During the last weeks we have witnessed the massive protests of the movement Black Lives Matter, that led hundreds of thousands of people in the United States and around the world to demonstrate against racism. Social networks were not exempt from protests or responses to the protests. In fact, in the midst of this crisis, US President Donald Trump attacked social networks (see more here. y here.) in order to regulate the conduct of companies against the expression of third parties. As if that were not enough, everything happens in the framework of a highly polarized electoral campaign ahead of the presidential elections in November. Although it is not surprising that Facebook and Twitter are relevant actors, in these weeks TikTok also took center stage - we could say, surprisingly.
TikTok is a social network of Chinese origin that allows its users to easily upload videos and edit them, adding music and effects of different types. Since its launch in 2016, it has been a rage among adolescents from different parts of the world, with more than two billion (yes, two billion) of global downloads. Beyond its popularity, it was not known as a platform used by users to discuss politics, much less to summon social movements ... until now.
Over the past few weeks, amid a burning social climate, Trump and his team promoted their rally in the city of Tulsa, Oklahoma, without imagining that thousands of teenagers, especially fans of k pop, They were going to boycott the event. How they did it? Through TikTok: videos circulated calling users to register in the rally, all with then don't go.
Days before rally, occurred on Saturday, June 20, Brad Parscale, Trump's campaign manager, flaunted the more than 1 million registered to participate in the event, whose maximum capacity was around 20 thousand people. Arrived on Saturday, the call was so minor that they even had to cancel planned outdoor activities, anticipating a crowd that never materialized. Hundreds of thousands of TikTok users claimed part of failure in the call.
It is not the first time that fans of K-pop They organize and engage in social and political issues using social media. In late May, Dallas, Texas city police called on citizens to share videos of "illegal activities" in the context of the movement's protests Black Lives Matter, through an app called iWatch Dallas, administered by the local police.
The tweet attracted the attention of fans of the K-pop, who began sharing snippets of music videos in the app with the intention of sabotaging it, to the point of causing it to collapse. A few hours after the original tweet, the Dallas police announced the temporary withdrawal of the app due to technical problems.
More recently, an invitation to users to enter Donald Trump's official site, add as many merchandising items to the “shopping cart” began to go viral on TikTok, and then don't buy them. This automatically causes the site to redirect advertising to users who have left their purchases unfinished. The objective of this strategy? Exhausting the digital advertising resources of the Trump presidential campaign. The numbers speak for themselves: the original video was watched by 2.9 million users and around 40 thousand users shared it in their accounts.
Undoubtedly, although they have not been specifically designed for these purposes, platforms such as TikTok constitute new spaces for political demonstration and, why not, for protest. In times of social distancing, prohibition of demonstrations and counter-demonstrations, these forms of political participation from the Internet bring to the agenda, once again, questions that in global jurisprudence are pending resolution, despite not necessarily being new.
If we review the history of the protests on the internet, we can see that they have existed since before the phenomenon of social networks. Some of them took the form of Distributed Denial of Service, or "DDoS"for example, modus operandi par excellence of the activist group (“hacktivist”) Anonymous in 2010, against the giants PayPal, Mastercard and Visa, among others. These attacks were part of the call "Operation Payback”, Motivated by the decision of the financial companies to prevent donations to the site Wikileaks. Around 10 people participated in the DDoS, causing the temporary decline of the websites of the financial giants for a few hours. Operation Payback motivated a debate that today becomes fundamentally relevant: was it hacking or was it expression?
As of today, DDoS is illegal in various countries around the world, including the United States and Great Britain. In the latter they were convicted of Operation Payback, a group of young, two of whom served sentences of up to 18 months in prison. One of the judges who sentenced them argued in their ruling that "it is intolerable that when an individual or a group disagrees with the activities of a particular entity they are free to restrict that activity through attacks such as those that took place in this case«.
But there are also those who question coordinated strategies on social networks, not because they are DDoS attacks or even because they are incompatible with freedom of expression, but because of what coordinated action has meant for the scene of the famous "fake news" In an interesting article from the Washington Post, Molly Roberts, a technology and society journalist, argues that "Holding some manipulations and condemning others is an unsustainable tactic for anyone who wants to untangle our global web of lies. It is sad that this is the most normal and natural-feeling activism for those who grew up in the Internet age, sad that many believe it is the activism most likely to succeed on a battlefield already riddled with falsehoods, and more sad yet they may be right".
On the other side of the argument, there are those who consider DDoS and this type of organized behavior as a form of protest and argue that as such it should be protected as a legitimate exercise of freedom of expression. There are even those who go further and consider that these types of protests should be encouraged, opening the doors to new forms of expression (this is the opinion of the renowned defense lawyer for digital activists and hackers, Jay Leiderman, in this article).
The lack of consensus on the treatment of these manifestations is particularly relevant in today's internet ecosystem in which platforms are increasingly pressured to adopt content regulation measures. Facebook, for example, fights against "coordinated inauthentic behavior”, Understood as that carried out by users with false identities. What is distinctive about the recent events on TikTok, however, is that they were behaviors promoted by real or “authentic” users.
There are legal tools to analyze these behaviors within the framework of the rights to freedom of expression, the rights of association and assembly, and the rights to political participation. Notwithstanding how it turns out in particular cases, these systems offer a framework for the analysis of these behaviors that should be addressed. Among the main standards for the protection of these rights, it is highlighted that any measure that seeks to restrict them must be previously established by law, in addition to being necessary and proportional to the legitimate aim pursued, whether to ensure respect for the rights of others or the protection of national security, public order or public health or morals (see articles 13, 15 and 16 of the American convention, and articles IV, XXI and XXII of the Declaration American of the Rights and Duties of Man, within the inter-American system).
International experts have also contributed to interpreting which constitute peaceful protests and which do not. Among others, the reports of the Office of the Special Rapporteur on the Rights to Freedom of Peaceful Assembly and of Association of the UN stand out (see reports of the 2012 and the 2015) and, more recently, the report "Protest and Human Rights”Of the Special Rapporteur for Freedom of Expression of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, of the year 2019.
Twenty years have passed since the first DDoS attacks and we can see how the forms of association and digital activism have evolved, not only in terms of their nature, size and scope, but also in terms of the actors involved. Perhaps the most sensible thing in this instance is to return to the bases and not lose sight of the framework of analysis from which to approach these new manifestations.
By Morena Schatzky
Image credit: Kon Karampelas @konkarampelas
