FROM TROLLING TO ACTIVISM
GABRIELLA COLEMAN: Anonymous was a name used between 2005 and 2008 almost exclusively by participants on the image board 4chan for the sake of internet trolling. And trolling is a name for a diverse set of activities that happen in many different places on the internet, and in many different ways, but the essence of trolling is a form of fearsome pranking. And it spans from the quite light-hearted to the quite gruesome. Trolling can be done by one individual, by a small group -- a trolling association -- or in the case of Anonymous, quite famously, it was crowd-sourced, distributed, and anonymous. And 4chan is an anonymous image board and that is where this kind of commitment to the ideal of Anonymous really became formed and entrenched. And what was fascinating was that over the course of many years under certain circumstances, the name would be used for trolling because on 4chan there's a lot of activity that has nothing to do with trolling, but at a certain point there was a transformation where the name Anonymous was used for trolling, but over the course of that trolling campaign it became used for activism. And the campaign had to do with the Church of Scientology, which is a fun target for a lot of geeks and hackers, and in specific, a video by Tom Cruise, which was an internal church video. Tom Cruise is a member -- quite famous member -- of the Church of Scientology. So this video was leaked onto the internet by little 'a' "anonymous", and many geeks and hackers were enjoying watching the video and circulating it, and it spread like wildfire. And the Church of Scientology, as it's known to do, became very litigious and threatened publishers with lawsuits if they didn't take down the video. And this triggered Anonymous into trolling mode, and they engaged in, what I still think of as the mothership example of a trolling raid, insofar as many thousands of people got involved, and what they did was they sent hundreds of pizzas to churches all over the United States. They prank-called the Dianetics hotline, which is a Church of Scientology hotline. They faxed a lot of black pieces of paper and nude body part images to the church, and were basically having a pretty grand time engaging in this act of trolling. And then a couple of things happened -- critics of the church reached out to Anonymous and said you know, what you're doing is quite powerful, quite interesting, can you do so without the trolling and join our cause? Anonymous also released a video which was done for the sake of trolling where they declared war against the Church of Scientology, and it was a very well done video -- at least from the perspective of rhetoric. It's very compelling. And even though it was meant as a joke, it was so compelling that in fact it helped spark a debate that maybe Anonymous should earnestly protest the church. So between the video, between the critics of the Church of Scientology -- some of whom were ex-Scientologists -- Anonymous started to think about protesting the Church of Scientology, and they went ahead and organised a global day protest on February 8, 2010. And it was wildly successful insofar as there were over 7,000 participants in 127 cities, but what was crucial was really the Australian cities; the biggest protests were in London and Sydney and Melbourne. And given that Australia is ahead time-wise, those initial protests in Australia, which were quite large, helped get the ball rolling and motivated other geeks and hackers in other cities to go out. And I do wonder if the turnout in Australia had been very low perhaps it would have also been low in Europe, and so that snowball effect was really important because those street protests really helped to cement that transformation from the trolling into activism. Because once those protests had occurred, Anonymous became a name that could be used both for trolling, as well as for activism. And in fact, over the years the name has not been used for trolling, at least in terms of a large scale trolling campaign. It is certainly the case that some operations use troll-ish tactics as part of their repertoire, and that's why they're so controversial, but it is done earnestly for a political activist cause as opposed to just for the fun of trolling.
WHAT IS ANONYMOUS?
GABRIELLA COLEMAN: So Anonymous is an online protest movement that is most identified with online activism and computer hackers. It is certainly the case that, first of all, many of their most prominent participants are hackers, though it's a much larger movement that attracts all sorts of folks with and without technical background. And their most famous operations sometimes have been linked to such activities as computer hacking or distributed denial of service attacks where you overwhelm a server with too many requests. But Anonymous is interesting, because at a certain point they pivoted away from simply internet issues in 2011 and started to forge ties with social movements, generally, and specific activists working in those social movements. And the turning point for that pivot was when they got involved in Tunisia, where there had been street protests over the dire economic situation of the country and also protesting the dictator. And some folks from Tunisia -- some geeks -- had found Anonymous online and kind of asked them to get involved and they did. This was a big turning point, because up to that point Anonymous was just so identified with the internet, and then it became clear that they could engage and contribute to social and political causes that had nothing to do with the internet. This I think has always been the case with certain forms of internet activism. In 1999, IndyMedia, which was a very, very popular citizen journalism website, was very much rooted on the internet, but had very strong ties with social movements, so it's part of that lineage in certain ways. I think another way also to look at the significance of Anonymous beyond internet activism -- and this only became apparent when I started to meet people from Anonymous, some of whom could meet me because they weren't breaking the law, and others because they'd been arrested and I could meet them after they had been arrested -- many of the participants also engage in activism outside of the internet. And so Anonymous I think is interesting -- I've described it before as "the gateway drug" towards other forms of activism. So, for many -- not all, but a number of participants -- it's their first entryway into activism, and it is a wonderful space for online protest, but many others then start to engage, let's just say, in policy NGOs, or developing encryption software. And so in that sense, Anonymous is also a little kind of internet factory for the creation of activists, who work both offline and online.
POLITICAL EFFECTIVENESS OF ANONYMOUS
GABRIELLA COLEMAN: I often get a question about the political effectiveness of Anonymous, and this is a question that's posed variably by journalists, by students, by critics, and supporters. And I think that there's very different ways to measure their success and their importance, but one void that they fill is they report on events or issues that are ignored by the mainstream media. Once Anonymous starts to get involved and report on them then the mainstream media jumps in, and then there's a kind of very symbiotic relationship between the mainstream media and Anonymous. Over the years there were certain moments where this became very apparent. So for example, when the Tunisian protests were occurring in January of 2011 there were a couple of extremely tepid articles coming out of Reuters and other news establishments that, if anything, were even minimising the protests. And Anonymous, on the other hand was getting video footage from activists on the ground and giving it to, for example, Al Jazeera and other news organisations and saying, you know, actually it's a little bit more significant than is being reported in the mainstream media. And at a certain point in part because of the footage they were shuttling out of the country there was a bit more reportage coming. This is something I've seen time and again. Another really good example of this -- and it's now a slightly different one, a slightly different dynamic -- has to do with a number of rape cases that Anonymous got involved in, in North America, and the first of these occurred in Steubenville, Ohio -- an industrial town in the middle of the United States. And there was a really wonderful New York Times article about the case showcasing some of the young football players who were going to trial outlining what had happened-- allegedly, at the time-- which was a sexual assault at a party. With a young woman who had been very inebriated and there had been a lot of footage that was shot, like videos and images. And what's interesting about that case was The New York Times did excellent reporting. It was really kind of a stellar article, but as happens with so much mainstream reporting, it's one dose and it goes away and we never hear about it again. And someone in Anonymous decided that this was an issue that he wanted to take on. He started a Twitter account. It garnered a lot of support and this case went from a single issue reported once in the national newspaper to an event that was followed by the nation. And then the issue of rape became a national discussion as well. And so they really changed the game, even though they got involved after the fact. Now what's interesting too about Anonymous is that in some ways they're just a condensed and potent actor in relation to a new internet context, which can also push the mainstream media to report on different issues. I think we saw this over the summer of 2014 where there was the conflict between Israel and Gaza, and the mainstream reporting really changed after the reporting that came from basically folks on the ground who were then relaying the information on Twitter, and then that was amplified by Twitter supporters. And Anonymous was one participant, but in some ways a very minor one. So really the game has kind of changed because of social media, and then Anonymous is particularly adept at harnessing the power of social media to force mainstream media to report or to continue to report on an issue because they actually coordinate with each other. There's teams. They go on reconnaissance missions. They have propaganda. They have a plan, and so it's one of the reasons why they're particularly adept, although the trend is also one in which participants on social media can, under the right circumstances, force the mainstream media to report on that, which they either ignore or just only lightly report on.
HACKERS
GABRIELLA COLEMAN: In fact, I think the interesting question about hackers in particular is they tend to be a pretty privileged group economically and socially. And so the question is why do they tend to engage in risky forms of activism, and just a lot of activism. And they seem to engage in higher numbers compared to other professionals, like lawyers or doctors or journalists who are also quite privileged and may be very vocal about political causes, and definitely do engage in political organising through groups like Doctors Without Borders. But it does seem like hackers, especially in the last few years, and in part, due to-- I would say-- the success of WikiLeaks, it has inspired many, many more to enter into the political arena. And they absolutely do so through technology, because it is what they can best take command of, but they don't exclusively either use technology to engage in political causes.
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