BY KIDENDEI CEGERETI

Increasing accessibility and the ability to communicate with thousands of citizens quickly has made the internet a tool of choice for individuals or organisations looking to spread a social message far and wide. Independent activists the world over are using the internet and digital tools to build their community, connect with other similar-minded people outside their physical surroundings as well as lobby, raise funds and organise events.

The Tools

The tools used by digital activists are vast and the list changes constantly in line with the rapid general evolution of technology.

  Online petitions.

Websites such as Change.org and MoveOn.org are hubs of online activism, where people can communicate with others worldwide regarding their cause. MoveOn.org initially grew from a small petition that two Silicon Valley entrepreneurs sent to some family and friends in the late ‘90s, asking for their support in telling the White House to “move on” from the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal to more pressing issues facing the country.

Social networks. 

Sites with high usage numbers such as Facebook and YouTube have proven beneficial in spreading a message, garnering support, shining information on a subject that might otherwise be overlooked by mainstream media. Protests in 2011 in Tunisia and Egypt against their respective governments were in part organised and promoted via Facebook.

 Blogs. 

Essentially a form of citizen journalism for the masses, blogs provide an effective means of non-filtered communication with an audience about any topic and have been used in numerous online campaigns.

Micro-blogging. 

Micro-blogging sites such as Twitter are used to help spread awareness of an issue or activist event. Twitter's hash tag function, which allows people to have their tweets contribute to a multi-user conversation by typing a keyword or phrase preceded by a hashtag, is used frequently as a digital tool for spreading a message. The Chinese equivalent to Twitter, Weibo is subject to scrupulous government censorship however people circumvent this blockade by using code words when writing about issues that might be government-sensitive.

 Mobile phones. 

Controversy surrounding the 2007 presidential elections in Kenya led to the introduction of a company which developed a piece of software that allowed people to send texts and pictures of violence following the elections which were plotted geographically on a Google map. The software has since been used to plot activity in disaster zones following earthquakes in Haiti and New Zealand and flooding in Australia and the USA.

 Proxy servers. 

As a means of circumventing government intervention when it comes to online protesting, many people employ proxy servers, which act as intermediaries between a user and a site, thus essentially circumventing national restrictions on any site. In 2009, student protesters in Iran took to social media to voice their concern over the contentious reelection of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. This led to a cat and mouse game of the government trying to identify which media were being used by the protesters to communicate (social networks and then eventually proxy servers) and shutting them down.