Social Networking

Political Unrest and New Media in Thailand

Chiang Mai, Thailand - Today is a day of deep political tension here in Thailand. A ruling by the Thai Supreme Court, expected in just a few minutes, will determine the fate of more than $2 billion of Ex-Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra's assets. Thaksin, a former telecommunications tycoon who was popular with many here for his populist policies, was removed from power by a military coup in 2006. He has been accused of corruption and abuse of power, specifically of negotiating business deals favorable to himself and his family while in power. Today's ruling will determine whether $2.3 billion of his family's assets will be seized. Today's ruling is expected to fuel political tensions here.

Since 2006, Thaksin has been living in exile in Dubai. However, he has remained active, and "frequently addresses mass rallies of supporters via video link, statements on pro-red shirt websites, blogs and via Twitter," according to Al Jazeera. Thaksin has over 65,000 followers on Twitter, and frequently uses Twitter to communicate directly with his followers, the red shirts.

In a country where broadband penetration is not especially high, particularly outside of major cities like Bangkok, Phuket, and Chiang Mai (where I'm writing from now), Twitter has begun to figure especially prominently. For while computers and internet cafes are far from ubiquitous, internet-capable mobile phones are everywhere (see this picture I snapped of a monk shopping for a phone). During my travels here, I have been many places without wi-fi, but I've always been able to connect using my (jailbroken and unlocked) iPhone. Everywhere I've been, from near-deserted tropical islands to endless rice paddies in the center of the country, I've had wireless data service (for which I pay just $3 a month). Many of Thaksin's supporters are in the rural North-East of Thailand, so mobile-friendly media are particularly important to their political communication and organization.

I'll be writing more as the situation here develops - Thaksin's supporters are planning rallies country-wide in March, largely organized using new media. Given all the red shirts I'm seeing here today, it should be an interesting few weeks.

 

Social Networking Against Violence in Ciudad Juárez

Ciudad Juárez, just across the border from El Paso, may be the most violent city in the world; the spectacular murder rate and the uncounted headless bodies are attributable primarily to the drug trade that plagues the entire border region. Back in October, a State Department Tech Delegation to Mexico City kicked off a collaborative effort to allow citizens of the border region to offer the police anonymous tips via free text message whenever they witness violence.

But that's not all that's going on in Juárez to combat the pandemic of grusome violence. A bottom-up movement organized by one librarian has been holding protests, vigils, and speaking out against the violence in their city. Daniel Cruz Batista was fed up with all the violence in Juárez, so he started a Facebook group called “Ya Basta de Violencia en Juárez!!” (Enough With the Violence in Juárez).  He gained 6,000 followers within a week, and now has more than 9,000. Another Facebook group, “Jóvenes Por Juárez” (Young People For Juárez), has 4,000 members, and has similarly acted as a forum for citizens to connect, share information, and organize.

In an essay I highlighted a few days ago, Ethan Zuckerman offers three theories of how internet access can change closed societies. Two of those theories can, I think, be applied to a place like Mexico's border region, where the problem isn't government oppression, it's that average people are powerless in the face of violent crime syndicates. The first, which Zuckerman calls the "Twitter Revolution Theory" is the idea that if people have web access, they'll be able to use that connectivity to communicate and organize with like-minded people. The second, the "Public Sphere Theory," holds that the web provides people a place to think, speak, and express themselves freely, and to create a "parallel public sphere" to empower social actors.

The problem in Juárez is, on its face, a problem of law enforcement's inability to stand up to a powerful criminal element. But it runs deeper to a weak local government, and, at its root, a civil society that lacks the power, cohesion, or capability to stop the violence.  While social networking tools like Facebook are clearly not the whole solution to this kind of a problem, they are a crucial step, through the mechanisms described by the above theories. Via two Facebook groups, begun by average citizens, the rational, peaceful, law-abiding majority is able to communicate and organize, and then, ultimately, build a civil society that is strong enough and cohesive enough to stand up for security, stability, and justice in Juárez.

Violence can be a force as oppressive as authoritarianism, violating rights to life, liberty, and security of person. Fortunately, tools of connectivity have the potential to be as powerful in standing up to drug lords as they can be in standing up to dictators.

Friday New Tools Feature: When Your News Feed Becomes Your News

There have been a few big developments in social media space recently, particularly with regards to Facebook, the net's largest social media player. Though Twitter continues to receive a ton of hype and attention, and has been changing the techie world in intriguing ways (being able to read real-time reactions to the speakers at PDF and Netroots Nation has really changed the dynamic of these conferences), Facebook actually grew twice as fast as Twitter last month, and maintains a very substantial lead in total users.

However, not content to rest on its laurels, Facebook acquired FriendFeed last week. FriendFeed is a popular service among the tech-savvy that combines all of your social media presences into one - Facebook, Twitter, Google, Tumblr, etc. (it supports at total of 58 different services). Of particular interest is FriendFeed's ability to integrate with Google Reader's "share" feature, which would be very useful for sharing news stories on Facebook. There are also several other advantages FriendFeed has over Facebook right now. TechCrunch writes of the acquisition,

...it’s clearly a good match. Over the last year or so, Facebook has “borrowed” quite a few features that FriendFeed popularized, including the ‘Like’ feature and an emphasis on real-time news updates.

Obviously Facebook has already built out some of FriendFeed’s functionality so there is some overlap, but there are still numerous ways FriendFeed beats out Facebook’s News Feed setup. One of these is the way stories are ‘floated’ to the top as new users comment on them. And FriendFeed’s system is truly real-time, unlike Facebook’s feed which users have to manually refresh.

I think this was a very smart move on Facebook's part, and could go a long way to improving their service. The second big move they made was to partner with the Huffington Post, the internet's most popular news source, to create a new service called "Huffington Post Social." As Ms. Huffington herself explains, HuffPo Social is

...a collaboration with Facebook that connects HuffPost users to their Facebook friends, the news they are reading, and the stories they are commenting on.

When you sign up for it, HuffPost Social News finds your Facebook friends who are also reading HuffPost and links you together on our site so you can dive deeper into the stories you like best. (But don't worry, you'll still have complete control over what stories and comments are shared with your friends, as well as what goes on your Facebook wall, and into your friends' news feeds.)

I like the idea of integrating comments on the actual story with the social networking experience - reader comments have become an important component of the new news media, so it makes sense to try and highlight this interactivity.

Finally, Facebook just announced today yesterday that Pages will now have the ability to automatically publish to Twitter. As the New York Times said of the move,

Bands, companies, non profit organization and celebrities are likely to benefit from this new feature as their updates will be more widely distributed and Twitter followers are likely to retweet and redirect new audiences to Facebook Pages.

This is a very convenient feature, and it's heartening to see that Facebook may be starting to see their relationship to Twitter as complimentary instead of adversarial. The change is also well-implemented; it's easy to use, and administrators can control what aspects of their Page get pushed to their Twitter feed, and which Twitter account is linked to each Page.

The new media ecosystem has quickly become very complex, so it's good to see confluences and collaborations that will actually make the social networking experience more intuitive and powerful. In the past, I've often felt that Facebook tends to make things worse when it makes changes, but I'm behind these decisions. Can check out HuffPo Social and the Facebook Pages Twitter feed yourself and let me know what you think, and keep an eye out for what they decide to do with FriendFeed. 

And of course, if all of this social networking stuff has you completely bewildered, make sure to check out our NPI Paper, Leverage Social Networks, to get up to speed.

Thursday New Tools Feature: You Have 1.1 Billion New Friend Requests...

Nielsen this week released a study demonstrating just how popular and widespread social networking has become. From the Reuters story on the study:

Networking and blogging sites account for almost ten percent of time spent on the internet -- more than on email.

"While two-thirds of the global online population already accesses member community sites, their vigorous adoption and the migration of time show no signs of slowing," said John Burbank, the CEO of Nielsen Online.

One in every 11 minutes spent online globally is on networking sites. Between December 2007 and December 2008, the time spent on the sites climbed 63 percent to 45 billion minutes.

To put that growth in perspective, the growth in "member communities" online this year was "more than twice that of any of the other four largest sectors," and more than three times the growth rate of overall internet usage. To those that think of Facebook and similar sites as optional, largely peripheral entities, this study should come as a serious wake-up call. Social networking sites are changing the game the same way that email did when it was introduced. Facebook is no longer just an excuse for college students to avoid writing papers; in fact, social networking use has grown the most among 35-49 year olds (see chart).

More and more people are using social networking sites to communicate, socialize, and organize online - the overall amount of time spent on Facebook increased a whopping 566% this year. This is a very interesting and powerful phenomenon, which will have wide-spread implications for the political sphere - for instance, back in November, right after the election, I wrote about what an incredibly effective GOTV tool Facebook was, in part due to of the sociological effects of "seeing" all of your friends vote.

Another phenomenon that promises to further shake things up is the confluence of mobile technology and social networking. The Nielsen study found that  

...the increasing popularity of social networks has resulted in increasing demand to access them on the move. Mobile is a natural fit for social networks, as consumers are used to connecting with friends via mobile calls and text. UK mobile web users have the greatest propensity to visit a social network through their handset with 23% of them (2 million people) doing so, compared to 19% in the US (10.6 million people). The numbers of people doing so are a big increase on last year - 249% in the UK and 156% in the US.

To learn more about how to use social networks effectively, check out our New Politics Institute paper, "Leverage Social Networks," which was written by Facebook's Chris Kelly. You can also watch him and others explain how to harness the power of social networks at our New Politics Institute event, Social Networking in Politics.

Finally, check out this video of Ning's Jason Rosenthal at our recent event, New Tools for a New Era:

Thursday New Tools Feature: Facebook "Poking" People to the Polls

As NDN Fellows Morley Winograd and Mike Hais demonstrated yesterday, the Millennial Generation played a key role in this election, voting in higher numbers than in any recent election and in a more unified manner than any other age group - 66% of Millennials supported President-Elect Obama, compared to only 32% who supported U.S. Sen. John McCain. Millennials constituted a greater percentage of the vote than those 65 and over. Without the overwhelming support of Millennials, Obama's victory margin would have been 1.5% instead of 6% nationally, and there might have been a lot more nail-biting on Tuesday night.

We're still waiting for the final numbers on the youth vote to come in, but a new CIRCLE report projects that youth turnout increased between 1 and 6 percentage points this year - an increase that translates into several million new voters. What was responsible for this increase?

One obvious answer is the candidate himself; Obama connected with young voters like no other political figure in recent memory. He gave them something to get excited about and ways to get involved. Shirts sporting his visage flew off the shelves at Urban Outfitters. He is, simply put, cool.

Others might point to the fact that his campaign organized a superlative ground game and created a fundraising juggernaut. Still others might note that the Obama campaign demonstrated a mastery of technology and deployed it on a scale never before seen in American politics - this is a point that Sarah Lai Stirland makes in Wired this week, and something I and others at NDN have talked about a lot.

The Obama campaign's message, organization, and use of new tools were all game-changers. But I believe one of the biggest boosts in the youth turnout may actually have had nothing to do with Obama himself. On the day before the election, I wrote about the Facebook Election Rally, which allowed users to select automated status message updates urging friends to get out the vote, including a link to join the rally themselves and the option to invite other friends manually. By the end of the rally, nearly two million Facebook users donated their status messages for GOTV purposes. Of those users, 70% put up messages encouraging friends to get out the vote for Obama, 21% put up messages for McCain, and 7% put up messages saying to simply "get out the vote."

Then, on election day, Facebook essentially became one giant GOTV tool. The login page said "VOTE" in giant letters, and at the top of the home page was a button that said "I voted," next to a counter of Facebook users who had voted so far. When I checked at around 10 PM, the counter had reached nearly five million.

From a sociological perspective, the combined effect was very powerful. Anyone who logged into Facebook near or on election day was inundated not only with reminders to get involved, but also bombarded with reminders that their friends were voting. I don't think this has ever happened before, and seems much more powerful than any "Vote or Die"-style MTV ad could be - seeing so many friends involved has a real impact, particularly on youth. Facebook is helping to create a culture of civic participation among Millennials, and that participation quickly becomes habit. And if it continues, this could have an even greater impact in the next few elections, since less than half of Millennials were eligible to vote in this election. If Millennials gave Obama between 4 and 5 points nationally in this election... well, you do the math.

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