The “dead souls” of online activism campaigns

A short story in the FT highlights a campaign currently unfolding in Saudi Arabia to ban men from serving as sales assistants in the country’s lingerie shops. What makes the FT piece different from several other accounts of this campaign (likes this one or this one) is that it is actually written in the first voice: as told to an FT correspondent by Reem Assad, the campaign’s organizer and a lecturer in banking and finance at a Saudi college. It all sounds very inspirational:

…in the area of underwear sales, I decided it was time for change. I love my country dearly but we find ourselves in some paradoxical, illogical situations. A woman, even if her hands are covered, can be forced to call on a male shop assistant to look at lacy underwear or G-strings. Sometimes, the assistant will look at her to try and gauge what size she needs. It doesn’t make sense. I find it extremely unpleasant. Women who can afford to, buy their underwear abroad. Marks & Spencer in Marble Arch has become a Saudi colony.

But, of course, my campaign cannot be political. If I started trying to do that, I could find myself in all kinds of trouble. I can’t confront government ministries.

So I went online and began a Facebook and e-mail campaign. It was slow to take off – I only had 20 supporters in the first day. But by the end of last year, I decided to push it. I contacted the dean of Dar al-Hekma women’s college, where I lecture in banking and finance, and asked if she would help. She told me that she would provide training in retail skills to 200 women in the Jeddah region. Together, we then announced the launch of the campaign through the college. Online we now have half-a-million supporters.

Now, does anyone else find this last number very implausible? I don’t have the slightest desire to challenge the importance of this campaign (it has my full support), but let’s just put this 500k number in perspective and compare it to some other campaigns on Facebook. So,  "Save the Children of Africa" has 375K+ members while "Fight AIDs" has 416K+ members; to the chagrin of all human rights workers wolrwide, a campaign to protect  Swedish underwear models from foreign competition beats them all with 630K+ members.

As this last example reveals, there are exceptions : some obscure campaigns do get a lot of members simply for the virality of their message (but most of these campaigns also tend to be about very shallow issues – the Swedish example is a case in point here). That said, there are usually at least two or three campaigns with similar names, so the total number for those fighting AIDS on Facebook is probably higher than 416K+. 

So I’ve looked up Reem Saad’s campaign on Facebook; it was relatively hard to find – I actually had to turn to Google to locate it-  since its name and description are in Arabic (which means that many other potential members faced the same challenge). At the time of writing it has precisely 2,056 members – a far cry from the 500,000 mentioned in the FT piece.

Additional research has revealed that there were other campaign-related sites – virtually all of them in Arabic – they are probably the onesl harboring these 498,000 "dead souls" (to borrow an expression from Gogol). But it could also be that Assad simply used some different metrics to arrive that number – for example, # of visitors to the Facebook group – to measure the # of online supporters. I am curious how she also managed to avoid double-counting of those who signed local petitions in Arabic circulating on Saudi web-sites and those who joined the Facebook group; I am sure these two groups overlapped to a great extent…

The key question for me in this story is whether such deflation of "online support" is a bad or a good thing. It’s certainly good in terms of stimulating media attention to the cause – everyone wants to cover a campaign that has 500k members in it – but I also think it’s a bit disingenious to present everyone who ever clicked on your web-site as your hardcore supporter….