Hot damn it's almost like empirical (qualitative) research can give us answers against hot-take headlines. @deaneckles @zeynephttps://twitter.com/achrisafis/status/1070976038581256192 …
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Replying to @alexleavitt @deaneckles
Having done a significant amount of protest interviewing, nothing here is in opposition to the idea that the particular way Facebook operates in particular and social media in general have had significant impacts on protest trajectory. Also, protest interviewing is tricky.
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After the Arab Spring the obsessive interest in the role of technology (which is what I've long studied but what we saw was journalists *and* tech companies swooping in with claims) led to protesters blatantly lying to interviews about tech aspects. (I know because they told me).
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In reality, I'd rarely seen a community so interested in Facebook's algorithms (and also how trending on Twitter worked)—because it affected everything they could and could not do. Social movement people is who I learn about algo changes: they often sense it before it's public.
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Technology companies were super happy to claim part in Arab Spring (they had a part!) and now want to act like they're irrelevant—except to advertisers, of course, to whom they say they're the place to convince people (they are!). That's why we need *independent* & calm research.
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The gilets jaune trajectory has almost every attribute of social-media fueled protests in my book written many years ago, though even more accelerated. Its history won't be written outside of Facebook. OF COURSE it feeds on collapse of institutional trust, as did all of them.
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What's really striking is that unlike Arab Spring countries France has strong institutions of protest and dissent. It's *still* happening like this. That's truly interesting and I don't see how we get at it by ignoring changing public sphere (FB is big part this, obviously).
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Hopefully someone is doing great data collection and hopefully Facebook will work with independent researchers doing on-the ground work with historical depth of understanding. Otherwise, we get stuck at "but we don't know"—we could know, if Facebook plus researchers cooperate.
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