Big Technology

Discussing the Future of Social Media-Driven Protests With Zeynep Tufekci

‘Of course it’s performative, but you know what? It’s a better world if brands feel they have to be performative’

Alex Kantrowitz
OneZero
Published in
29 min readAug 24, 2020

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Zeynep Tufekci
Photo illustration, image courtesy of Zeynep Tufekci.

OneZero is partnering with Big Technology, a newsletter and podcast by Alex Kantrowitz, to bring readers exclusive access to interviews with notable figures in and around the tech industry.

This week, Kantrowitz sits down with writer and researcher Zeynep Tufekci to discuss the evolution of social media-driven movements, from Gezi Park in Istanbul to Black Lives Matter today. This writeup of their discussion has been edited for length and clarity.

To subscribe to the podcast and hear the interview for yourself, you can check it out on iTunes, Spotify, and Overcast.

In 2013, writer and researcher Zeynep Tufekci and I showed up to Gezi Park in Istanbul, Turkey. The park was a site of a social media-driven networked protest, where people from all walks of Turkish life came out to protest overreaches by the Turkish government. We were at the protest separately, but both interested in seeing it up close as movements of its nature took off across the globe.

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Alex Kantrowitz
OneZero

Veteran journalist covering Big Tech and society. Subscribe to my newsletter here: https://bigtechnology.com.