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Zeynep Tufekci

Summary

Zeynep Tufekci is a Turkish-American sociologist and professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; author of Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (2017), in which she argued that digitally-networked movements can mobilise large numbers quickly but tend to lack the durable organisational infrastructure — leader development, decision-making protocols, internal communication channels — that mass movements need to translate mobilisation into durable political change.

Key idea in this wiki

  • The “scales fast, structurally fragile” thesis is the analytical anchor the wiki’s distributed-organizing and civic-tech pages build on when discussing the limits of purely networked mobilisation [source: tufekci-twitter-teargas].
  • The broadcast-power vs coordination-power distinction Tufekci draws is the wiki’s primary analytical lens for the fragility-of-networked-movements discussion [source: tufekci-twitter-teargas].
  • The networked-movements concept page cites Tufekci’s work as the canonical contemporary academic treatment; the wiki applies the same lens in digital-organizing, networked-movements, and secure-messaging concept pages.
  • Tufekci’s Twitter and Tear Gas pairs with the thinkers/heimans-timms new power analysis: new power scales faster, but the organisational fragility Tufekci identifies is what new-power movements must address.

Why campaigners read her

Campaigners read Zeynep Tufekci because Twitter and Tear Gas (2017) identifies the most-cited fragility of the post-2010 networked-movement model: digitally-networked movements can mobilise large numbers fast — a million marchers in a week — but they tend to lack the durable organisational infrastructure (leader development, decision-making protocols, internal communication channels) that translate mobilisation into durable political change [source: tufekci-twitter-teargas]. The wiki applies the scales fast, structurally fragile thesis in distributed-organizing, civic-tech, and networked-movements. The broadcast-power vs coordination-power distinction is the wiki’s primary working test for whether a movement’s tools are mobilising or organising — a test that becomes operational in digital-organizing and secure-messaging design decisions. The wiki pairs Tufekci with heimans-timms as the contemporary networked-movement analytical pair — new power describes what scales, fragility describes what does not — and treats distributed-organizing as the practitioner’s working answer.

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Open Questions

  • The broadcast-vs-coordination power distinction has been empirically contested since 2017; the wiki treats it as a useful analytical frame rather than as a settled empirical claim.

Sources & verification

  • [twitter-and-tear-gas](sourcing target — source page pending) — primary work, link-only
  • [tufekci-civil-resistance](sourcing target — source page pending) — secondary reference

Last verified: 2026-07-03