How Tech Shifts the Political Protest

Zeynep Tufekci, contributing opinion writer at The New York Times, associate professor at the University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science, a faculty associate at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society and the author of Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (Yale University Press, 2017). She talks about the challenge of building social movements in the digital age, analyzes why today's organized movements effect change differently than past generations, and gives a road map for how social movements can get politicians to listen nowadays. 

Tufecki says that social movements have real power when it comes to organizing and empowering people. But what happens afterwards? For example, look at the Women's March that brought hundreds of thousands of people together to march and caught the world's attention. "But their steering wheel hadn't totally been built," Tufecki says, and so they couldn't maintain their momentum.