As a crowd chanted at the entrance to an Oakland freeway it hoped to swarm and shut down, a man ran to the concrete wall of a store, a bandanna over his face, and spray-painted an antipolice epithet.
But first he added a Twitter hashtag.
As demonstrators take to the streets to decry the lack of charges for police officers who killed unarmed black men in Missouri and New York, the already central role of smartphones and social media has exploded.
Protest leaders have long used applications like Twitter to organize protests — with hashtags like “#Occupy” and “#Ferguson” bringing people together — but they now coordinate movements, plan tactics and share videos and images in real time at a blinding speed that police are struggling to keep up with.
Last week, after it was revealed that the California Highway Patrol had sent armed undercover officers to infiltrate marches that have frequently devolved into vandalism and looting, the agency’s chief in the Bay Area, Avery Browne, said his officers were also creating fake Twitter accounts.
He said the accounts, which did not identify their CHP affiliation, were a bid to match “the sophistication” of tech-savvy protesters.
“They’re texting and they’re tweeting and they’re using social media to communicate,” Browne said. “They’re using their smartphones to give GPS locations. And we know they’re monitoring our police frequency. By the time we’ve communicated something out on the radio, they’ve already tweeted them out.”
Now some of the common hashtags are “#BlackLivesMatter,” “#ICan’tBreathe” and “#HandsUpDon’tShoot,” references to the deaths of Eric Garner in Staten Island, N.Y., and Michael Brown in Ferguson, Mo. Or protesters go with something like “#BerkeleyProtests” when people want to communicate during a local march.
On Twitter as well as Vine, Instagram, Facebook and Tumblr, they are planning actions, rallying support, framing objectives and defending the movement. So powerful and immediate are the communications that police officials at times jump into the conversation to try to clarify a point.
On Wednesday night in Oakland, after an undercover officer pulled a gun on protesters who attacked him, some assumed he was a city cop. But a social media-embracing Oakland lieutenant, Chris Bolton, soon took to Twitter. And he made sure to use the right hashtag.
“The #OaklandProtest pictured man isn’t an OPD officer & not an OPD arrest,” he wrote. “OPD 1st responded to scene on report from other agency.”
The CHP would have to respond to that one.
That same social media reach was on display just hours after officials in Missouri said on Nov. 24 that a grand jury had chosen not to bring charges against the officer who said he killed Michael Brown in self-defense. Word spread across the Internet of a march beginning at Frank Ogawa Plaza in downtown Oakland.
Discussing the organization of a subsequent march, protester Chirag Bhakta said, “We made a Facebook event, and a graphic to put on Instagram. Sometimes that’s all you need.”
“With the Arab Spring and Occupy, we saw the same thing,” said Charlton McIlwain, a New York University media and culture professor. “You have thousands of people who begin as one mass and end up in 20, 30 separate groups surrounding a city at different points.
“Anyone who is participating on social media can be his or her own leader and drive his or her own protest that is connected to the larger movement but separate at the same time,” McIlwain said. “None of that would have been possible a decade ago, possibly even just five years ago.”
The quickening pace of social media can be frustrating for police charged with keeping a handle on disruptive marches.
Protester Pan Ellington — whose Twitter avatar reads, “The Revolution will not be televised. It will be Tweeted” — said that when she was zip-tied at the back of a Ross Dress for Less in Emeryville after allegedly breaching a freeway with other protesters, an officer said something surprising to her.
“I wanted to see if I could get my phone out of my pocket,” Ellington said, “and an officer came over and asked, 'Are you tweeting?’”
Browne, the CHP chief, said his agency is only monitoring social media for content of “criminal nature” — that relating to people bent on vandalism and violence.
News of the CHP’s Twitter operations, though, brought out some of the diciest aspects of social media and the anonymity it can offer. One protester began attacking others on Twitter for possibly being “cops,” using discrepancies in identifying information as proof.
“The whole movement has been contaminated and taken control of by the powers that be,” he tweeted.
A larger concern for many protesters is that their message not be lost. McIlwain, the media professor, noted that the rise of social media has allowed everyone — and no one — to be a protest leader.
During the Occupy movement, “What was taking place on social media and on the ground had not just a leaderless quality, but a disconnection to anything that would extend it,” he said. “The optimism I have with what’s going on with the current protest around police brutality is that it’s well connected to a well-established civil rights community that has established policy and will be able to extend it long after the protests wane.”
Ellington said that after learning of the CHP’s social media monitoring, she sometimes worries about what she’s tweeting, and whom she’s connecting with.
“But on the flip side of it, I’m not doing anything wrong,” she said. “It’s our First Amendment right to express our ideas.”
She called the current protest ecosystem a “really complex, messy, beautiful thing,” adding, “There are positive things to come out, but how do you hear all the voices? How do you consider everyone?”
©2014 the San Francisco Chronicle
