Zeynep Tufekci Discusses Her Book ‘Twitter and Teargas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest – EXTENDED INTERVIEW

FEATURING ZEYNEP TUFEKCI – We take for granted the Internet today and all its myriad social networking tools. We use them to debate and discuss, organize and mobilize. But only 30 years ago these tools were not available to political activists seeking to challenge authority.

From the Zapatista movement in Mexico, to the anti-World Trade Organization protests in Seattle, to Occupy Wall Street, Arab Spring, Black Lives Matter, Standing Rock, and the Women’s March, social movements have taken full advantage of digital technologies to mobilize large numbers of people. But we are still evolving these tools and assessing their strengths and weaknesses. There is both “power and fragility” in organizing in this manner.

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Zeynep Tufekci, contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, associate professor at the University of North Carolina School of Information and Library Science, and a faculty associate at the Harvard Berkman Center for Internet and Society. She is the author of the new book, Twitter and Teargas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest.

**This interview was originally broadcast on July 11, 2017.