Despite Negative Press, Facebook Is a Powerful Agent for Social Change

By Nancy Scola, AlterNet. Posted April 24, 2008.

As an organizing tool, Facebook has had a couple of ugly weeks of late. Students at Michigan State University recently used Facebook to revive Cedar Fest, an old campus tradition that had been outlawed by local officials in the late 1980s after it frequently escalated from a party into something more akin to a riot. This time around, after violence ensued, East Lansing police officials vowed to hold those Facebook users accountable. News headlines ran along the lines of "Facebook: Tool for Chaos?" and the social-networking site was demonized as a means for the rabble to wreak havoc.

But it's only right to hold up the recent commotion in south-central Michigan against other Facebook-fueled collective action. It should be placed in context with how a Canadian university student named Alex Bookbinder has used the site to push back against state-sponsored violence in Burma. It must be judged against the worldwide attention to China's policy on Tibet that activists have used Facebook to generate in recent weeks. And it is only properly understood against the backdrop of those Colombian citizens, sick and tired of the fear that racks their country, who used Facebook to say no mas in more than one hundred cities on the very same day.

Facebook is revolutionizing the way collective political and social actions are organized today, blowing the doors off old models of how volunteer lists are amassed, funds raised, and messages honed and delivered. And no one is more surprised by that than Alex Bookbinder.

After traveling through Burma (also known as Myanmar) before his first year at university, Bookbinder returned home last fall and did something seemingly inconsequential: He initiated a Facebook group called Support the Monks' Protest in Burma to protest the Burmese military junta's harsh crackdown on the nation's religious caste. What's remarkable is that "global group" -- the social-networking site's parlance for designating a group open to all comers -- indeed became a global network of resistance.

"It was totally unexpected," Bookbinder says of the group's explosive growth. "It wasn't intended to take off to the level it did." After first attracting a handful of members of Bookbinder's own personal network of contacts, it quickly grew to 25,000 members, then 250,000.

"It's like a party," says the first-year student at the University of British Columbia. "If it catches attention, it will go viral" -- aided in part by Facebook's News Feed feature, which functions as something of an EKG for your social network. In the last weekend in September, the group reportedly gained a breathtaking nine new members a second.

Burma Campaign UK, a well-established bricks-and-mortar advocacy group formed in 1991, took notice of the contagiousness of the idea Bookbinder had unleashed. "They thought the group had potentially the largest collection of people interested in Burma in the world," says Bookbinder. The British organization made the decision to use the group as a catalyst for launching global boots-on-the-ground protests.

By the time the group's roll topped 300,000, the "Saffron Revolution" had garnered worldwide notice. And on a Global Day of Action for Burma on Oct. 6, protestors took to the streets in more than 30 cities from Vienna to Seoul to Washington D.C., demanding the repressive Burmese military regime treat the red-robed religious leaders with tolerance and respect.

Of course, though the uproar in Burma has calmed of late, the country's woes have far from passed. Attention is thus being paid to tending to the group, the membership of which stands at more than 387,000. As the group exploded, Bookbinder realized he needed help. The group now counts more than a dozen self-organized administrators, from Australia to Guatemala. Bold-faced names like Elie Weisel and Yoko Ono have added notes of encouragement to the group's posting wall. Weisel's note to the group reads "You are their hope and ours."

One of the beauties of a Facebook group is the "Message All Members" feature, by which group administrators can reach out to entire membership rolls at any time. Asked when the group will again be provoked into mass action, Bookbinder points to a junta-authored draft constitution military leaders say they'll put to the Burmese people on May 10. Pushing Burma into the realm of free and open societies is a tremendous challenge. "It's not what one person can do. It's what a critical mass can do. You need mass globalization, and that's something Facebook can do."

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Nancy Scola is a Brooklyn-based writer who has in the past served as the chief blogger at Air America, an aide to former Virginia Gov. Mark Warner as he explored a run for the presidency, and a congressional staffer on the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

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