People Use Social Networking to Fight Violence, Extremism
New York conference will bring together international youth groups


By Meghan Loftus


Washington — Oscar Morales decided he had had enough.

Morales, like many other Colombians, had been following the news in late 2007 that three hostages held by the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia, known by the Spanish acronym FARC, were to be released on December 24. According to media reports, while two were released, the FARC was lying about the whereabouts of the third hostage, a 3-year-old boy.

It turned out the boy no longer was in FARC captivity; he had been abandoned by the group and was in foster care in Bogota.

“It caused enormous frustration and rage,” Morales said. “We felt like it was a slap in the face. It was the drop that filled the glass of water.”

So Morales decided to take action. “I felt the need to do something in my own space,” he said. A user of Facebook.com, he created a group on the social networking site in early January 2008 called Un Millón de Voces Contra las FARC (One Million Voices Against the FARC). He urged other Facebook users to stand up and let their voices be heard.

So Morales decided to take action. “I felt the need to do something in my own space,” he said. A user of Facebook.com, he created a group on the social networking site in early January 2008 called Un Millón de Voces Contra las FARC (One Million Voices Against the FARC). He urged other Facebook users to stand up and let their voices be heard.

“We cannot keep bearing the cruelties and the lies and all this terrorism,” he recalled thinking at the time.

Morales couldn’t have imagined the response. By his count, in 12 hours there were 1,500 members of the group; the following day, 4,000 people; and by the third day, 10,000 people had joined.

“The discussion board was really boiling with proposals and ideas for converting this growing movement into something real,” he said. “So the third day we elaborated a proposal to protest in the streets, outside the boundaries of the Internet, to make it real.”

The group decided to give itself a month to organize the protest. About five dedicated protesters volunteered to serve as a central organizing committee. In a few days, they had found 40 people willing to serve as coordinators in more than 50 cities. Meanwhile, the group’s size had swelled to 150,000.

Morales, who is a Web developer, created a Web site dedicated to the march so the media could see what the group was doing. The group also leveraged other technologies like blogs and discussion boards to spread their message.

Though the growth of the movement sprang from new media, Morales knew that traditional media, such as newspapers and television, would play a crucial role in spreading the news to the rest of Colombia and the international community.

The media “were marveled to discover that young people with no prior experience and no political interests were forcing this protest to happen,” Morales said. “They were even more marveled that this was being [done] through Facebook and technology.”

But even the best-laid plans could not have prepared Morales and other organizers for what to expect. “We came to February 4 without knowing for sure what was going to happen. We didn’t have any way to calculate how big it was going to be,” Morales said.

That day, 12 million people in almost 200 cities in 40 countries protested the FARC. “We couldn’t believe the solidarity,” Morales said.

As for the protesting and organizing, Morales said the experience was beyond words. “It is not describable,” he said. As a field organizer for Barranquilla, he thought he’d be leading a crowd of 10,000; on February 4, Morales estimated that 300,000 people were there. “I was really nervous and really excited about doing this,” Morales said. “I had to scream over the microphone.”

“We knew that this whole protest would be a very big knock down for FARC, politically speaking and ideologically speaking,” he said. “Before February 4, they believed they had some kind of popular support. What we did was to prove mathematically that Colombia does not support FARC.”

The marches have provoked thousands of demobilizations, or desertions, from the FARC. A second march was held July 20, Colombia’s independence day, to celebrate the release of more hostages from FARC captivity, including former presidential candidate Ingrid Betancourt.

HARNESSING SOCIAL NETWORKING TO STOP VIOLENCE

From December 3 to December 5, Morales and people from 16 other international organizations that have an online presence in combating violence and extremism will gather at the Alliance of Youth Movements Summit in New York City to share their experiences.

Jared Cohen, a member of the secretary of state’s policy planning staff who has written extensively about youth and technology, said in an America.gov webchat that the aim of the Alliance of Youth Movements is to look at how groups like Un Millón de Voces Contra las FARC have successfully used online space as a tool against violence. (See “U.S. Official Discusses Alliance of Youth Movements Summit.”)

“Online, mobile, and digital media offer tools that can be leveraged for freedom of assembly and freedom of speech,” Cohen said. “They allow for the free flow of information, critical thinking, and opportunities for individuals to reach beyond those in their immediate circle of contacts.”

The conference, held at Columbia University Law School, will bring together American private and public-sector partners including the U.S. Department of State, Columbia University, Facebook, Google, the MTV cable network, AT&T Inc., Howcast Media Inc., and Access 360 Media.

At the end of the conference, a manual will be published online at Howcast for other groups that want to build a youth empowerment movement against violence that harnesses the Web.

“We feel that around the world, young people are using the Internet to push back against violence in a new way, using social networking, convening large groups to have conversations, basically, to share information,” said James K. Glassman, U.S. under secretary of state for public affairs and public diplomacy. “We think that the technology that exists today is on our side; it’s not on the extremists’ side.”

And as Oscar Morales and 12 million others proved in February, sometimes the most powerful tool isn’t the technology used to deliver the message, but the message itself. “We are not the army; we are not using weapons,” Morales said. “We are just the voice of society.”

More information is available on the Facebook group Un Millón de Voces Contra las FARC and on a Web site run by the organization.