Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest

Zeynep Tufekci — a sociologist at the University of North Carolina who has become one of the most incisive public analysts of the relationship between technology and politics — examines how social media has transformed political protest and collective action, with detailed case studies from the Arab Spring, Gezi Park, Occupy, and the Black Lives Matter movement. Her argument is simultaneously hopeful and sobering: digital tools have dramatically lowered the organisational barriers to mass mobilisation, but they have also created new structural vulnerabilities that authoritarian states and established powers have learned to exploit.

The book's relevance to the information environment extends beyond protest movements. Tufekci's analysis of how networked movements are strong in some dimensions (speed of mobilisation, global reach) and weak in others (strategic capacity, resilience to disruption, ability to negotiate demands) provides a framework for understanding the dynamics of information operations targeting civil society. Her account of how governments and corporations have adapted to digital activism — developing counter-strategies that exploit the specific weaknesses of networked protest — is directly applicable to the analysis of contemporary influence operations. Available open access from Yale University Press.