how to protest in the age of twitter
June 10th, 2010 • posts i've written
It is officially Day 52 since the BP oil spill began in the gulf of Mexico.
Somewhere between 12,000 to 25,000 barrels of oil have been escaping into the ocean per day.
That’s 600,000 to 1.3 Million barrels of oil released total. So far.
Look at the cup sitting on your desk (or imagine one being there). Fill that cup 874 million times.
I don’t question that BP is attempting to solve the problem.
And I offer my sincere condolences to the families of the workers lost in the original accident.
I grew up playing in the waters of the Gulf.
I spend most of my days now, playing on the internet.
And because of that, I believe that BP should be solely focused on minimizing the already assured catastrophe – stopping the oil first and foremost – and not buying Adwords or worrying about Twitter.
In my opinion, BP should dispatch their PR & legal departments, donned in polyvinyl dungarees, to clean up the shoreline or preserve wildlife instead of conduct business as usual – spinning facts and covering their backsides.
You’re free to disagree. These are my opinions.
I asked myself, what do you do in the age of Twitter to protest … or give tangible voice to your beliefs?
I think @BPGlobalPR is one way. A brilliant way, actually. And Twitter deserves credit for not giving into the demands of a multi-national corporation, with legions of lawyers, and for not shutting down the account.
And I think there’s another way to protest directly to BP. And I’ve started it – but I need your help.
I’ve created a single Twitter account that, every hour on the hour, sends an @ reply to @bp_america – BP’s official Twitter account.
An example tweet the account sends – STOP THE OIL STOP THE SPIN @BP_America
Creating the account, powering it, and scheduling it was all pretty easy – and I’m going to show you how to do it yourself.
To me, this is the equivalent of holding a sign outside of their offices. And if there are enough of us, it will make using Twitter very difficult for the brand – their @replies will fill up with our message – assuming enough people join me or use my method and do something even more interesting with it.
How to set up your own protest account in 5 steps:
- Create a new Twitter account at Twitter.com
- Download the PHP file I’ve uploaded here
- Edit the file (in a text editor) to input the name of your account and the password to the account (that’s all you have to change)
- Upload the file to your webserver (make sure to give it full read/execute permissions – 755)
- Here’s the complicated bit – create a cron job that runs the file every hour on the hour (a cron job is simply a way to tell your webserver to run a file periodically without you having to do it yourself). You should be able to find how to do this for your hosting service in their help files or in your control panel.
If you have any questions, drop them in the comments and I’ll do my best to be responsive (but readers, do feel free to help each other of course).
It will take a handful of us doing this together to have an impact – so please, if you agree, help out and get an account running.
Related posts:
6 Responses (add your comment)
-
sethotron June 10, 2010at 12:44 pm
-
Hey everybody,
I ran into my own troubles with the cron job – the current script works – but you’ll need to probably review your webserver’s wiki/help files to make sure you’re calling the script correctly.
Here’s how I did it:
wget -q –delete-after http://pathto.com/yourfile.php
-
For those who thought a cron job was an eighties haircut: use a scheduled tweet provider.
I like this one: http://www.twaitter.com/
Log in with your new twitter acct, enter the text of the tweet, then schedule that tweet (every hour on the hour, whatever.)
It’s free / no php required.
-
I think the @BPGlobalPR is a brilliant and unignorable way to protest.
I am not convinced of the method you recommend though. Making it difficult for @bp_america to use Twitter with flooding @replies to them assumes that they want to use it as a tool for dialogue – nothing in their tweetstream currently suggests that. Even if they plan to do so at a later stage, this will be a great excuse not to.
And I don’t at all think that BP (or anyone else) will be convinced that these tweets are “the equivalent of holding a sign outside of their offices.”
I quote from Clay Shirky’s ‘Here Comes Everybody’ at length here. Do substitute automated tweets for email and BP for congress and so on…
“This hardly sounds like the stuff of failure, but in fact e-mail is the wrong tool for lobbying Congress. Before e-mail, a rule of thumb in COngress was that one handwritten letter from a constituent indicated that something like two thousand voters in that district cared about the same issue. E-mail enormously lowers the transaction cost of sending a message while creating superdistribution, the effortless forwarding of the message from person to person and group to group. The problem with e-mail as a tool is that it is now too good – the cost of lobbying COngress by e-mail is so low that an e-mail message has become effectively meaningless. Attempts by Congress to reintroduce some value to the communicatuons – by asking e-mail correspndents to include their mailing address, to make sure that they are a congressperson’s constituents – have failed because users can easily cut and paste addresses from the congressperson’s district, whether they live there or not. One of the reasons e-mail campaigns continue, despite their near uselessness, is as a public show of force. The individual communications have been denatured, so the battle has moved to public claims of how many mails were sent, which play out in he court of public opinion, not in the halls of Congress. MoveOn, and every other organisation that lobbies COngress, would be better served by a less convenient, more expensive tool, one that took real effort to use and so communicated real commitment on the part of the people writing in.”
-
@blaiq
Chances are … you’re right.
I think, when I objectively look at the situation – I’m really more angry than I am logical – this has worn on for so long and so much information has been withheld – it’s like never being allowed to mourn.
Not everything I do will be perfectly laid out, no matter how much grinding of the millstone.
But I’m not convinced that there isn’t something here … something to be used later … for another cause.
If you have any ideas, I’m all ears (figuratively).
-
Bud, I think you’re onto something with this idea. I can see value in this concept when business and government are actively tracking social metrics and listening to feedback from open data streams. The weight of someone’s influence would strengthen the voice of their “social megaphone”.
@blaiq makes a good point with the quote from Clay Shirky about how some email campaigns are ineffective. But instead of “a less convenient, more expensive tool”, why not create a social strategy that gets real attention? We have to use the momentum from this for something bigger.
donate your two cents
NOTE: Anonymous and/or hateful comments get deleted. My blog, my rules.
just set up an account @setitablaze, set up the cron job, but I haven’t seen it output yet…staying tuned though!