Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives (19 page)

In 2012, I was invited back to the World Economic Forum in Davos, this time no longer as a representative of Facebook but as the CEO of a media company that now bore my name. And once again I was asked to sing at the Shabbat table, this time a song called “Shalom Aleichem.”

This time, I said yes without hesitation. And as I took the microphone, I looked around the room and saw many familiar faces. I thought of my childhood, growing up in Dobbs Ferry. I thought of Brent and Asher, my own family waiting for me back in California, and of the people who could not be there and whose lives we were honoring on what also happened to be Holocaust Remembrance Day.

I sang, and as the room joined in, the moment we shared was touching and all too brief.

I had come a long way. In the course of the past few years, I had learned what it meant to take risks in my personal life and my professional life. And I had learned the most important secret of all: that both those lives are part of the same thing. I knew there would be no way to separate the two, so the one life I lived might as well be authentic.

chapter 9

COMMUNITY

I Get By with a Little Help from My Friends (and Kickstarter)

I
n this chapter, I want to talk about one of the hardest but most rewarding things on social media today: doing something good for other people and the community.

We’ve talked a lot in this book about how technology can make our everyday lives and relationships more complicated, whether in our friendships, our romantic entanglements, or our careers. As all those tricky situations and painful stories show, these aren’t unimportant problems. If we refuse to take the perils of technology seriously today, there can be serious consequences for our lives and livelihoods.

We must keep things in perspective. Technology, as a tool, can be used for both good and bad. And in these final pages, I want to talk about some of the opportunities that exist for us to help create some good in the world.

My first experience of this was in 2007, amid tragic and terrible circumstances. On the morning of April 16, 2007, a student went on a shooting spree at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, Virginia. Thirty-two people were killed and seventeen wounded before the gunman took his own life. It was the worst school shooting in U.S. history.

In the days that followed, something very poignant began to happen on Facebook. Many of us who shared a similar sense of anguish and sorrow began to find a common way of expressing ourselves. My Facebook News Feed began to fill with notifications of friends changing their profile pictures. They were all changing them to the same image: the letters
VT,
the Virginia Tech insignia, placed over a black ribbon. In a sudden spontaneous outburst of emotion, people from across America and many other countries were making a small gesture of solidarity with the victims and against the horrors of gun violence.

In time, the black ribbons faded and people’s profile pictures returned to normal. But I was struck by what I had seen.

Facebook began as a place for trivial and everyday interactions, a place for college kids to Poke one another, post photos of their lunches, and procrastinate instead of study. What began in the aftermath of Virginia Tech showed that Facebook and social networks were transforming into something else, a place not just for personal expression but collective action—and today it’s just one example of what happens when people on the Internet rally behind a cause.

Social media give us all a voice, and at certain incredible moments, we see hundreds, thousands, or millions of people bringing their voices together to form a chorus. As people take a stand and show their support for a cause online, their friends join in, followed by friends of their friends, and so on. This is word of mouth at scale. Together, all those people become a force for change in lives and communities all over the world, for so many different causes, in so many different ways.

Over the past few years, we’ve seen the Internet revolutionize fund-raising for charities and good causes. Every November there is the awesome silliness of “Movember,” when men compete to grow the most ridiculous moustaches possible and then proudly display their whiskers online to raise awareness and funds for the fight against prostate cancer. On our friends’ birthdays, we occasionally see generous souls “donating a birthday” to a charity. And there are many apps devoted to fund-raising, sometimes on a grand scale. An app on Facebook called Causes has connected over a hundred million people with three hundred and fifty thousand causes and raised over $30 million for everything from curing cancer to stopping genocide.

We’ve also seen citizens and consumers rally to change the behavior of powerful governments, corporations, and institutions and to make the tools of communication serve the interests of people who have been historically ignored.

In March 2012, Bettina Siegel, a Houston-based mom and blogger, started a petition on the website Change.org that asked the USDA to stop the use of “lean beef trimmings” as filler in ground beef destined for school meals. Beef trimmings are also known as “pink slime,” something that’s probably not good for kids. Just nine days after the petition was launched, over two hundred thousand people had signed it, and a new public debate had begun over the potential health risks of pink slime. The debate ended when the USDA announced that, starting in the fall, it would offer school districts a choice of beef either with or without the filler.

A single concerned mom started a movement that confounded an entire industry and its army of lobbyists, and she achieved what health activists and celebrity chefs had spent years calling for.

Social media’s role in driving political change is well documented, as discussed in chapter 3. Over the past few years we’ve seen citizens mobilize on an unprecedented scale using social networks, mobile phones, and the Internet, and when people cry out for change today, as much attention is paid to the people on the streets as on the web—and often the former begins with the latter. Witnessing the Arab Spring, Iran’s Green Revolution of 2009, anti-austerity protests in Europe, and the U.S. general election of 2012, we have all seen countless examples of how online action has driven incredible offline outcomes.

Of course, it’s fair to ask whether most of the time changing your profile photo, liking a cause on Facebook, contributing a few dollars to a friend “donating” his or her birthday, or retweeting a nonprofit’s request for money actually does anything, or if it’s just a cop-out form of slacker activism, or “slacktivism.” It’s also fair to ask how widespread online movements really are.

Scientists and researchers have asked these questions. And the data is very clear. The impact of social media is not a myth. Word of mouth at scale has a
really big
scale and creates tangible real-world impact.

During the midterm congressional elections of 2010, UC San Diego researchers and Facebook’s data science team ran a study on how social media affected voter turnout. At Facebook, we already understood the immense power of social suggestion, and as the election approached, we often talked about how a News Feed story saying which of our friends had voted would probably be far more effective in getting Facebook users to the polls than just another boring PSA explaining how it was everyone’s civic duty. I helped create a banner that appeared in the News Feeds of sixty million people on Election Day with a message encouraging them to go out and vote, a clickable “I voted” button, and a list of their friends who had already clicked on the button. In the study’s control group, the users saw a banner with only the go-out-and-vote message and no social information.

After the election, researchers checked publicly available voting records to see who in these groups had actually voted. The results? People who saw the “social” message were about 2 percent more likely to go out and vote than those who saw only the generic message. That might sound small, but those couple of percentage points equates to another approximately 340,000 people. In tight races, or with controversial initiatives on the ballot, those votes might make all the difference.

And in the years since, the power of the Internet to amplify people’s voices has only grown. In March 2013, the U.S. Supreme Court met to begin debating the future of gay marriage. On Monday, March 25, Human Rights Campaign, a prominent LGBT advocacy group, called for people to change their Facebook profile pictures to a pink-on-red equal sign as a show of support for marriage equality during this historic debate. The group posted the image to its Facebook page and invited people to use it.

By the next day, millions of people across America, and across the world, were proudly displaying that image, or some variation of it, on their profiles. When Facebook researchers dug into the data, they found that within twenty-four hours roughly 2.7 million more people in the United States had changed their profile pictures than on a regular day, or about 120 percent more than usual.

This is what happens when people use technology today to stand up for their beliefs. Millions of people stand with them, and the effects can be awe-inspiring.

A study by the Pew Research Center in February 2012 showed that, on average, every post we make on Facebook can potentially reach an audience of over 150,000 people through friends of friends. When you post something online, your voice can echo through the Internet and spark new conversations. All those conversations have the potential to lead to new ideas, and ideas to action. We are the most empowered generation in history. And if you have the power to change the world, why wouldn’t you?

Start Small

So, how exactly can we create change that has a massive impact? How can individuals use technology to create movements that reach thousands or millions of people? I will try to answer that by going back to 2010.

On January 12, 2010, a massive earthquake struck the Caribbean nation of Haiti, just sixteen miles from the capital, Port-au-Prince. In less than a minute, thousands of homes and buildings collapsed, hundreds of thousands of people lost their lives, and millions of people were made homeless.

As news of the disaster began emerging late on January 12, I was a world away—metaphorically and literally. I was standing in the lobby of the palatial Venetian hotel in Las Vegas, attending a Stanford business school event. My husband was at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business at the time, and every year they have a tradition of all the business school students dressing in ’70s costumes and heading to Vegas for one night. There we were, surrounded by people wearing polyester jumpsuits, disco jackets, and comically large lapels, as images from Haiti began to stream in on CNN.

I knew that I had to get home as soon as possible and mobilize my team at Facebook to help with communications. I ducked into a hotel lobby café with Brent and, with two phones and a laptop going simultaneously, we frantically tried to rebook my flights and contact my team.

It was in the middle of that café that I got a call from the White House. (I still get excited saying that. I mean, who does that happen to besides Jack Bauer?)

It was Macon Phillips, the White House director of new media: “Randi, I’m reaching out to all my contacts in Silicon Valley. We need all the major tech companies to help with Haiti. We need Facebook to do something.” The White House was launching a massive relief and recovery effort for Haiti and was trying to mobilize donations and resources from across the United States. They were working with many different partners already, who were planning big online fund-raising drives, but they had a specific vision for using Facebook. “You guys have the most people online, and it’s the only way we’re going to get to a critical mass of people fast. Can you help us with raising awareness about all the different campaigns that are going on?”

Whoa.

I headed to the airport fast. I needed to get back to the office right away. Thankfully, there was in-flight Wi-Fi, so all the way back to San Francisco I was conferencing with my colleague Adam Conner. And by the time I landed, the two of us had sketched out a plan for a Facebook page that could serve as a hub for getting out information about the relief and recovery efforts.

Over the following hours, a lot of people at Facebook worked with me to turn that idea into a reality, working through the night fueled by adrenaline and an urge to do something good. The next morning, we launched the “Global Disaster Relief” page, a clearinghouse of information for individuals, nonprofits, governments, and everyone else involved in the Haiti response, to find out the latest about the relief efforts and how to support them. It was less than twenty-four hours since the earthquake had struck.

By this time, people on Facebook were posting more than fifteen hundred status updates about Haiti every minute, and organizations such as the Red Cross and Oxfam were raising hundreds of thousands of dollars in donations through their own Facebook pages. Using the “Global Disaster Relief” page, we started working to amplify these efforts to a broader audience. Later, we also tried other tactics, organizing awareness-raising online town halls with everyone from the United Nations to Linkin Park and fund-raising with the sale of virtual gifts in the Facebook gift shop. Already, within a day, we were part of a much broader constellation of groups online working to try to help people.

When I think about what makes an effective online social movement, I see an important lesson in that moment. All change
starts small
. The online campaigns for Haiti ended up mobilizing millions of people and dollars in donations and having a huge impact on the lives of those suffering from the tragedy. But none of these efforts started that way. They began with individual phone conversations, e-mails, and messages asking for help, which quickly snowballed into something much larger. No one at Facebook who worked on the “Global Disaster Relief” page had any idea how popular the page would be or how many fans we were going to get. We didn’t care. We knew this was something we wanted to do, so we focused on just launching the page as quickly as possible so that we could start being useful. And in the end, we had an impact.