There are a lot of ways to cover the Komen/PP firestorm–too many, in fact. For the purposes of my work here, I’m going to focus on what made this brouhaha different than any other concerning Planned Parenthood, the lessons learned if you’re on the defensive, and the lessons learned if you’re on the offensive.

The culture of this particular moment

I’m going to first spend some time investigating why it was that this particular attack on reproductive health and Planned Parenthood was so explosive. Planned Parenthood has been under attack for quite a while, and especially in the last few years– those working on reproductive freedom issues won’t likely soon forget the US House trying to defund Planned Parenthood altogether in 2011, for example. (And we won’t forget Stephen Colbert’s completely amazing takedown, either.) So why was Komen’s move so incendiary? And what can we learn from it?

Invariably, I know people working with social media strategy are eventually going to be asked to reproduce situations like Komen/PP. They’re going to be asked to make this new campaign GO VIRAL. Let’s get this part out of the way: Nothing can ever be made “viral” on purpose, period. Anyone who says differently is selling something.*

Here are the salient points about This Moment for future campaign work:

1. Komen mistook the community of breast cancer survivors and cause supporters as their own community and supporters. People who are involved in working towards a cure for breast cancer are coming to this work often for very emotional reasons: because they have survived, or they know someone who has– or hasn’t. They appreciate that Komen is leading the charge, but their passion ultimately centers itself on breast cancer.

Katha Pollitt points out in her Nation piece, by the way, that Komen’s origins are activist and feminist in nature:

Breast cancer activism began as a feminist cause, after all: the initial impetus, back when Komen was founded in 1982, was the silence and shame surrounding the disease, the lack of research funding and the general sexism pervading treatment. Those are all feminist issues, and were structured as such in public discourse at the time.

This has been mainstreamed in many ways, and particularly the pinkwashing campaigns have normalized breast cancer as part of our everyday conversations about women’s health and cancer in general. (Pinkwashing is problematic for a number of reasons; I’m not going down that road here, but read the piece at the link above if you want to know more.)  In any case, Komen’s championing of breast cancer support on multiple fronts gave the organization the impression that people cared about Komen. They don’t. They clearly care about Komen’s money and that it always goes towards supporting breast cancer initiatives, though.

Will Komen be able to fix this? I don’t know. As a colleague pointed out to me in an email:

I doubt that Komen can regain the trust and support of the millions of disappointed women. Komen’s former meme was “We fight breast cancer for you and the people you love.” A new meme has been created: “We are part of the nasty culture wars that have hurt so many, and we care more about that than about whether you die from breast cancer.”

2. Furthermore, emotional connections in general matter. Planned Parenthood has an incredibly emotional relationship to their constituencies: the women for whom they provide services, and of course, the advocates for reproductive rights and justice. Look at any of the stories posted on the Tumblr that I created, Planned Parenthood Saved Me, and you’ll find people not referring just to the services that they received, but more so, the care, understanding and non-judgmental support. More on the Tumblr later, but the bottom line here is that Planned Parenthood has carefully cultivated that emotional connection into a relationship. When the crap comes down in a relationship, friends are there for each other. PP’s constituencies felt personally attacked by Komen, and responded as such.

How was that different than the legislative attacks of last year? Mostly because so many more women outside of PP’s traditional constituencies were involved, but I’d also say that this felt particularly jarring to core activists and supporters. This wasn’t the usual social conservative attack: A non-partisan organization (albeit one with a dubious history, about more of which we’re learning every day) caved to anti-choice pressure. That hurt.

While an organization can’t create this kind of attack for themselves, what they can do is this: Create your community before you need them. Leverage emotional connections to your work into real relationships.

3. A reconnection of reproductive healthcare as real healthcare was made in the wider mainstream community. This one is harder to quantify– or at least, I’ve been having trouble quantifying it. There are two parts of this: that women have assumed for the last couple decades that care of their ladyparts is automatically going to be covered under other healthcare provisions; two, that Planned Parenthood has morphed in the public consciousness as a healthcare provider to an abortionplex (as depicted by The Onion, a satirical newspaper. Also, see the Yelp reviews.). Rebecca Traister and Joan Walsh talk about this in their excellent Salon piece:

For the first time in what feels like forever, passion and fury were being loudly, proudly given in a full-throated voice, on behalf of women – women as moral actors; women as citizens with rights, health, bodies, freedoms; women as people with families and economic concerns. [...]
The demonization of Planned Parenthood should have awakened the country to the radicalism of the right, and how far it has pushed the political conversation. It’s been hard to measure the degree of the radicalism, so slowly and unceasingly has it crept across our consciousness and the political discourse. But it’s important to remember how mainstream Planned Parenthood used to be. It was the respectable, even Republican, advocate for women’s health, including reproductive services.

Both of these common-culture frames/memes — assuming care and demonizing Planned Parenthood– have contributed to the chipping away at reproductive health and freedom. The emotional pain of the moment combined with the chipping away led many women outside of traditional activism spheres to their a-ha moment last week.

Lessons learned: if you’re under attack

So, the mob has lit their torches and gotten out their pitchforks. What do you do? Assuming you’ve already built your community before you need it, there are a few other things to keep in mind.

1. Say something. Komen chose to remain silent, and as pointed out by Raven Brooks over at the Netroots Foundation, they allowed the conversation to get away from them. What could they have said? “We’re listening. We hear you. We know you’re upset, we’re here for you.”

I was reminded in this situation of a problem that my dear friend Jaclyn Friedman faced a few weeks ago. She wrote a column about Blue Ivy, and in it, didn’t use a racial justice lens on Black women’s sexuality. This upset a lot of people, understandably, and Jaclyn was faced with a lot of angry tweets. So, she tweeted that she was about to get in a car and drive to an event for a few hours, but didn’t want people to think she was being silent. She also tweeted that she was genuinely listening to concerns and wanted to take time to process and respond properly. When she did respond, she posted an apology that has since been held up as a shining example of how to handle this kind of situation. While not everyone was satisfied, many people who previously were angry with her took the time to support and thank her.

2. When you do finally say something, don’t do it in plastic. Komen posted a video that was widely criticized as flat and inauthentic. It reminded me of watching people who dance who’ve recently been taught how to dance. They’ve got all the moves down, but it’s awkward–they’ve got no flow. People at this point don’t want to hear about numbers. They don’t care, frankly, about understanding you at this point. They want you to understand them.

Also weird: they never mentioned Planned Parenthood in this video, as if mentioning PP would make the entire Komen organization evaporate instantly. This is clearly straight out of an old-school PR book: don’t mention the enemy! Time to get that memo out again: old-school PR tactics don’t work in social media. You’re in a conversation.

More tips can be found at my post on #AmazonFAIL from 3 years ago (these rules haven’t changed!), over at Allyson Kapin’s post on Frogloop, and Raven’s post at Netroots Foundation.

Lessons learned: if you’re on the attack

Again, we’re assuming here that you’ve already built your community before you need it. I can’t stress enough how important this is. You might also want to look at Beth Kanter’s Ladder of Engagement to understand more how people become involved with your organization through digital channels.

1. While you can’t create these kind of opportunities on the fly, you can be ready for them when they happen. Removing barriers to effective, nimble organizational response is key. Planned Parenthood had an email out almost immediately, and their social media followed suit.

2. Don’t forget targeted, multi-pronged approaches to digital activism.  While a lot of yelling and screaming on social media may make you feel better as an individual, you have to ask yourself: Does an organization like Komen really care about loose cannon spray? I don’t think that they do. In that vein, a lot of people with whom I work started talking right away about how to hurt Komen financially, using a targeted set of strategies to shame current donors into withdrawing support, and to raise money for Planned Parenthood.

I also started wondering what kind of activism could be done with women who don’t have any money to withdraw or re-donate–those who would be most affected by a lack of services at Planned Parenthood. It was with that impetus that I created the Tumblr blog, Planned Parenthood Saved Me, as a storytelling vehicle. Numbers and statistics don’t tell stories; people do. That’s how we relate to one another. Collecting these stories in one place became a powerful messaging tool: for Planned Parenthood itself, if they wanted to use it; for journalists looking for the human side of this story; and, of course, for the women who have lived through horrific healthcare experiences, who were saved by PP, as a tool of catharsis and support.

What else can we examine here? Leave your thoughts, ideas and lessons in the comments, or ping me with them on Twitter.

(For a more in depth exploration and ensuing discussion of DDoS, see my post, and the comments, over here.)

(Note: There are so many parts to the Wikileaks story that it’s almost impossible to cover them all–once you start to detangle one angle, you discover twenty more. Slip down that rabbit hole, and you’ll come out dizzier than when you went in. In any case, this isn’t meant to be a comprehensive discussion of the entire topic, but to expand on a conversation sparked yesterday.)

I attended Personal Democracy Forum’s symposium on Wikileaks yesterday–a fantastic lineup of speakers and attendees, gathered quickly to discuss one of the most complicated intersections of Internet and politics that we’ve seen in a while. During one of the earlier forums, my friend Noel Hidalgo put forth an idea that divided the room pretty quickly: that distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks are a legitimate form of civil disobedience.

A quick lesson on DDoS for the unfamiliar: a group of people gets together and decides to render a website unusable. They do this by flooding the website’s server with so many requests that the server gets overloaded and either slows down, or stops responding altogether. A big important point: this is not hacking. “Hacking” generally applies to incidents where systems are actually broken into and data is compromised. DDoS doesn’t do this.

To use the case from this week, a group of activists called Anonymous (more on them in a second) decided to render, among others, Mastercard’s website unusable. This does not mean that credit card data was stolen, or that people were unable to use their Mastercards for purchases. It means that if you went to Mastercard.com, you got a message that the website was unavailable.

So, the question: is this a legitimate form of civil disobedience?

The first sentence of the civil disobedience entry in Wikipedia reads, “Civil disobedience is the active, professed refusal to obey certain laws, demands, and commands of a government, or of an occupying international power.” After that, all bets are off on what you consider the term to mean. It’s generally accepted in the US to mean an organized, non-violent way of protesting or expressing extreme displeasure with a situation. I’m certainly open to hearing others’ definitions, here–this is as concisely as I can nail my own understanding.

The next part of this question is to look at the word “legitimate.” Legitimate doesn’t always mean legal; in fact, most of the time, it doesn’t have much to do with law at all. I want to clarify this because it also explains how I approach politics. As I said in my talk at PdF this year:

Let’s be clear about what politics are. “Politics” is not just about candidates, elections, and ballot initiatives. Politics is the art and science of influencing or changing any kind of power relationship: the cultural norms by which we act; the laws that govern us; the expectations we experience based on our gender, race, class, sexuality, abilities, and more. When I talk about political work, I’m talking about challenging and radically redefining those power relationships.

Because “legitimate” is so much more than laws, in the same way that politics is more than government, I use the term to mean “justifiable,” or otherwise “acceptable.”

To be clear, most DDoS attacks are rarely explicitly politically motivated; the people that commit them are often just in it for the lulz. (In other words, in it for kicks ‘n’ giggles.) Those folks, typical of Anonymous’ membership, are what I call “chaos enthusiasts.” They want to cause disruption for its own sake, and love watching the theater and drama of an attack play out. When politics do become involved, other tactics are often added to the DDoS attacks, and aren’t what I’d consider OK within the realm of protest vs. power. Friends, clients and colleagues have been the victim of this end Anonymous’ work in the past–particularly my feminist cohorts have experienced their brutal misogyny.

When we face issues of free speech on the Net, we’re confronted with a severe reality in the harshest moments: we consider this here to be public space, but in reality it’s owned and operated by private companies. There is currently no set of accepted standards that say we have a set of rights online. (Though many have tried– Katrin Verclas referred us to a very short history of Internet rights, for example.)

Several corporations bowed to political pressure and cut off services to Wikileaks. It has not yet been proven that the organization broke any laws, but Paypal, Mastercard and others decided to stop allowing citizens to show their support for the organization by giving them money. This is a clear violation of limiting a form of speech– the Supreme Court ruled this year that political donations are a form of free speech, at least when corporations are doing the donating. To me, this was the first volley in this theater of battle. It angered me, and a whole lot of other people, clearly. I’ve been told that in Germany, where the citizenry are notoriously suspicious of technology, privacy and politics, the federal courts there have labeled DDoS a form of free speech. (Link tk.)

Thus, in response, Anonymous launched a DDoS attack against the websites of the companies that took away people’s rights to support a political organization. Many, myself included, consider DDoS in this context to be much like a sit-in in the offline world. The point of a sit-in is to render a building/room/service unusable for a temporary period of time. Sit-ins aren’t “legal”– you get arrested, and most activists who participate in them know this ahead of time and prepare for it. (At the event, I was asked what happens after arrest; most of the time, it’s a misdemeanor charge, and you’re issued an ACD.)

No permanent damage is done in a DDoS attack. This is particularly important to note when discussing DDoS as a political tool. It’s the difference between participating in a die-in at an embassy, for example, and smashing the windows of an embassy. As with any other form of activism, it shouldn’t be the only prong in a campaign strategy, and shouldn’t be used in every campaign.

Many at the forum disagree vehemently with this line of thinking: from what I understand, the argument is that “attacking the network does everyone a disservice.” I understand this and see the nobility it tries to bring; I was pointed to a quote from 2000 by Cult of the Dead Cow opposing early political DoS attacks– “One does not make a better point in a public forum by shouting down one’s opponent.” However, I disagree in cases where we are dealing with powerful corporations who do not respond to traditional forms of protest. I also believe it is, in cases against corporate abuse of power, a way to get direct media attention for a cause.

Noel asked what I’d ask people who disagree with me: how do I digitally throw myself in front of a tank? What we do online often runs the risk of slacktivism. For example, I’m surprised at how many people rallied around last weekend’s “change your Facebook picture to a cartoon character to raise awareness about child abuse.” Really? This is the innovation we’re coming up with? What does a picture-swap do except make us feel chummy with each other?*

We — tech activists and politically-minded folk, especially in the US — bring a tremendous amount of privilege to the table. We have the ability and freedom to risk ourselves for the benefit of many who do not. So with that in mind, we’re using our privilege to poo-poo the temporary disabling of a giant corporate website, while looking for just the right shot of Mickey Mouse? Power dynamics matter. There is a reason that David and Goliath is such a powerful story in Western culture.

Perhaps what some people are afraid of is that giving a stamp of approval to DDoS as a political tool makes it okay for their political enemies to do the same. What’s to stop the CIA, or Iran’s government ops, or whomever to do the same to sites we believe in and support? Again, I understand, but I maintain another angle on the slippery-slope fears: I fear cataloging DDoS as illegitimate will ultimately prevent other forms of digital activism from being used, or even from being able to be used. There’s a nicely nuanced post about DDoS from the Iranian protest period of 2009 that discusses pros and cons, vis a vis the “we don’t want to stoop to the enemy’s level” argument.

The last point of discussion I want to bring up is one of accountability– over on Twitter, my friend Ben Greenberg made this point: “I question actions that are not accountable to a community or to the other side. How is that ‘civil’ disobedience?” Well, I think Anonymous certainly is accountable to itself, with its own set of wacky mores and rules. In a case like this, who else do they need to be accountable to? Maybe I’m misunderstanding the question, which is why I wanted to take this part beyond the 140-character limit. An anti-war group that sits-in at a recruiting station is accountable to whom? Themselves, certainly. Are they accountable to the entire rest of the anti-war movement? The opposing side, in this case, the military or the police, can hold them accountable by arresting them. In the case of DDoS, that’s not as easy, but still quite possible. (Especially when the publicly released tool to propel the DDoS on Wikileaks’ detractors didn’t disguise IP addresses.)

Nonetheless, anonymity is mainstay of DDoS, and this could be the sticking point for many as to whether it’s considered “civil.” My friend Arthur said, “Anonymity is generally not accepted as civil disobedience- that is not a bad thing, it’s just a different category. Civil disobedience uses the spectacle of the citizen confronting the mechanisms of the state to create its power. I don’t think denial of service attacks are comparable in that regard.” What if members of a DDoS attack volunteered their names? Would that change how people who currently disagree with the tactic feel?

Ultimately, I’m far more fearful of (and angered by) corporate reactions to politically sticky situations, and what we’re going to be doing to aid people I buy Internet services from in protecting me against politically-motivated squelching, and how we’ll stop those companies that seek to do it anyways. Until we have clear, strong protection globally, I have few to no issues with using many of the tools at our disposal.

UPDATE: Noel sent me this article on Electronic Civil Disobedience.

UPDATE #2: Must read: Nathan’s comment below.

Deanna Zandt on WRHU: Iranian elections, social media and more

First, from an American media perspective, here was another great moment for folks to demand what they wanted to see covered on national news media. What a moment of media dissonance: As protests erupted — and in some cases, turned violent –� in the streets of Tehran and elsewhere in Iran, major broadcast media in the US had little to no news on the events at all. By using the hashtag¹ #CNNfail to collect all of the dissatisfaction on Twitter, Americans were able to shift the focus of the conversation and eventually influence CNN’s decision makers to start covering stories by Sunday.

It’s reminiscent of #AmazonFAIL (when Amazon accidentally delisted 58,000 books, fueling a social media revolt), in the sense that within a pretty short timeframe (less than 24 hours), major news organizations simply could not ignore the story unfolding — via reportage and commentary — on social media. I remind folks to think about how this sort of situation would have unfolded even five years ago: Bloggers would blog, perhaps media watchdog organizations would get a grassroots campaign together, and maybe within a week, if we were lucky, we’d see some influence. Now, with so many people participating in the conversation, we have immense power to quickly shift both focus and perception.

This is why, when it comes to politics and advocacy work, it’s important to look at a bigger picture beyond just who’s using Facebook to get votes, or which representatives of governments tweet with pizazz. It’s less about celebrity and more about connection, humanity and the ability to inject our values into the wider culture in a fundamentally populist way.

Another fascinating angle of this story is the bootstrapping of access to technology after the Iranian government began blocking access. Facebook was blocked in late May, when reformist candidate Moussavi had around 5,200 supporters. Not long into the protests this weekend, access to major portions of the Internet (including Twitter), as well as SMS texting, were blocked. Not to be stopped, protesters within Iran are receiving information about accessing proxy servers from folks setting them up outside of the country, and stories continue to flood out.

Honestly, there is just no blocking The Internet, y’all. What the Iranian government is trying to do is, in effect, akin to trying to stop water or electricity from flowing. There is so much infrastructure in place at this point, they’d basically have to blow up most of it to stop people from accessing the outside world. Of course, I wouldn’t put it past Ahmadinejad, now that I think about it…

–

¹ What’s a hashtag? It’s a keyword that people add to their tweets, so that conversations around a particular topic can be easily tracked.

Friends, colleagues, New Yorkers, Americans:

Below is a call that went out earlier in the week for us all to gather at Wall Street tomorrow (Thursday) at 4pm to protest the inanity of the $700 billion bailout. Seven. Hundred. Billion. Dollars. For what? For them to screw up again and rob us blind? Please!

My big question in all of this is: who’s going to bail out Main Street? What happens to the over a million people with foreclosed homes this year alone?

And hey, I’ve got a buncha useless crap around that I could use some money for– thanks to the folks over at BuyMyShitpile.com, there’s an idea to bring it all down to Bowling Green and see if there are takers. Even WIRED Magazine is in on the fun: http://blog.wired.com/27bstroke6/2008/09/outrage-online.html

So, heed the call– the unions, the grassroots organizations, the media… everyone’s in on this one. Come on down. Bring friends. Forward this on. I’ll see yas there. Full details below.

————

This week the White House is trying to push through the biggest financial theft in world history with nary a stitch of debate. They're asking for a blank check for over 1 trillion dollars to bail out George Bush's Wall Street cronies who created this economic crisis in the first place.

If this passes, we can forget about any money for environmental protection, to counter global warming, for education, for national health care, to rebuild our decaying infrastructure, for alternative energy.

This is a historic moment. We need to act now while we can influence the debate.

Let's rally against this bailout in the heart of the financial district! Gather at 4pm, this Thursday, Sept. 25 in the plaza at the southern end of Bowling Green Park, which is the small triangular park that has the Wall Street bull at the northern tip.

What: Say NO to the Wall Street bailout
When: Thursday, September 25: 4pm
Where: Southern end of Bowling Green Park, in the plaza area, by the bull statue
What to bring: Banners, noisemakers, signs, leaflets, etc.

Do whatever you can for this historic event and contact all your groups and friends. This proposed financial bailout is without precedent and we have to stop it!

Since Wall Street is asking us to give them money for their worthless investments, some folks are planning to bring their OWN junk to Wall Street and see if they'll buy it. Bring your collectible mugs and limited edition Thomas Kinkade prints and add ��em to the pile! This action inspired by Buy My Shitpile – (http://www.buymyshitpile.com/)