Editor’s note: This commentary is by Gregory Dennis of Cornwall. It first appeared in the Addison Independent.
President Trump and his followers say it’s biased against the right wing.
Liberals worry that it’s stealing their privacy.
The El Paso mass murderer used it to spread lies he had read online about an “invasion” at our southern border.
Social media has a bad reputation. And it’s getting worse.
CEO Mark Zuckerberg has been forced to explain how Facebook allowed Russian trolls to help swing the election to Trump. The president himself used Twitter to tell American-born members of Congress to “go back where they came from.”
Like it or not, social media is here to say. And it’s proving to be invaluable to organizing citizen-based campaigns — including the climate movement that essentially got its start here in Vermont with 350.org.
Yes, there’s a dark side to social media. Extremists use it to spread hatred. “Deep fake” videos can be manipulated to put false statements in a leader’s mouth. And of course it can be a gigantic time suck.
But without social media, it’s likely there would have been no Women’s March to repudiate Trump’s election. No worldwide climate movement.
Another thing: Social media democratizes political organizing.
The civil rights movement had Dr. King. The women’s movement had Gloria Steinem. But today’s movements don’t need to rely on a charismatic leader. It’s a world of many voices and many causes.
“Right now social media is on a computer platform, so it’s easier and more nimble. But there was social media before there was this thing called social media. There were telephone trees, letters and a lot more paper,” ACLU volunteer Diane Berry said in an article on Govtech.com.
Those older organizing tools were most effectively used in the civil rights movement. Writing in the Kennedy School Review, Ben Maguire called it the modern pinnacle of organizing, “a triumph not only of moral leadership but also of logistics, coordination and tactical effectiveness.”
Indeed, civil rights leaders established a bit of a textbook for today’s climate movement. If they could accomplish so much without social media, imagine what can be done with the power of digital communications.
Other citizens movements also use social media to great effect. The Occupy movement learned from the Arab Spring’s use of social media. #BlackLivesMatter and the #MeToo movement launched on the same rocket fuel. Me Too started out as one woman’s tweet.
One risk for today’s organizers is that a Big Brother government entity can be on the same social media, to covertly monitor activists and impede perfectly legal political activity.
And there’s the danger of slacktivism: the mistaken belief that if you “like” a particular post on Facebook, you have somehow achieved something politically.
Nonetheless, many people in the climate movement use social media to great effect.
Armed with Facebook, Twitter and an extensive email list, 350Vermont.org assembled over 300 people this April to join the Next Steps climate march from Middlebury to Montpelier. The same tools brought over a hundred people to a hearing on legislation to ban new gas pipelines in Vermont.
This month we are seeing another push by climate groups in the form of the Global Climate Strike.
In our state, a coalition of 350 Vermont, Extinction Rebellion, students, the local Climate Economy Action Network and many others is using the power of digital media to organize a week of actions. (See www.VermontClimateStrike.org for details.)
The climate strike was prompted by calls — mostly online — from the youth climate movement and Swedish teen activist Greta Thunberg, who sailed from Sweden to New York in solar-powered sailboat.
Organizing dozens of climate strike events around Vermont has relied on Facebook and Twitter, it’s true. But the new social media stars have been Zoom and Slack.
Zoom allows multiple people to join meetings via phone, or via computer with or without video. If you’re trying to coalesce a group of people who share a common cause but don’t know each other, Zoom allows face-to-face contact without all the driving.
Slack’s collaboration software allows teams to organize without the onerousness of email chains.
Yes, it can be confusing. And we haven’t even touched on Reddit, Instagram and the thousands of political lists and comment chains that serve as virtual, 24/7 town meetings.
It’s hard to go a single day without hearing about one Trump tweet or another. Our Facebook pages used to be filled with personal news from friends. Now they’re clogged with political messages.
In fact, a recent Pew Research Center survey found that fully half of Americans in the past year had participated in some form of political or socially minded activity online.
Some people might call that overwhelming. I call it democracy.
