information about movement goals, campaigns, actions, reports, and so on via website, email, listservs, bulletin boards, chat rooms, ftp, and other channels. Information may be designed for the general public or for specific receivers, for example press releases, academic reports, or radio programmes and video segments for rebroadcast. In some cases the same information may be repackaged differently for various intended audiences.”
Radio B-92 broadcasts music and news promoting “free speech, objective reporting, social tolerance and solidarity, minority cultures, cosmopolitan values and alternative culture” in the struggle for a free and democratic Serbia. After two brief closures by the regime of Slobodan Milosevic, Radio B92 was permanently taken over on April 2, 1999. Within months, Free B92 managed to resume almost all its former activities. In cooperation with Studio B, the radio program B2-92 began broadcasting on 99.1 MHz FM on August 9, 1999. Despite constant jamming by the regime this program quickly became the highest-rated in Belgrade as had been Radio B92 before the shutdown. The government took over Studio B on May 16, 2000, terminating the FM broadcast. Despite this, the station continued to broadcast on satellite (six hours a day) as well as on the Internet (24 hours). The shift to underground, Internet broadcasting enabled the opposition to be heard throughout the war. The station continues to the use of the Internet in the fight against repression and as focus of an on-line community concerned with the struggle for democratization of Serbia.
Indymedia is many things to many people: a collection of autonomous independent media organizations; an open publishing system; a global, grassroots infrastructure for free speech, dissent, and activism; a network for solidarity and technology exchange; a movement for truth and social justice, both local and international. Indymedia rose to prominence during the protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle in November 1999. Since then, the global justice movement and Indymedia have grown along side each other, often intersecting and mutually supporting one another. Over 120 Indymedia Web sites provide an online forum for independent journalism. Check the Indymedia FAQ or contact a local Independent Media Center near you.
Much has been made of the rise of Blogs in Iran, particularly as a place for women in Iran to talk freely about subjects they can not otherwise discuss in public. The debate online is an extension of the overall intellectual and democratic transformation taking place.
Blogs also played a role in the resignation of Senate majority leader Trent Lott. When the mainstream media ignored the racist remarks of the incoming Senate Minority Leader, bloggers kept the story going.
Tokyo Alien Eyes is a tiny organization that fights racism against foreign residents in Japan, particularly students. The director maintains a blog (in Japanese) of his activities which creates a level of transparency that is unique among Japanese community based organizations.
Geek buys a new computer with a built-in DVD player. Geek runs the Linux operating system and is unable to play the DVD’s he owns. So he cracks the DVD encryption scheme and shares the recipe with other Linux users. Hilarity ensues. So what’s the best way to spread a piece of code? Ban it and then sue a bunch of geeks to remove the code and links to it from their Web pages. The debate over DeCSS, subsequent lawsuits and massive civil disobedience have broad implications: Is code software or speech? Are digital media, movies, videos, software, or speech? Can you really make hyperlinks illegal? And what about our freedom to tinker? The continued redistribution of the code has made a mockery of the MPAA, their tactics, and security model. (Particularly when the DeCSS code was briefly entered into the public record in the course of the trial.)
And then there are your solid campaign sites like Circuses.com. Run by the organization People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals, the campaign targets cruelty against animals by circuses. The site provides a concise overview of the issue, a list of actions you can take, and materials for kids to download and print. The site navigation is clear, and the overall design is bright and circusy with stars and photos of circus tents... and animals in chains. The domain name is also a great Google hack. When a user searches for info on “circuses,” Circuses.com comes up first.
“Many social movement organizations use the Internet as a resource for gathering specific information relevant to their cause, including information about opponents or targets, information produced by other movement actors, case studies of parallel situations, historical background, theory, economic data, environmental data, media analysis, and so on.”
The Environmental Working Group Farm Subsidy Database is a database of farm program checks written by the U.S. Department of Agriculture during calendar years 1996 through 2000, obtained via a Freedom of Information Act request. The tens of millions of check records were compiled to obtain the total subsidy received by each recipient, in each payment category. According to the NYTimes, it has “not only caught the attention of [U.S.] lawmakers, it also helped transform the farm bill into a question about equity and whether the country’s wealthiest farmers should be paid to grow commodity crops while many smaller family farms receive nothing and are going out of business.”
Among the myths, propaganda, and disinformation bolstering the U.S. invasion of Iraq, there were a few shining beacons of clarity and truth on the Web. The Center for Cooperative Research has produced several excellent fact sheets about America’s war without end. Their breakdown of Iraqi opposition groups, and their positions on U.S. invasion, is the best that I’ve found. See also 13 Myths About the Case for War in Iraq, a collaborative research project developed by Organizers’ Collaborative. Written and produced by “The Committee to Unsell the War,” Who Dies for Bush Lies? features a summary of Bush administration lies in the case for this and the previous Gulf War, and addresses the cost of war on U.S. civilians and soldiers as well as Iraqi civilians and soldiers. It also points to carefully selected resources, links, and actions, and features photos of anti-war Americans from all walks of life rallying against the war.
“Visual art, music, video, poetry, net.art, and other forms of cultural production by artists active in, associated with, or supportive of social movements are often posted, distributed, or sold online.”
Several Web sites host agit-prop images that can be freely printed out and posted around town. Subvertise is a fairly broad collection. During the invasion of Iraq, many sites hosted a number of downloadable anti-war posters. The idea is a good one, though the quality of the images is mixed. Two individual artists with some great agit-prop images and posters online are Erik Drooker and Mike Flugennock. Micah Wright’s remixed vintage propaganda posters were widely picked up by the blogging crowd.
During the invasion of Iraq, a couple of artists remixed President Bush’s State of the Union speeches to comic and chilling effect. To this, I would also add this lipsynched love song between George W. Bush and Tony Blaire.
Also under cultural production, are satire sites.
“Site parodies or replicas of target sites that subtly alter wording or images to express activist viewpoints and discredit the target have been launched against.”
Some examples: gatt.org, GWBush.com, whitehouse.org, Homeland Security Cultural Bureau.
Other examples are listed in the parody section of this blog.
Also known as “viral marketing,” these campaigns often take the form of Flash pieces that are emailed from friend to friend promoting a cause or action. Two examples are AIDS Concern, Hong Kong, and the Amnesty International, Conflict Diamonds animation.
Less attached to any specific campaigns are two projects by Jonah Peretti that were forwarded widely around the Web: his email exchange about customizing Nike sneakers with the word “sweatshop”; and the straight-faced satire site blackpeopleloveus.com.
Somewhere between outreach and tactical communication is political use of the Web site meetup.com. The site is a “free service that organizes local gatherings about anything, anywhere.” You register your interest and city and when a critical mass of people have also registered, a date and place for the meeting is set. On April 2, over ten thousand people met across the country to discuss campaign efforts for Democratic presidential candidate Howard Dean. As of this writing, Dean’s Meetup site reports that nearly 23,000 people are meeting or are interested in meeting in nearly 500 cities. Also of note, is the Howard Dean Web log, maintained by one of his campaign workers as they stump across the U.S.A. Read more about the Dean campaign and its use of the Internet. Note, too, that constituencies that are less connected to the Internet, are less likely to be reached by Internet organzing alone.
One of the first electronic advocacy campaigns was the Blue Ribbon free speech. In February 1996, President Clinton signed into law a Telecom Bill and its “Communications Decency Amendment.” The “Communications Decency Act” attempted to impose U.S. broadcast-style content regulations on the Internet. Internet users were outraged. Protests were held, lawsuits were filed, and Web authors colored their pages black for 48 hours. Subsequently, the authors posted banner graphics of blue ribbons and linked to campaign pages on the fight against the CDA and Internet censorship. In June 1997, a unanimous US Supreme Court decision struck down the CDA as an unconstitutional violation of the First Amendment. The blue ribbon campaign did not end, however, as Clinton signed the “Child Online Protection Act” (aka “CDA II”) in 1998. After another round of protest and lawsuits, the law was struck down in March 2003. The blue ribbon campaign continues today and has broadened to include Internet censorship around the world.
In January 2003, Sam Hamill was invited by First Lady Laura Bush to take part in a White House symposium called “Poetry and the American Voice.” Hamill, author of 13 volumes of poetry, is also ex-Marine, a Buddhist and a pacifist. He started the Web site Poets Against the War and invited a few friends to submit antiwar poems. The poems would be presented to the White House at the March 5th event. In two months, the site received over 13,000 submissions. News got around and the symposium was cancelled. The site also began listing events and readings of poetry against the war around the U.S. In March, 13,000 poems were presented to the Prime Minister of Canada. In May, 174 of the poems were published by Nation Books in an anthology titled “Poets Against the War.”
From the Link and Think site:
“Each December 1, World AIDS Day, the creative community observes A Day With(out) Art, in memory of all those the AIDS pandemic has taken from us, and in recognition of the many artists, actors, writers, dancers and others who continue to create and live with HIV and AIDS. A Day With(out) Art was created by the group Visual AIDS in New York City. 
For the last several years, Creative Time has organized a Day With(out) Art observance on the worldwide web, encouraging diverse website designers and administrators to darken their site and convey AIDS prevention and education information to their visitors. In 1999, more than 50 webloggers took part in a project called a Day With(out) Weblogs. In 2000, nearly 700 personal weblogs and journals of all sorts participated. In 2001, the number was over 1,000. The personal web publishing community — weblogs, journals, diaries, personal websites of every kind — has continued to grow and diversify. Once again, everyone who produces personal content on the web is invited to participate a global observance of World AIDS Day. In recognition of the variety of sites participating — E/N sites, weblogs, journals, newspages and more — and to differentiate it from other, similar endeavors, a Day With(out) Weblogs became Link and Think.”
“This includes electronic versions of certain kinds of collective action aimed directly at influencing the political process and legislative outcomes. Online petitions and email campaigns fall into this category. Targets may be elected officials and government bodies, multilateral institutions, transnational nongovernmental organizations or other social movement organizations.”
Corporations and non-profits, like Capital Advantage and GetActive Software, maintain online applications that make it easy to contact state and federal officials in the U.S. Non-profit organizations like NARAL (formerly The National Abortion and Reproductive Rights Action League) can use the applications to run action driven sites like the Choice Action Network which can email customized action alerts to supporters in targeted districts so the users need only click a button to send a letter to their elected officials. The applications also integrate email list management and online fundraising, and can connect track the online actions and donations of their supporters.
Like the services mentioned above, the Web site FaxYourMP.org lets Britons send faxes their Members of Parliament. The site was instrumental in killing the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act of 2000 and the national ID card campaign. What’s notably different is that the site is run by a private citizen out of his own home. Blogger Corey Doctorow sums it up: “Some code, a good meme, DSL, and a few hundred bucks’ worth of hardware adds up to a tool that moves governments. I am agog.”
The WWF Panda Passport makes electronic advocacy into a kind of a lobbying game. The more actions you take the more stamps you get in your panda passport. The more stamps you accumulate, you higher rank and title you win. At each threshold, you are offered rewards like downloadble wallpaper graphics and screen savers. Site users are also sent action alerts by email. Though the game format seems very effective at encouraging participation, I find it trivializes the content.
Amnesty International’s Urgent Action Network existed long before the Internet. Postal mail action briefs were sent from AI’s London headquarters to national offices around the world to distribute to Amnesty International members. The briefs outlined cases of “prisoners of conscience,” often detained for non-violent expression of their political beliefs and often at risk of torture or execution. Amnesty members would respond with hundreds and even thousands of letters to the responsible government officials urging them to free the prisoners. Email and the Web have dramatically shortened response times, though much of the lobbying is still done with postal mail. Last year’s campaign on torture introduced action alerts via text messages to beepers and cell phones. Over the years, hundreds of prisoners have been released (though AI does not take direct credit for specific releases.) Also of note is the use of geography as a tactical tool. Not every urgent action is sent to every member by the 80 Amnesty offices around the world. When actions are distributed, a geographic balance is maintained so that, for instance, letters an Islamic country does not only receive letters from the U.S. and Western Europe, but from other Islamic countries as well. Conversely, Amnesty generally does not send cases to members that are in the members’ own country (though there are some exceptions.)
Lobbying is not confined to government officials and corporations, but also includes the media. With the Capital Advantage application you simply your zip code for a list of local media outlets and their contact info. Palestine Media Watch sends out regular email dispatches that document media bias in reports on the Israel-Palestine conflict. The newsletter encourages subscribers to respond directly to the news agency concerned.
There are an enormous number of petitions online. Sites like petition online makes creating one very easy, though it lacks a verification mechanism. This petition urging UN High Commissioner for Human Rights Mary Robinson to investigate Ariel Sharon’s crimes against humanity has nearly one million. The petition collected signatures into 2003 — long after Mary Robinson left that office in September 2002 and after the Web site and email account of the petition creator ceased to exist.
One of the best uses of online petitions is simply building a network of supporters. MoveOn.org started in September 1998 as an online petition to encourage the media and politicians to move on from the seemingly endless noise over the President Clinton’s impeachment proceedings. According to the site “during impeachment, MoveOn’s grassroots advocates generated more than 250,000 phone calls and a million emails to Congress.” The site has focused on other issues, but it was in the fight the U.S. war on Iraq that it took off. Most notable, was the virtual march on Washington which organized thousands of anti-war Americans to call and fax the President and Congress on February 26, 2003. The action overwhelmed White House and Senate switchboards and offices. With their periodic email messages urging simple, concrete actions MoveOn also organized off line rallies, personal visits by constituents with their elected officials, and raised funds for the production and placement of television, radio, and newspaper ads. The email list now boasts over two million subscribers around the world.
“This includes appeals to membership and donations as well as the online sale of ‘SMO merchandise’ - T-shirts, books, buttons, posters, and so on. This is problematized by certain kinds of companies that might be considered (or consider themselves) SMOs but have a main organizational function that is commercial, for example Fair Trade Federation (http://www.fairtradefederation.com). Fundraising efforts are also aided by computer-assisted direct mailing campaigns and by member database management.”
An growing number of Internet users are donating money online, though the overall percentage of chartiable donations made online is still very smalll. According to groundspring.org, around 1-3% of individual giving in the U.S. was via the Internet in 2002.
Humanitarian organizations like the Red Cross raise an enormous amount of money whenever a big disaster hits the mainstream media. Donation sites for the families of the victims of the attacks on September 11, 2001 raised an unprecedented amount of money.
Of online donation sites, I find the Heifer International Gift Catalog particularly effective. The Catalog is an e-commerce site where you can purchase cows and goats which are distributed to families around the world that live in poverty. The site creates a strong sense of transparency, giving the impression that there is no question about what your money is funding.
The Hunger Site was the first of many ‘clicks for charity’ sites. The site funnels dollars from banner ad clickthroughs into humanitarian relief efforts. I have always been impressed by the popularity of the site, considering how superficially it address the actual causes of hunger and extreme poverty. The Hunger Site is run by for-profit corporation, though it claims 100% of sponsor banner advertising is paid to nonprofit beneficiary organizations.
In the U.S., registered non-profit organizations are restricted in the amount and kinds of lobbying they are permitted to conduct. So MoveOn, building on its enormous email network, started a separate political action committee. MoveOn PAC is a response to corporate PACs that raise money for (and curry favor from) candidates for congressional office. MoveOn PAC acts as a conduit for Web users to fund candidates with moderate to progressive views. “All funds go entirely to the individual campaigns in the amounts you specify. We take care of all the required [Federal Election Commission] paperwork by transmitting necessary contributor information to each campaign... Through the MoveOn.org Political Action Committee, more than 10,000 everyday Americans together contributed more than $2 million to key congressional campaigns in the 2000 election, and more than $3.5 million in 2002 election.”
Planned Parenthood also used fundraising itself as an advocacy tool. After an LA Times columnist wrote that a donation to Planned Parenthood in the name of John Ashcroft was a fitting message to send to President George W. Bush on Presidents’ Day in response to his reinstating the “global gag rule” and appointing John Ashcroft as U.S. attorney general, 15,000 individuals contributed $500,000 . 15,000 acknowledgement messages were delivered to the new Executive Office Building.
“This refers to the use of the Internet or other electronic communications to aid mobilization efforts, both before and during street or ‘real world’ collective actions. This includes calls to action distributed electronically, as well as coordination during street actions using internet, pager, cell phone, WAP, or other electronic communications technologies.”
On September 25, 1995 the Mersey Docks & Harbour Company sacked 500 dockworkers in Liverpool for refusing to cross a picket line. Faced with Thatcher’s anti-union laws at home, the dockers appealed for international support. Along with conventional means of communication, they spread the word through email and a Web site on LabourNet. As the dockers travelled to carry the picket abroad, to publicize the struggle and raise funds, they found that when they arrived, people already knew about their struggle “from the Internet.” LabourNet became a daily news service about the Liverpool dispute for dockers around the world.
“Using this network the dockers were able to organise two international days of action in their support. In the first day of action, the body that supposedly possessed the authority to call international dockers’ actions, the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF), was circumvented in this way and reduced to trailing limply behind the dockers’ network. It organised virtually no action itself and when asked by the press to supply information on the pending action it was forced to send begging E-mails to LabourNet to try to find out what was actually happening. This first day of action, on 20th January 1997, resulted in what one international union official described as ‘the biggest international working class action for 100 years.’ In 27 countries, 105 ports and cities, dockers, seafarers, and other workers took part in workplace meetings, public meetings, demonstrations at British Embassies and Consulates, work-to-rules, and full-scale stoppages ranging from 30 minutes up to 24 hours. Whilst this was happening, the Liverpool dockers’ union, the Transport & General Workers’ Union (TGWU), was trying to persuade the Liverpool dockers and their families to accept redundancy payments and quit their fight. The international support was inspiring them to carry on and was making the TGWU leadership’s task much more difficult. When the Liverpool shop stewards called a second day of action on 8th September 1997 the TGWU insisted that the ITF must not support the action. This made very little difference. If anything the action was bigger than the first one. US and Canadian longshoremen closed down the entire North American West Coast from Alaska to Los Angeles for 24 hours. The flexibility of the dockers’ communication network was illustrated by the fact that they were able to organise this action whilst keeping the employers in the dark about its actual date, only publicly announcing it at the last moment.
In September 1997, a ship from Britain with containers on board from a company using Liverpool was refused by dockers in Oakland, Vancouver, and at two different ports in Japan. Rather than sail back all the way back to Britain, the ship was sold along with its cargo to a company in Hong Kong.
“This action caused great fear amongst ship owners and their insurers, even more than the international days of action had. Despite this growing international strength, the dockers were ultimately forced to surrender by the connivance of the TGWU leadership. On 26th January, 1998, the Merseyside Port Shop Stewards Committee issued a statement notifying supporters around the world that ‘the Liverpool dockworkers decided to call an end to their long running dispute.’ Behind the scenes, enormous pressure, full details of which have never been fully revealed, had been put on the shop stewards by the TGWU leadership to force them to end the dispute. Despite this defeat, the Liverpool dockers’ struggle proved how powerful a networked union communication structure based on the Internet could be in the fight back against a globalised capital that dominates the mainstream media. During the course of the Liverpool fight, dockers in a number of other countries: Montreal in Canada, Santos in Brazil, Los Angeles in the US, Amsterdam in the Netherlands and Stockholm in Sweden all began producing their own Web sites. The defeat of the Liverpool men meant most of these Web sites later closed down, but workers elsewhere are still building Internet based communications networks inspired by the one built in support of Liverpool. During the Korean general strike in 1997, the, then illegal, Korean Confederation of Trade Unions used LabourNet and its own Web sites to publicise its actions. This later resulted in the formation of Korean LaborNet (NodongNet). In February [2002], the All Japan Dockworkers’ Union, which played a central role in taking action for Liverpool, worked together with labour media activists to launch LaborNet Japan.” [source]
Other examples of electronic media for tactical communication include:
- the use of fax machines to mobilize and publicize 1989 uprising in Tiananmen Square.
- the use of text messaging by protesters in 2001 revolution in the Phillipines to rapidly coordinate demonstrations that helped topple president Estrada.
- the use mobile phones by protestors at the 1999 World Trade Organisation meeting in Seattle to coordinate the demonstrations, and outwit the centralized radio system of the police. Other large scale, international demonstrations by the global justice movement, such as the G8 protests in Evian, France and convergences like the World Social Forum in Porto Alegre, Brazil, rely heavily on the Internet to coordinate.
The January 2003 presidential victory in South Korea also stunned everyone by shaking off 50 years of conservative rule. The change is in part the result of a demographic shift and the use of the Internet by the younger generation to get out the vote.
The February 15, 2003 protests against the U.S. invasion of Iraq were historically unprecedented for the scale and global distribution, and the fact that they occurred before the war. Millions of people in 793 cities around the world took to the streets to protest Bush’s war in Iraq. Though email facilitated much of the organizing within individual cities, I hear from organizers that almost no coordination at all took place between cities. It was mostly word-of-mouth. The idea started at the European Social Forum in November 2002. There, the date February 15 was chosen as a date for anti-war demonstrations “in every capital.” From there the idea spread. Images of the protests circulated the Web in practically real time. Some articles: Wired, New York Times, Washington Post.
Mentioned above, MoveOn.org’s massive lobbying blitz, the February 26, 2003 “virtual march” on Washington D.C. falls under this category, too.
Last updated on July 20, 2003.
2 June 2003, 7:30 PM | 
