Internet & Democracy Blog

The best tools in the world do not build a house–skilled carpenters do. (Paraphrasing Marshall Ganz)

Social organizer extraordinaire Marshall Ganz from the Kennedy School and Jeremy Bird of Obama for America are talking today about the Obama campaigns technological organizing as the kick off session of Berkman’s 2008 Internet & Politics event. Love that Marshall started out with a quote by Tocqueville and the process of combination of ideas as a transformative experience as opposed to just aggregation of disparate ideas. Marshall says three things are needed in successful social movements:

Leadership;

Community building to create collective agency, and;

Power.

The Obama campaign made a great investment in terms of building social capital through the grass roots compared to previous campaigns. Shared values are critical to social movements–because they are the source of motivation. Creating peer commitments to one another moves social movements beyond just aggregation. Structure behind the movement in Obama campaign was critical. Thousands of trained leaders who then trained others and created structures that led to success. Do not have to have bad group experiences (which we’ve all had, likely in grad school) by properly training leaders.

Adaptation is the most creative and purposeful part of campaigns: Elect Obama President. The structure of the org allowed that to happen.

Shared action also important. Mobilization and deployment of individual resources required for change and success. In a campaign outcomes are clear and explicit–get obama elected, contact voters, get them to the voting booth. To what extent, how, and in what way can this new technology help improve governance now is the unanswered question.

Jeremy was a graduate of the divinity school about six years ago and this is his first time back at Harvard. He loves John Palfrey’s classical and jazz thesis to explain use of technology in campaigns and riffed off it several times (pun intended). Jeremy argues that the Net is the organization, but not necessarily the engine. He talked about three states that showed the interdependence of technology and classic campaign skills can be combined. South Carolina: Not the most tech savvy in the nation. Jeremy thinks back to April 11, 2007, two days before the primary, the campaign decided to ask ticket holders to give the campaign their cell phones so that they could text. This was under-reported according to Jeremy at the time but now a big story including the announcement of VP, but more importantly having those numbers allowed the campaign to text supporters to motivate them and get them involved.

Fast forward to Maryland 14 days before the election where a lot of people had organized themselves through tech tools built in Chicago. 1200 people in montgomery county alone signed up in 24 hours through myobama.com to volunteer for get out the vote (GOTV) efforts. The Net meant that GOTV effort allowed Obama campaign to contact each targeted voter three times before the election. Organizers had tools that created an accountable community that allowed classic campaign techniques and jazz of the Internet to come together.

Jeremy also talked about Ohio, where I grew up, and follow closely politically. The campaign started to shoot all kinds of video in Ohio because it told the story of the campaign and what they were doing–but always connected it to a follow up action that was required for the campaign. Sounds to me like a motivational tool, which may have been Obama’s greatest strength as a candidate and leader.

The website voteforchange.com was also critical to voter registration–700,000 individuals downloaded the registration forms and organizers used it to contact those voters. It actually became a great base of people to recruit volunteers from because they were largely young people registering to vote for the first time and they were motivated to help Obama win.

Jeremy also noted that the online tools designed with field people and organizers by getting sitting down together.

Remaining questions are:
How do you develop leaders in the online space? The person to volunteer to lead a group is often the worst person to lead. So need to figure out how to do this training and leader identification remotely and online. Marshall is planning to teach his popular organizing class at the Kennedy School online.

Biggest remaining question is how to use the Internet and this social movement to help govern–something we’ll hopefully start to figure out together over the next couple days.

Five days ago, Reporters Without Borders reported that the Thai government is stepping up its efforts to censor pornographic, terrorist and anti-monarchy material on the web by installing a country-wide firewall overseen by MICT (Ministry of Internet and Communications Technology). Estimates for the cost of the project range from 3 to 15 million dollars and would presumably replace the secret process of blacklisting and selective filtering already in place. (YouTomb, an outfit of MIT Free Culture, discovered awhile back that YouTube was using special coding flags to filter Thai content geographically, especially content held to be offensive to the royal family.)

Internet censorship is nothing new in Thailand. What makes this new initiative alarming is the political climate Thailand currently finds itself in. After years of military coups and failed constitutions, Thais held their first reportedly free and legitimate election in 2001. This brought Thaksin Shinawatra and his populist Thai Rak Thai party to power by a landslide. After winning again in 2005, however, allegations of corruption and hostility to the free press fomented a series of highly visible anti-government protests by an opposition group and then, even more dramatically, a bloodless military coup on September 19, 2006.

The junta scrapped the 1997 Constitution, dissolved the Thai Rak Thai party and, last May, passed an expansive Cyber Crimes Bill. (The bill gives Thai police extraordinary latitude in data seizure and investigation into “illegal” access.) Then, when elections were finally held in December 2007, a reorganized People’s Power Party (made up mostly of ex-Thai Rak Thai folks) managed to take a near majority in the Thai House of Representatives, despite intimidation from the junta.

In this politically charged environment, the internet has become a battlefield. Arguments over free expression and the touchy issue of Thai beloved monarchy are fanning partisan flames. The chief anti-government party has repeated claimed that Thaksin, and now his successors in the People’s Power Party, are perpetrators of lèse majesté, that is, the offense of insulting or defaming the Royal Family. Lèse majesté is an offense punishable by three to fifteen years.

According to some, the current government’s proposed firewall to block content insulting the king (many of the controversial YouTube videos mock the monarch as an “ape king”) is a bid to win over the anti-government opposition. Controlling the internet also gives the government the sort of law and order credibility needed to stave off another coup by the brass.

Thailand’s aging constitutional monarch, Bhumibol Adulyadej, seems to be above the fray. In 2005, the king publicly distanced himself from lèse majesté laws, often pardoning those convicted. Still, the zeal with which the Thai police are allowed to investigate allegation of lèse majesté is frightening.

An Australian national, Harry Nicolaides, is currently being held in a detention center without bail for writing three sentences in a small self-published novel (it reportedly sold seven copies), which may or may not “suggest” that the crown prince has a torrid sex life.

This example, combined with the fervor the government showed in attacking puerile YouTube videos, leaves one unsettled as to the potential for further and more substantive internet censorship in Thailand. After all, Burma’s crackdown on “cyber dissidents” took place just across the border. Thailand’s current instability (anti-government forces occupied the parliament building again today) would be fertile ground for using and controlling the internet as a political weapon.

Campaign managers of the world unite!

While Obama online organizers are busy trying to figure out how to adopt their online tactics to help them actually govern, Benjamin Netanyahu of the conservative Israeli Likud party has already adopted the look and feel of Barack Obama’s Web site. It’s not surprising that an overseas campaign adopted successful strategies from the US, but Netanyahu in particular may be more familiar with the US political scene, having studied business and political science at MIT.

The resemblance to the Obama campaign site is striking; the policy positions not so much. For example, the Russian version of his sight today shows missiles and the text “The Iranian threat” and a button to click for more information. It also allows you to join the party and ways to get involved.

While the campaign has adopted some tactics from Obama, the justification for adopting a broader Net strategy are closer to what we heard from Palin and other conservatives in the US–they have to go online to get past a perceived media bias against them. According to Netanyahu’s Internet campaign manager Sani Sanilevich, “The main advantage of the Internet is the ability to communicate with citizens and people directly,” he said. “You can actually hear them and get them involved in this campaign. The whole idea is, together we can succeed.” And as the Times article continues, “Netanyahu aides say direct communication with voters is important for many reasons; one of them is their belief that Israel’s mainstream news outlets are not sympathetic to the candidate, and he needs to go around them.”

Sound familiar?

A recent article in the New York Times which showed how Google search results can track the spread of the flu as well and sometimes ahead of the CDCs monitoring program got me to wondering if Google searches also show us who will win Presidential elections. The quick answer appears to be yes.

In the below graph for Obama v. McCain searches, Obama was leading McCain in the final month of the campaign and opened a larger lead in the run up to election day (the highest peak in this normalized chart is actually on Nov. 5, the day after the election.)

It is also interesting to note where the searches were most prevalent. In most of battleground and toss up states you often see the highest search volume, including Ohio, Florida, Colorado and North Carolina. Even though voters in those states were drenched in advertising and door to door canvasing, they were still searching the Net for more information on the candidates.

And Google also predicted the Bush win over Kerry in 2004, as shown below.

Perhaps Nate Silver should add this into his predictions in 2012.

Today an outstanding panel gathered at Harvard Law School to discuss Obama’s election and the next steps for Obama’s administration and the American people: “In Order To Form a More Perfect Union: Next Steps for President-Elect Obama and For We the People”. Panelists included:
* Douglas Blackmon, Atlanta Bureau Chief, Wall Street Journal
* Alan Dershowitz, Felix Frankfurter Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
* David Gergen, Professor of Public Service, Harvard Kennedy School; CNN Political Commentator
* Lani Guinier, Bennett Boskey Professor of Law, Harvard Law School
* Orlando Patterson, John Cowles Professor of Sociology, Harvard University
* María Teresa Petersen, Executive Director, Voto Latino
* William Weld, Partner, McDermott Will & Emery LLP; Former Governor of Massachusetts

Professor Charles J. Ogletree, Jr., Executive Director of Charles Hamilton Houston Institute for Race & Justice acted as moderator. He opened the discussion by asking panelists how we should assess the election of Barack Obama.

According to David Gergen, Obama’s election was the best organized campaign seen in years. Obama succeeded beyond the impossible by running a very strategic campaign and by putting together a first class team. He was especially successful in mobilizing Black, Latinos and young voters. (Interestingly, Gergen mentions how Kerry increased the youth vote by 9% and Obama by 35%). Gergen emphasized the great fear of excessive expectations now that Obama is in power – not just in the US, but also in Europe where people are seeing Obama’s election as a sign of hope for change in their home countries too.

Lainie Guinier echoed Gergen’s assessment of the campaign by stressing how Obama’s success in mobilizing people is something which has never been seen on the Left (she juxtaposed this to the Right’s mobilization of evangelicals). For Guinier the challenge now is to keep the ‘movement’ going, where by movement she did not mean special interest group or national leaders, but keeping in motion the organization that Obama put in place.

Sociologist Orlando Patterson expanded on some of his thoughts which he wrote up in this NYT op-ed the day after the election. For Prof. Patterson, Obama’s election should be seen as the triumph of the public sphere and of American democracy. It should not be seen as a radical change but as the culmination of a process: the success of American hybridism, cultural capital fusing and generating America. For Patterson Obama is very much a character of that process. He went on to stress what for him is now the biggest paradox of American society: with Obama’s election black Americans are now fully included in the public sphere but they remain totally excluded from the private sphere. Segregation has worsened in the last decades: schools are more segregated now than in the 1970s and black Americans remain the most endogamous group (less than 10% of unions with other races). For Prof. Patterson the biggest and most fascinating question for him as a sociologist is now: Do black Americans now want to assimilate?

Maria Teresa Petersen explained the election from the Latino community’s point of view – according to Hillary Clinton’s campaign Latinos would have never voted for a black candidate, and this was wrong. Obama got their vote because he was talking about the issues that Latinos care about. Petersen stressed how Obama went into the neighborhoods in a way that no other candidate ever did by focussing on issues such as the education gap, which do not only matter to Latinos but to all Americans. For Petersen the three priorities for Obama are (1) the need to address the education gap (2) to ensure that candidates do reflect Latino communities and (3) that Democrats in general need to solidify the Latino base by identifying different congressional seats to bring Latinos into leadership positions, thus creating a Latino agenda. Conversely, for Petersen Republicans need to figure out whether they should continue with someone like Palin with a really narrow base or whether they need to open up to embrace American diversity.

According to Alan Dershowitz, Obama’s primary responsibility now is to the future of the
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From his SecondLife campaign headquarters to his comprehensive technology and innovation proposal, Barack Obama exudes an familiarity with the internet rare among his colleagues in the federal government. Though always measured, Obama seems “cool” in quite a different sense when discussing tech issues, something bordering on tech geek hip. The Boston Globe has amicably remarked that Obama possesses “cyber sensibility” and his popular, though debated, position in the “net neutrality” debate (about whether internet providers can discriminate against certain kinds of data) is just one such example.

His vision of the internet as an empowering tool is matched by his populism. His plan to beef up rural broadband access has the familiar ring of FDR’s Tennessee Valley Authority, a federal program designed to bring electricity to isolated Appalachia.

Perhaps more important the specifics, however, are that his ideas seem to grasp not only the current importance of technology as an interface for democracy (take his staggering internet fundraising abilities, for example), but also a more visionary projection of how the internet will make government more transparent, efficient and responsive to the electorate.

The story of how Obama tapped the internet for fundraising has by now been thoroughly covered, re-hashed and debated. It earned him unique admirers, such as the conservative columnist George Will. Will was quick to point out the irony in McCain’s complaints that Obama’s massive fundraising was distorting politics with money, when the bulk of Obama’s war chest came from donations averaging around 86$ (in September) from thousands of first-time donors. The unstated implication to Will’s remarks is that the internet, when coupled with the First Amendment right to express support for a candidate financially, actually increases civic engagement and strengthens democracy.

If the new Obama administration can follow through on their promises with the same alacrity and skill they applied to fundraising, there is much to look forward to in the future of internet democracy. Yet, as the Boston Globe noted today, there are likely to be significant obstacles and interests working against his plans as well. Rural telephone companies are likely to oppose diverting some of their subsidies to build broadband networks. ISPs such as Comcast, who have tried to limit or eliminate the taxing bandwidth usage of torrent downloads and are now fighting the FCC in court, have a vested interest in opposing net neutrality legislation.

Obama’s various “sunshine” proposals are likely to be opposed by bureaucrats and lobbyists, who no doubt will find citizen oversight of the federal government alarming. Obama has even proposed video taping meetings, making large swaths of data available and encouraging periodic town hall sessions online, so that average citizens can participate in the workings of the government, even if they live far from the shadow of D.C. In particular, the proposed grant/earmark search engine, which allows citizens to track money in Washington, is likely to find lobbyists fighting for their livelihoods.

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There were many firsts in this 2008 election cycle: amongst them the pivotal role played by the Internet in engaging voters, raising funds and organizing volunteers and party supporters. But the most striking trend to emerge was that the Internet has overtaken newspapers as the main source where people look for campaign news.

A recent poll conducted by the Pew Research Center for People and the Press (full report here) has looked at the different media sources where people look for campaign information between October 2004 and 2008. According to the poll:

–    the percentage of respondents who reports turning to the Internet as their first or second choice for getting campaign information has tripled between 2004 and 2008 from 10% to 33% (a staggering 23 percentage point change).

–    At the same time the percentage of people who mention newspapers as their first or second choice for getting campaign news has remained stable at 29% between 2004 and 2008.

TV remains the most prominent source of campaign information. What is striking, however, is that especially amongst young people the Internet is largely the new place where to go and look for political news. 49% of 18-29 year olds and 37% of 30-49 year olds turned to the Internet compared to 29% of 50-64 year olds and 12% of the over 65. For newspapers we see the exact opposite trend: only 17% of 18-29 year olds and 23% of 30-49 year olds looked for campaign news in newspapers (both percentages below the general population average), compared to 34% of 50-64 year olds and 45% of over 65.

Clearly these data show that it is not only ‘digital natives’ who are turning increasingly to new media to get their political information. The 30-49 age group is also choosing technology over more ‘traditional’ sources of information, suggesting that an important transformation is taking place in news consumption habits. This is certainly aided by the increasing attention paid to new technologies by campaign strategists – but also by the growing bottom-up participation encouraged by blogs, social networking sites and interactive features of online news sites.

“I think we’ll be analyzing this election for years as a seminal, transformative race,” said Mark McKinnon, a senior adviser to President Bush’s campaigns in 2000 and 2004. “The year campaigns leveraged the Internet in ways never imagined. The year we went to warp speed. The year the paradigm got turned upside down and truly became bottom up instead of top down.”

Well, the polls have barely opened and it’s already the conventional wisdom according to the NY Times: the Internet fundamentally changed the nature of the 2008 presidential election–no matter who wins tonight. Here is where I think the conventional wisdom sits and some points I think they are missing about the Internet’s impact on this election.

We’ll let the Times article represent conventional wisdom, and here’s what their points boil down to.

1. Obama leveraged the Net to blow away the Republicans in fundraising;
2. Obama used social networking to supplement his ‘formidable ground game’;
3. Bloggers played a bigger role than in the last election, often ‘trafficking in rumor and misinformation.’
4. But, voters used the Internet to fact check the campaigns themselves, instead of accepting what the campaigns say as fact.
5. McCain didn’t leverage the Internet nearly as well as he could have, or as well as Bush did in previous elections.

Here’s a couple of my early thoughts on how the Internet has impacted this election:

1. First, I don’t disagree with the obvious fundraising point, but it’s not that interesting and will be discussed ad nauseum in the coming months/years. Other factors are much more interesting from my perspective.

2. Bloggers had a much bigger impact than we understand or traditional media will probably want to acknowledge. It’s not an ‘old vs. new media’ argument anymore. Political bloggers on the left and the right helped shape the agenda of news coverage and served to fact check campaigns–and to go way beyond the talking points and issues the traditional media get locked into. Sadly, blogs were also used to spread rumors and hit on trivial issues as our research with Columbia and John Kelly seem to indicate. Early results seem to indicate that this is not a very effective strategy, though.

3. YouTube: Not even in existence in the last election, YouTube played a huge role. The aspect that needs more investigation is the ability of users to create their own content, closely tied to the concept of semiotic democracy or ‘user-generated democracy.’ That said, campaign messages also got out through YouTube. According to the Times, Obama’s substantive speech on race in America has the most views of any political video. This shows, I think, that voters want more than the ‘horse race’ analogies and campaign tactics reporting that the traditional media focus on during elections.
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/pWe7wTVbLUU" width="425" height="350" wmode="transparent" /]

4. Factchecking: The ‘show me’ aspect of blogs and the Internet allowed by hyperlinking means citizens have been able do their own research on the candidates, likely offsetting the ‘rumor spreading’ criticism of the Internet. Since we’ve seen an erosion of trust of all American institutions (media, government, etc.), it’s not surprising that voters have used the Internet to factcheck what campaigns and traditional media have reported, and then make up their own minds about what’s true or not.

5. Polling: More addictive than crack, FiveThirtyEight and other sites have told us more about polls than we ever knew before. How off these polls are from the actual election results will be a major point of discussion, though, and these sites are going to help us sort through the explanations for hits or misses by different polls.

5. Social networking and social capital: Fundraising is obviously critical to a campaign, but we need research that tells us how much social networking led to action for the campaigns, and ultimately led people to vote because their ‘friends’ told them to. Assume a huge effort by the Republicans to catch up on this by the next election.

No matter what, I think Mark McKinnon’s quote is right, a lot of people will be studying this election for a long time to come, for a lot of different reasons. It’s been an amazing one to watch, and will be just as fun to further explore in the months and years ahead.

Today’s Columbia Journalism Review has an article by Renee Feltz on the election blog study we are working on in partnership with Columbia’s Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Reporting and John Kelly. Renee writes that the results of her interviews with bloggers and blogger outreach coordinators shows “…a fundamental difference in the candidates’ approach to the blogosphere.”

According to the article:

Barack Obama’s campaign reaches out to activist bloggers in order to communicate with and mobilize campaign volunteers and feed them into its online social networking site, MyBarackObama.com. In contrast, John McCain’s campaign takes a top-down approach, using blogs—many of which it helped incubate—as an echo chamber for channeling mostly anti-Obama attacks into the mainstream media, in order to create an impression of grassroots online support.

As John’s recent map of the US blogosphere shows, two new clusters emerged in the summer that were not part of the traditional political blog network. Feltz writes of these clusters:

The use of the incubation technique is evident in a map of 8,000 blogs produced by Morningside Analytics for a joint investigation by Columbia University’s Toni Stabile Center for Investigative Reporting and Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. In addition to two large clusters of mostly longtime conservative and liberal bloggers, the map shows a ‘halo’ of about 500 relatively new blogs in two isolated clusters. One cluster includes several hundred anti-Obama blogs (orange) and the other contains several hundred pro-McCain and pro-Palin blogs (green). Most of them were created in mid-July 2007 or afterwards, and are listed listed on “blogrolls” such as McCain Victory 2008 and the NoBama network.

John Kelly says that pro-McCain/Palin blogs that heavily link to each other but not the existing political blogosphere, “…indicates it is not a particularly effective communications strategy, because these sites don’t draw much attention from established bloggers on the left of the right.” However, they did appear to allow the McCain campaign to “generate a buzz for attacks on Obama.” For example, blogs that focus on Acorn or Bill Ayers can lead to higher hits on Google searches about Obama and create the perception of widespread outrage, which has the ability to frame news coverage.

And confirming what others have noted before, the Obama campaign has not reached out as significantly to bloggers, and has focused instead on its own social networking site; which is not surprising given Facebook co-Founder Chris Huges’s role in the campaign.

We’ll report out in the future on the results of our coding of hundreds of these blogs, but in the mean time check out the full CJR article here.