Modern Melodies, Crafty Caricatures And Hidden Networks: How Viral Audio, Visual Motifs And Technical Advances Have Shaped Protest In The Digital Age.

“For the girls wishing they were boys 

For women, life and freedom

For this heaven being forced on you”

In writing the song Barye (“For”), Shervin Hajipour ignited the protests surrounding the death of Mahsa Amini into the biggest challenge to the Iranian authorities in recent regime history. Fired up by Amini's brutal death while in police custody for violating Iran’s mandatory hijab law, Hajipour composed a poignant account of the suffering of life under the Iranian government. But what could have remained a personal account of opposition became a viral expression of universal frustration, gaining 40 million views in 48 hours.[1] Hajipour’s song illustrates how acts of protest in the digital age rely on visual motifs, audio and technical innovation to evade censorship and reach broad audiences. 

Protests movements have long used slogans and songs to galvanise support and subvert propaganda. As early as the 1940’s, songs such as “Bella Ciao” - the partisan hymn against facism - were widely adopted to act as a rallying cry to unify protestors around a central message. 

However, Hajipour’s song transcended this role by serving a purpose unique to the digital framework in which modern protests develop.[2] The song enabled protestors to group their posts simply by using the song and in doing so avoided the need for words or hashtags which could have triggered the Iranian internet censors. The strength of Hajipour’s song stemmed not only from its virality but also its ability to meet the increasingly important imperative of modern-day protests: evading digital censorship.[3] 

The firewalls, armies of censors and troll farms that police the internet in many authoritarian countries have forced protest to evolve from large displays of discontent to small decentralised acts of disobedience with shared, subtle motifs that are hard for censors to eliminate. The use of Winnie the Pooh to caricature Chinese leader Xi Jinping enabled dissenters to avoid explicit references to the leader in their critiques.[4] China’s Blank Paper protests saw white sheets of paper, absent slogans or political demands, widely shared, with onlookers invited to project their own personal grievances onto the blank sheets.[5] Protests in the digital age, burdened with avoiding censorship, have moved from the explicit to the implicit, utilising visual motifs to make oblique references to the objects of their criticism. 

Mass adoption of social media in the late 2000s and early 2010s provided an opportunity for protests to reach new, broader audiences and to surmount the censorship that afflicted dissidents in many of the world’s authoritarian regimes.[6] Looking to the original causes of the internet’s adoption as a protest medium provides insights as to how the digital world shapes protest movements today. The self-immolation of street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi in 2010 in Tunisia in protest at his treatment by local government sparked indignation towards state officials as news of his death was widely relayed on social media. Bouazizi’s death, and the wave of Facebook posts it incited, ignited the Arab Spring.[7] The movement set much of the Arab world alight and sparked the removal from power of the leaders of Tunisia, Libya, Egypt and Yemen. The “Facebook Revolution”, as the Arab Spring became known, heralded a new age of protest.  Protestors coordinated meetings and spread uncensored information, for the first time, en masse in digital spaces. Facebook enabled dissidents to share their grievances by bypassing censored legacy media outlets. Social media also enabled regime opponents to gain immense reach as the most compelling posts or images were elevated to virality. These two early “raison d’être” of digital protest, evading censorship and gaining reach, remain underlying criteria of success for protest in the current digital age.

The censors of the Arab world’s radio, print and television outlets were initially absent from the digital world. Yet, as the ramifications of overlooking digital spaces in their censorship efforts became apparent for authoritarian regimes, censorship was soon also thrust upon digital outlets.  Merely migrating from the physical world to the digital became an insufficient means of evading censorship. As protestors adapted to a new age of internet policing, a cat-and-mouse game emerged between protestors seeking to gain reach with their posts and censors curtailing dissent.[8] This cat-and-mouse dynamic between protestors and censors continues to define digital protests to this day. As they seek to fulfil the imperatives of protests in the digital age, evading censorship and gaining reach, dissidents have employed visual motifs, audio and technical innovation to adapt to protest in the digital age. 

The occasional fissures that appear even in the world’s most censored online spaces means that digital realms create new dimensions where, through ingenuity, citizens can undertake acts of protest impossible in their analogue, physical worlds. The mass dissemination of information through Apple’s Airdrop system for the 2019 Hong Kong protests exemplified how loopholes in digital spaces could undermine surveillance states.[9] Airdrop allowed protestors to evade aggressive censoring algorithms and enabled the planning of physical demonstrations.[10] Here, virtual transfers of information catalysed street protests, highlighting how digital tools have become indispensable for conventional protests. 

On the 1st February 2021, the Myanmar military orchestrated a coup against the democratically elected leader of the country, Aung San Suu Kyi.[11]. Soon, the nation’s 22 million active social media users found their internet access severed at the hands of the military junta. But the impact of this digital shutdown, intended to stifle dissent and prevent organised resistance, was substantially diminished by protestors’ technical know-how. Craftily assembled by political opponents, peer-to-peer networks, where a person uses Bluetooth signals to create an independent network whose range grows with each additional member, exploded in popularity. Apps like Briar, which provided this service, gained more than 1 million downloads in 24 hours. The decentralised nature of these networks has made them hard to trace and difficult to shut-down, providing a stable method of communication and coordination for protestors in tightly surveilled digital spaces. The success of these innovative attempts at overcoming censorship illustrate how technical innovation has become a key pillar of protest in the digital age. 

Metalinguistic tactics - where internet users exploit subtlety and double meaning in languages - have also enabled protestors to remain one step in front of censors.[12] Students in China enabled their version of the MeToo movement to gain traction despite fierce crackdowns by universities by communicating through homophones and coded language. The term “Me Too” was transliterated to mǐtù (#米兔) and later, using the individual meaning of the characters, represented by rice and bunny emoji.[13] This crafty use of language was easily decipherable to members of the movement but difficult to identify for automatic censors. As a result, posts had to be removed manually, extending the time for which the posts were available. The Chinese ‘Me Too’ movement is a poignant illustration of how protestors have utilised language barriers to overcome censorship and successfully protest in the digital age. 

Protestors have also exploited niche regional and cultural references to transmit political messages.  The 2019 Hong Kong democracy protests capitalized on the mainland Chinese origin of censors to confuse them by disseminating information in a mix of Cantonese, Mandarin and English.[14] While the overwhelming majority of people in Hong Kong speak Cantonese, few of their mainland counterparts are fluent in the language. The disconnect between dissident’s intended audience and the censors was also exploited during the early stages of COVID-19, when doctors sought to bring attention to the dangers of the virus to Western media. Whistle-blowers from local Wuhan hospitals translated their messages into foreign languages, using French and Italian and a Romanised form of Chinese characters, to evade censorship. In translating their messages, whistle-blowers enabled their messages to remain online for longer and augmented the probability that they would be detected by a foreign outlet. Hence, to gain traction in the most tightly controlled digital spaces, protestors have utilised local dialects and foreign languages to confuse and deceive government censors. 

More recently, protestors have countered the increasing sophistication of AI-powered censors by employing graphical tricks to confuse algorithms.[15] Users have altered their text by switching orientation or adding brush strokes and borders to bypass text recognition software. Russians seeking to denounce the war in Ukrainian camouflaged their text by swapping between the Cyrillic and Roman alphabet and by utilising highly stylized fonts.[16] While these design changes did not impede understanding of the text, it enabled them to evade text recognition software. The technical capabilities of activists, coupled with their innovative strategies, have enabled them to continue communicating and continually counterbalance the improvement of censor’s filtering systems.  

Technological advances have given the modern-day surveillance state greater tools for data collection and surveillance, but in utilising their technical skills, audio or visual motifs and exploiting language barriers, protestors can seek to craftily avoid the oppressive eye of the censor and achieve virality. Protestors in the digital age are thus engaged in a perpetual quest for a viral melody, a subversive caricature or novel method of protest, as they seek to gain online reach and avoid censorship. 

Works Cited:

[1]Bozorgmehr, Najmeh. “Iranian celebrities fan flames of anti-regime protests.” Financial Times, 1O October 2022. Financial Times https://www.ft.com/content/eedfd315-b14e-46ea-9bf3-ff08833c9ff1

[2]Pelham, Nicolas. “I’m the same as Mahsa. And I want my freedom”: anger at Iran’s regime spills onto the streets.” The Economist, 28 September 2022. The Economist 

https://www.economist.com/1843/2022/09/28/im-the-same-as-mahsa-and-i-want-my-freedom-anger-at-irans-regime-spills-onto-the-streets

[3]Alterman, John B. “Protest, Social Media, and Censorship in Iran”.18 October, 2022. Centre for Strategic and International Studies.https://www.csis.org/analysis/protest-social-media-and-censorship-iran

[4]Morris, Seren.“Why is Chinese President Xi Jinping being compared to Winnie the Pooh?”. 11 April, 2023.The London Evening Standard.https://www.standard.co.uk/news/world/chinese-president-xi-jinping-winnie-the-pooh-taiwan-b1073403.html

[5]Murphy, Matt. “China's protests: Blank paper becomes the symbol of rare demonstrations.” 28 November, 2022. BBC https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-china-63778871

[6]Esteban Ortiz-Ospina. “The rise in Social Media”. 18 September, 2019. Our World in Data https://ourworldindata.org/rise-of-social-media 

[7]“The Arab Spring at Ten Years: What’s the Legacy of the Uprisings?” 3 December, 2020. https://www.cfr.org/article/arab-spring-ten-years-whats-legacy-uprisings

[8]Weber, Valentin.“A Bold Proposal for Fighting Censorship: Increase the Collateral Damage” 31 January, 2019. Centre for Technology and Global Affairs. https://www.ctga.ox.ac.uk/article/bold-proposal-fighting-censorship-increase-collateral-damage 

[9]Frosina, Silvia. “Digital Revolution: How Social Media Shaped the 2019 Hong Kong Protests” 8 June, 2021. Italian Institute for International Political Studies.

https://www.ispionline.it/en/publication/digital-revolution-how-social-media-shaped-2019-hong-kong-protests-30756

[10]France-Presse, Agence.“Apple limits AirDrop on iPhones in China after filesharing feature was used by protesters.”11 November, 2022. The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/nov/11/apple-limits-iphone-filesharing-feature-used-by-protesters-in-china

[11]Bawi Thang, Lian. “Understanding the Military Coup in Myanmar, Two Years Later.15 March, 2023.Centre of Foreign Relations East-West center: https://www.eastwestcenter.org/news/east-west-wire/understanding-military-coup-myanmar-two-years-later  

[12]Jones, R.H. Orcid. Metalinguistic tactics in the Honk Kong protest Movement. 11 January, 2022. Volume 21, Issue 11 of the Journal of Language and Politics.  https://centaur.reading.ac.uk/99352/1/Jones%20and%20Chau_JLP.pdf 

[13]Yang, Yuan. “China’s “MeToo” movement evades censors with #RiceBunny.” 9 August , 2018. The Financial Times. https://www.ft.com/content/61903744-9540-11e8-b67b-b8205561c3fe 

[14]Jili, Bulelani. “China’s surveillance ecosystem and the global spread of its tools”. 17 October, 2022. The Atlantic Council. https://www.atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-research-reports/issue-brief/chinese-surveillance-ecosystem-and-the-global-spread-of-its-tools/ 

[15] Knockel, Jeffrey “Can’t Picture This: An analysis of image filtering on WeChat Moments.” 14 August, 2018. https://citizenlab.ca/2018/08/cant-picture-this-an-analysis-of-image-filtering-on-wechat-moments/ 

[16]Davies, Katie Marie “ Censored in Russian, anti-war activists turn to indigenous languages” 20 April, 2022. The New Statesman. https://www.newstatesman.com/world/europe/2022/04/censored-in-russian-anti-war-activists-turn-to-indigenous-languages