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Do online protests really work?

Posted on 17 Sep 2009 at 13:16

Taking on the tabloids

Not every successful protest is reliant on an email. Earlier this year, The Sunday Express in Scotland printed a front-page cover story titled "Anniversary Shame Of Dunblane Survivors". The story talked about how the survivors of the Dunblane masacre had "shamed the memory of their dead peers".

Graham Linehan, best known for penning TV shows such as Father Ted, The IT Crowd and Black Books, was one of many outraged by the article. He told PC Pro that The Sunday Express "waited until the kids hit 18 and then trawled through their Facebook pages for evidence of 'bad' behaviour. For their purposes, this bad behaviour included drinking and swearing, and this, they said, 'shamed the memory of their dead classmates'."

Linehan was one of thousands who weren't impressed. "It just blew me away that anyone would try to smear the victims of a crime in this way, and I wanted to draw attention to it because it represented a new low for tabloid journalism", he recalled.

Linehan hadn't intended to be one of the catalysts for a mass protest about the story. "I just wrote a blog post about it", he explained, "then linked to the piece and got some help to Photoshop out the names of the students. I wanted to draw attention to the story while leaving the Dunblane kids out of it as much as I could".

It just blew me away that anyone would try to smear the victims of a crime in this way, and I wanted to draw attention to it because it represented a new low for tabloid journalism

His blog post, then took on a life of its own when it was distributed via Twitter. Eventually, the protest resulted in an apology of sorts from the Sunday Express, but Linehan has mixed feelings on whether the overall campaign - which resulted in the delivery of an e-petition with 11,186 names on it to the newspaper's office - could be considered a success.

"I'm glad that a lot of people who weren't aware of the story now know what the tabloids are capable of", he told us. "But I'm still waiting to see how the Press Complaints Commission responds to the petition. We won't know whether it's a success or not until we hear their verdict. I suspect it will be little more than a slap on the wrist."

Whether the PCC acts or not, it was Twitter that fuelled the protest, and arguably made the difference. "It wouldn't have spread nearly as fast without Twitter", said Linehan. But, he admits, the effect of the microblogging service didn't come without its problems.

"That was one thing that gave me pause. It's very, very powerful for organising in this way, and I needed to be sure we weren't adding to the problem by bringing up bad memories for the people involved. It was an unknown quantity, and as we saw with #amazonfail, there are downsides to the power that Twitter gives us".

Amazon fail?

#amazonfail is an interesting case, and one that highlights the volatility of relying on the internet for a protest. It was another Twitter-fuelled campaign, and one that demonstrated what an uncontrollable beast the service could be.

It all started over this year's Easter weekend, when some users noticed that Amazon had started re-categorising gay-themed books as "adult". This meant that they wouldn't appear in main search listings, and this, in turn, had the potential to dampen sales dramatically. It also left searches for gay literature returning names of books that were clearly positioned against homosexuality. Twitter went into overdrive, calling for a total boycott of Amazon, arranging protests, and damning the store's handling of the issue.