It’s been almost two weeks since Air Force One lifted off from Pittsburgh International Airport and signaled the end of the G-20 summit here.
Supporters and critics will debate the economic impact of the summit on this great (non-capital) city for months and years to come, but far more interesting to me are the public relations lessons. Over the next few weeks, I’ll be sharing several key PR learnings from the ground-level perspective of an international summit.
A few days ago, though, one issue popped up in the news that wasn’t on my list. It’s important enough that it deserves first billing: Two anarchists arrested for using Twitter to organize protests against the G-20.
Personally, I’m struck more by the fact that anarchists organize than I am by their use of Twitter. Nonetheless, this use of Twitter has stirred a raft of free speech discussions because, as the conventional wisdom has it, the Internet is some sort of democracy and Twitter is a tool for democracy (see Twitter and the elections earlier this year in Iran).
Since the disruptions of the G-20 were minimal and the harm to Pittsburgh businesses directly caused by anarchist activity was negligible compared to previous gatherings, it seems the goal of the anarchist organizing failed (something I’ll blog about later as public relations and communication played a key role in that). It may well be that the Twitter tempest is the most prominent legacy of the G-20 protests in Pittsburgh.
There are plenty of examples of Twitter use during the G-20 that would arouse little concern for democracy or free speech. For example, we helped one of our clients, Regency Global Transportation, Ltd., debut its Twitter identity, @regencytrans, as a public service during the G-20. The executive transportation company drove about six delegations during the summit and its drivers were in the thick of traffic conditions that local residents needed to know about to better plan their commutes and travels as security considerations closed roads and created temporary traffic snafus. The Twitter identity went from 2 to 200 followers overnight and gained some nice media coverage.
Given what we saw in Iran and some of the unusual uses of Twitter that have already made news around the world, I’m not surprised by the use of Twitter to guide a street protest or to monitor the movements of a police force during the G-20 in Pittsburgh.
I am most curious about the direction of the free speech debate. Is this going to be another homeland security issue of the kind that led to the passage of The Patriot Act, which gave law enforcement broad new powers for electronic eavesdropping?
Or is this, instead, a free speech issue more along the lines of Schenck v. United States, the case in which the late Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. wrote a majority opinion that concluded it was illegal to pass out flyers that opposed the draft during World War I because that was not free speech but “a clear and present danger” to the future of the nation as it recruited troops to fight the war.
This is the opinion often misquoted as concluding that you can’t shout fire in a crowded theater. What Holmes actually wrote is that “The most stringent protection of free speech would not protect a man falsely shouting fire in a theater and causing a panic. […] The question in every case is whether the words used are used in such circumstances and are of such a nature as to create a clear and present danger that they will bring about the substantive evils that Congress has a right to prevent.”
So would the use of Twitter to organize anarchist protests against the United States and its participation in the G-20 meet this test? Given the history of violence and disruption from previous G-20 protests (and from the local community’s fear of such disruption this time), it’s clear that a majority of those in Pittsburgh saw the protests as a threat to civil order if not the state of the union.
I am no legal scholar but my experience in journalism and public relations tells me that important social issues are often settled in our society, for all practical purposes, long before they are settled in a court of law.
So how will this case affect the actual use of more “outlandish” uses of Twitter for free speech purposes? Will it embolden others to use Twitter to push the civil disobedience envelope? What about terrorist groups? Does anyone doubt that Al Qaeda uses Twitter? Or that the National Security Agency or other government bodies monitor that use?
Will this free-speech case cross the divide into popular commerce and culture and cause guerrilla marketing and PR firms who might have plans for “cute” TweetUps or related Twitter uses to pause and pull back? Let’s not forget the experience of the Boston guerrilla marketing firm a few years ago whose placement of robotic toys around town was misinterpreted as a terrorist act. Will law enforcement officers be reading Twitter now with the same sensibilities, concerned that the newest social media tool can be employed as a threat to the freedom they are sworn to protect?
The next several months will give us an indication but not a conclusion. If there’s anything that the rise and relative fall of tools such as Friendster has taught us, it’s that the arc of social media is hardly predictable and often much shorter than even our digital age can comprehend.
So this is the most intriguing legacy of the anarchists’ visit to Pittsburgh: Can Twitter, which is merely a tool, though a fascinating one at that, become the next battleground to test the limits of free speech as it applies to what post 9/11 America considers a potential terrorist threat? Or is it, to follow the 80-year-old logic of Justice Holmes, the test of what defines a clear and present danger to freedom?
The answer will be found at Twitter.com in the months to come. And perhaps the most profound aspect of the process will be the public nature of the debate. Anyone, anywhere in the world (including at the NSA) will be able to search, monitor, tweet and retweet as the conversation evolves. I’ll be among those participating and I hope you will be too.
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Paul Furiga is president and CEO of WordWrite Communications.
