Understanding Facebook activism in two easy steps

After reading Michael Valpy’s confusing article on the political effectiveness of Facebook in this morning’s Globe and Mail, I have to wonder if reporters will ever get their minds around exactly what Facebook is. Judging from Valpy’s interview with a pollster about how Canadians feel about Facebook’s effect on politics – not, note, what Facebook activism has actually accomplished – I fear our intrepid reporters will be misunderstanding Facebook for a long time to come.

Valpy and his source, pollster Nick Nanos, essentially rehash that old chestnut: what does it mean when a bunch of people join a Facebook group? This is the wrong question and misses almost all that makes Facebook and social-networking sites important. I’ll try to put this in more traditional terms.

Facebook is the telephone. It is a way for people to share opinions and to organize online and offline activity. If you remember that Facebook is only a tool, and a tool is only as effective as the people using it, the whole idea of social-networking platforms becomes much easier to understand. It also demonstrates the silliness of asking, as Nick Nanos does, whether Facebook can replace political parties. This is as absurd as asking if a fax machine (remember them?) could replace the Conservative Party of Canada. Facebook is a tool for communicating and lobbying, not governing.

Facebook groups are mailing lists. The power of mailing lists isn’t necessarily in how many people are on that list, but in the amount of money they are able to raise, the number of people they are able to deliver at election time, the number of protestors they’re able to mobilize for a rally. Again, their effectiveness will depend on the people using the lists.

Facebook and other social-networking platforms make it much, much easier for individuals to organize. Before Facebook, getting over 25,000 people out to protest, on a single day, across the second-largest country in the world, with only a couple of weeks of organizing, would have been a massively expensive and complex logistical undertaking (to those who downplay this remarkable accomplishment: try doing it yourself sometime). Most interestingly, Facebook makes it easy for this to happen with little central organization, beyond the original Facebook page.

While its decentralized, inexpensive nature make Facebook activism potentially much more effective for grassroots groups than more centralized forms of political activism, at the end of the day its effectiveness depends on the people involved. It’s still up to the people doing the organizing to make protests work.

So what do the numbers mean? Like everyone else, I don’t know how worried the Conservatives should be that over 225,000 people have joined the Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament Facebook group (I'd be a bit worried). I do know that, via Facebook, Canadians across the country were able to get 25,000 people into the streets to voice their displeasure with Stephen Harper’s suspension of Parliament. I do know that since December, Conservative support has dropped dramatically into a statistical dead heat with a Liberal party that could most charitably be described as “adrift.”

I also know that two years ago, tens of thousands of Canadians joined the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group, which they used to organize protests, including visits to MP’s offices, letter writing campaigns, and even showed up at the Industry minister’s riding’s Christmas party to call for public consultations to address copyright reform. I also know that these protests were at least partly responsible for delaying the introduction of a copyright bill long enough that it was killed when the Fall 2008 election was called. It also seems clear that the Summer 2009 public consultations into copyright reform (for which the Conservative government deserves praise) were at least partly the result of this public pressure.

From these two examples, it seems clear that joining a Facebook group does, in some cases, lead to political activism. To the extent that it facilitates this activism and makes people aware of the issues, it can have, as Nanos says, “political heft in (sic.) the ballot box.”

Look: Facebook is still relatively new. We need more research into the conditions under which joining a Facebook group leads to political activism (hmmmm, that would make a nice postdoc subject…). But it does happen. And I’m sure that some enterprising political aide or grad student can come up with a nifty formula that tells us how many voters are represented by each Facebook joiner. It’s not like there are no data on the subject: Facebook has been around for five years, and in Canada we have at least two, and probably more, examples of effective Facebook-based political campaigns.

Understanding the limits and possibilities of Facebook activism requires moving beyond a simplistic view of Facebook as a pseudo-pollster and toward a more nuanced understanding of how Facebook, as a communications tool, actually works.

Facebook Activism, Redux

The blogosphere and pundits are all atwitter over the Facebook group, Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament, trying to figure out what it means that over 80,000 people have signed up to this group in only a few days (it had only 20,000 members when I joined on Monday). Almost all of these comments have treated this group as if it were something novel.

It’s not, and the potential effectiveness of these groups has already been settled. Those of you interested in copyright might remember that in December 2007, a similar Facebook uprising panicked this same Conservative government was panicked into postponing its copyright reform legislation.

In Fall 2007, the Conservatives were preparing copyright legislation that would, among other things, implement what opponents have called, exaggerating somewhat, made-in-the-U.S. legislation. University of Ottawa Law professor Michael Geist starts up the Fair Copyright For Canada Facebook group to protest these measures and calling for public hearings into copyright reform. The group goes viral.

Based on Geist’s Facebook group’s suggestions, but with no central organization, members start sending letters to MPs and showing up at their offices. My favourite was the Kemptom Lam-organized meetup at then-Industry Minister Jim Prentice’s riding’s Christmas party, where they “respectfully” (as Lam told me) presented their concerns. Lam’s account of the party, and Facebook activism, here, is basically a how-to to use Facebook politically.

MPs, faced with actual live voters concerned about an esoteric issue like copyright, panic, since they (and the government) have no idea how deep this groundswell goes.

The government, facing tough votes on Afghanistan and still unsure of how weak the Liberal opposition is (eventual answer: quite), decides that discretion is the better part of valour and tables the legislation until June 2008. This delay is enough to sink the legislation permanently when an election is called a few months later. Furthermore, public hearings into copyright reform, the group’s main demand, were held in the summer of 2009.

The Great Copyright Facebook Uprising of 2007 succeeded in affecting government policy. Its success was due to several factors, some of which may be difficult to replicate this time around.

Who are these people? The first lesson from the copyright debate is that if people are signing up to support an issue that the week before they didn’t even know existed, then politicians should pay attention. That over 60,000 people are members of Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament demonstrates that Canadians, despite what MPs and pundits have claimed, are worried about what the suspension of Parliament means for our democracy. This is no small achievement.

What are their tactics?

Politicians are susceptible to old-school means of communication, like letters, meetings at MP’s offices, and protests. Facebook, as many have observed, is most potent as a means of organizing locally people who otherwise would never have been able to get together, while maintaining national linkages. This is exactly what happened with copyright. I would be surprised if the most active people on the Proroguing Parliament group didn’t know this and act accordingly.

The patronizing dismissal of these groups, in both cases, as unrepresentative of average Canadians is beside the point. Politics is a game of activists, and if people are concerned enough to visit their MP’s office, they’re probably concerned enough to vote. While MPs have yet to develop a rule of thumb like they have with snail mail as to the number of voters represented by every Facebook joiner, these joiners certainly represent voters. This alone makes Facebook groups important.

What are their goals?

The copyright activists were criticized for not being specific in their demands: after all, who could object to “fair” copyright? However, Geist’s call for “fair copyright” avoided a potential schism among copyright reformers by simply calling for Canadians to be heard in the debate. It also had the benefit of being realistic.

Calling on MPs to “get back to work,” especially in the middle of hard economic times, is a stroke of genius. It may not actually get MPs back to work, but if it makes it more politically difficult for a Prime Minister to prorogue Parliament in the future, then it will have done some real good for the country.

What are the ground rules?

This is likely to be the most difficult part for Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament to come to terms with and also shows the difference between protesting legislation and confronting institutional problems.

Copyright activists were able to delay the copyright legislation by taking advantage of the fact that, with a relatively weak minority government that depended on opposition members for support, MPs could be threatened with defeat should they defy the popular will.

Effective political pressure of the type deployed by copyright activists has a wonderful way of focusing a politician’s mind. While Conservative MPs are unlikely to be swayed by any current protests, the other parties may be tempted to score partisan points off Stephen Harper, portraying him as an undemocratic dictator-lite.

This will be useful as far as it goes, even if it leaves unaddressed the fundamental problem that our parliamentary rules allow any Prime Minister to ignore the will of Parliament; it’s just more obvious in a minority situation. Unfortunately, there still seems to be little appetite for real parliamentary or electoral reform, in the country and among the political parties.

Like those in the Fair Copyright for Canada Facebook group, Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament benefits from strong, passionate interest, and has the ability to translate this strength into on-the-ground pressure on MPs. Unlike the copyright fight, these newest Facebook activists have little leverage over Conservative MPs, and only superficial leverage over Liberals, who will benefit from Harper’s expansion of executive power once they return to the throne. As a result, they face an uphill battle to get Parliament to reconvene on January 25.

With luck, this current Facebook uprising will finally put to rest the question of whether Facebook groups can matter politically. Of course they can, but it depends on the skill of those using them. Canadians Against Proroguing Parliament have all the tools they need to be heard; all they have to do is use them. If they raise the political cost to future governments of suspending Parliament arbitrarily, they will have achieved something real.