Work in progress! See discussion questions at the bottom
EPIC’s The Stripping of Freedoms conference has an all-star cast: Kate Hanni of FlyersRights, pilot Michael Roberts of Fed Up Flyers, Jim Babb of We Won’t Fly, Prof. Jeffrey Rosen, Bruce Schneier, Nadhira Al-Khalili of CAIR, Chip Pitts of BORDC, Ginger McCall and Lillie Coney of EPIC, and many many more. So it’s a great chance to mobilize the resistance to the TSA.
Social media* are an important way of getting the word out; letting people participate whether or not they can make it to Washington DC; putting pressure on Congress, the Obama administration, and the airlines; and trying to get the traditional media to cover our side of the story as well as the TSA’s.  Here’s some thoughts about how to approach it.
The first step is to let people know about the conference — and get them excited about it. There are a lot of easy ways to do this: invite people to the Facebook event, share the links to EPIC’s page and blog posts on Facebook and Myspace, tweet it, mail it to your friends who are likely to be interested, tell any bloggers and journalists you know about it. A lot of people have never done anything like this before, so we’ll try to have some basic instructions available. We’ll also set up threads in the FlyerTalk forums and the We Won’t Fly blog to ask for questions and strategy suggestions.
During the event, live video will be available via http://epic.org/events/tsa/. We’ll also have discussion on Twitter on the #ScanTSA hashtag, with a two-way connection so that the speakers and audience in DC can see the backchannel. One of the goals here is to get discussions going between people watching online, to build connections that are a basis for future activism. Another goal is to generate ideas to help inform the strategy panel that wraps it up.
It may also make sense to stage an social network activism campaign in conjunction with the conference. There are several groups fighting the TSA who have large mailing lists, so we have a good chance at getting some traction; and we’ll need to make it as easy as possible for people everybody to participate.
A couple of ideas so far:
- letter-writing campaigns to Congress and the airlines (we’ll need sample letters)
- encouraging people to change their Facebook and MySpace statuses or photos
- engaging with high-profile supporters on Twitter to try to get them involved (Penn Jillette, Khloe Khardasian, Rachel Maddow, etc.)
- trying to get #ScanTSA to trend on Twitter to help raise awareness
The event ends with a strategy panel, and there will be plenty of ways we’ll need to get people involved going forward. So the final part of the social media campaign will be to get the word out about the conclusions and calls to action, broaden participation, and continue to work on getting media coverage.
If you haven’t ever been involved in a successful social media campaign before, it’s exhiliarating when it works and things go viral. It doesn’t always happen, of course; still, the more people who get involved and start helping, the more likely it is to come together. So if you’re reading this, please try to find a little time over the next week to be part of it.
Discussion questions:
- Thoughts about any of these activism ideas? Other suggestions?
- Should we set up a YouTube channel to collect videos of TSA abuses? There’s a lot of great stuff out there …
- How to reach out to the libertarian, progressive, and political blogospheres — and the feminist and womanist blogospheres?
- How best to incorporate social media into the conference site?
Feedback welcome!
* discussion forums, blogs, and social networks
EPIC to host TSA workshop ["Stripping of Freedom"] Jan. 6, 2011 in D.C. - Page 3 - FlyerTalk Forums | 04-Jan-11 at 1:38 pm | Permalink
[…] to this site, live video will be available at […]
Harry Waisbren | 06-Jan-11 at 9:28 am | Permalink
Glad you’re working on this, Jon! My feedback below:
# Thoughts about any of these activism ideas? Other suggestions?
–Letter writing: like the idea, and if you are also collecting videos, you can suggest video testimonials as well. The ‘It Gets Better’ campaign really raised the bar on utilizing viral videos to change the debate, in my mind, and I see big potential.
–FB MySpace photo/status changes: on a personal level, I use my FB account for mostly communicating with old friends, and much less for activism, so would be reticent to especially change my photo. As we have discussed before, my generation of recent college grads use FB differently than others do (for better or for worse…I increasingly hate Facebook by and large), and I’ve noticed that even those somewhat younger are much more attuned for using their public personas specifically for activism. I’d say the older generations of activists, though, utilize it in an entirely different manner, and would be quite amenable to it. FireDogLake especially had a lot of success with changing photos for their ‘Just Say Now’ campaign, and they have been leading the way from the progressive blogosphere against the TSA. If you want to go full force on this, I’d connect with someone over there, and bet they’d be all over it.
–high profile twitter supporters: I’ve seen Brave New Films use act.ly’s to petition to likes of Katie Couric to cover campaigns. Think it’s a very useful model that could be replicated, even on a smaller scale to the extent of ‘petition rachel maddow to RT this…’
–#scantsa: a trending topic on Twitter would be huge, but is difficult of course. If you are able to get some of hte higher profile users to tweet consistently on it, I bet it’d be that much more doable though.
# Should we set up a YouTube channel to collect videos of TSA abuses? There’s a lot of great stuff out there …
I’d say absolutely! Tons of great video out there, but to my knowledge it isn’t aggregated in one place. There are also problems with older videos of abuse being cited, and these have been often cited amidst the argument that this is all overblown. One directory of the contemporary abuse would dispel that whole notion…
# How to reach out to the libertarian, progressive, and political blogospheres — and the feminist and womanist blogospheres?
FireDogLake and Glenn Greenwald have been all over these stories, but both are also focusing on wikileaks at the moment. It could be tough to get their attention, but FDL also has their integrated social network platform now (part of the seminal structure) which could be a way of bringing this up to the top even without direct coordination. Libertarian outreach, Julian Sanchez has been a keen ally on these issues, and bet he’d have ideas if he hasn’t been brought into the fold already. Feminist and womanist blogospheres seem like natural allies given the nature of this abuse.
# How best to incorporate social media into the conference site?
If #scantsa gets off the ground I’d say that a widget of some kind chronicling the traffic would be huge. If influentials start tweeting, then I’d consider setting up a twazzup embed as well.
Great stuff all in all, and excited to see where it goes!
–Harry
L. Mirante | 06-Jan-11 at 6:57 pm | Permalink
Re Harry’s reference to “feminist and womanist blogospheres”…
I think an education blitz in parenting websites/blogospheres might be effective. Things I will let slide when it comes to my own privacy/health I will not tolerate when my children are involved. I’ve read several instances of people finding out AFTER their kids went through a WBI that it was naked and x-rays and they were angry.