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Erica Chenoweth on 5 Paths Social Movements Can Take in a Disinformation Era

Introduction

Erica Chenoweth, a US political scientist known for groundbreaking research work on nonviolent civil resistance movements, shares five paths social movements can take in a disinformation era. 

From the Arab Spring to the Black Lives Matter movement, civil resistance occurs around the world. But how can nonviolent social movements succeed against the rise of fictional narratives in the media? Erica Chenoweth, Berthold Beitz Professor in Human Rights and International Affairs, discusses these topics and more during this 2020 Wiener Conference Call.

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Social Movements in the Age of Fake News with Erica Chenoweth

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Below the Commons Librarians have excerpted some of the key insights relevant to people engaged in social movements and civil resistance. 

5 Paths Forward

It’s hard to know where activists should start if they’re trying to change the nature of the game. Do they focus on tech companies? Do they focus on governments to regulate tech companies? Is this a transnational problem?

It is really complex and difficult as opposed to the age of propaganda when it was clear that the opponent was organizing an effort centrally. 

1. Pick your Target

Pick the target at the right scale. There’s a technique that many movements use called power mapping or a spectrum of allies mapping. That’s really an effort to figure out who are the different stakeholders? Who are perpetuating systems in which there’s no regulation and no accountability around tech innovation and the ways that it can affect and undermine people’s human rights and democratic practice.

So the first thing for developing any kind of unified strategy is to map the power structures. Map where movements are in those power structures and then come up with some focus on where to fight back. Whether it’s against the practice of surveillance or manipulation or the systems that allow it to continue.

2. Innovate and Collaborate

The second thing that is a potential path forward is to innovate.

This is where movements would actually collaborate with one another and take it upon themselves to create new and more attractive platforms that actually disrupt the existing ones and attract more followers.

To some extent, this is something that many movements working under propaganda conditions used to do. 

The Polish Solidarity Movement was able to expand its base under pretty severe restrictions by the communist government from 1980 to 1989 by essentially building its own newspaper. The newspaper was so subversive because it had the ‘real information’ in it that it became widely popular. So there was, all of a sudden, 10 million subscribers to this newspaper. Of course, the Polish Communist Party made it illegal to circulate it.

The newspaper continued to circulate and got even more popular. Then the communist government had to outlaw printing presses that weren’t state-owned and locked up. And at that point, the movement which had thought ahead had been collecting onion skins in factories for weeks and just simply rolled out the paper through pressed onion skins for a time, which then made the communist government have to consider outlawing onions, which made it look so ridiculous that they couldn’t do that. And of course, they loosened restrictions on circulation because they realized they were losing a legitimacy game, and that this movement had created a platform that was better than the one that they were trying to promote. 

We can see some examples of this with sites like Fake news DZ in Algeria, which is a Facebook site. It’s kind of their version of Snopes, specifically developed by the protest movement that ousted Bouteflika last spring to counteract a massive information campaign against that protest movement. They were able to debunk about 300 stories as fake. It became the most popular Facebook page in Algeria. So these are ways that movements can break through and create something that is more attractive.

Another example is resistance to facial recognition technology. Hong Kong protesters have started wearing face masks and, of course, the government tried to ban face masks. And that bill has been violated now by many of the protesters because it’s become more attractive and a way to circumvent repression.

3. Analyze the Strategic Playbook that is being used against these Movements

The third thing that is a potential path forward is to really analyze the strategic playbook that is being used against movements.

What is the purpose of these disinformation campaigns? What are they trying to do to the movements? It’s clear that they want the movements to think it’s a good idea to use violence.

They want to disrupt them and disunify them and make them look totally chaotic in the public imagination. They want to shroud them in secrecy and conspiracy.

So movements should basically not succumb to those traps. If movements want to win, they should recommit explicitly to nonviolent action, to discipline, to unity, and to transparency because those are the things clearly their opponents don’t want them to do because it’s threatening.

4. Be Rigorous and Truthful

The fourth thing that is a potential path forward is for movements to be rigorous and truthful.

I say this because the temptation for movements to their supporters to essentially retaliate through their own disinformation programs is profound. And it’s very hard to contain as well, because so many of these movements are decentralized and have a decentralized leadership structure. But previous history shows that particularly for progressive movements, it can be incredibly costly to succumb to this temptation. 

One of my colleagues is a woman named Mary King, who was a press secretary for SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during the civil rights movement. One of her responsibilities was writing up press releases to send to mainstream news media about the aftermath of different events associated with the civil rights movement.

She said that when she would get a phone call about a certain number of people who were arrested or beaten or killed in the course of a match or a demonstration, that she would always triangulate and try to verify to the fullest extent possible. But she would always report the most conservative number. Because she was very worried that if she reported more, maybe exaggerated figures, that the movement’s credibility and legitimacy would be undermined.

They were fighting a battle of legitimacy and politics and they couldn’t afford being accused of being liars or hypocrites. She said that the mainstream media always used her numbers and that actually created a level of trust between journalists and SNCC that was very important to allowing them continual access to news outlets that could amplify their message.

5. Truth as a Revolutionary Value

Finally, the fifth potential pathway forward is more broad: resurrecting truth as itself a revolutionary value.

The reason why Solidarity in Poland was so popular is that it was counterculture and counter hegemonic at the time to want to publish your own newspaper and have it highlight more liberal democratic ideas. At the time, that was the revolutionary moment for them. Václav Havel in Czechoslovakia talked about living in truth as the best way to undermine authoritarian regimes, or at least their abilities to interfere with people’s day-to-day lives.

Given this time, we have an opportunity to popularize truth as a value in itself.

Framing the truth as a path to liberation, framing the truth as an end that’s worthy of protracted fight.

To lay claim to truth as the movements’ terrain, so movements are actually trustworthy, that they are attractive, and that they’ll pull people together because they’re focused on this primary purpose. 

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