Protests this year in Tunisia, Egypt and elsewhere have highlighted Facebook’s potential for activism. After all, if the social network were a country, it would the world’s third largest. So if you’re trying to gather a critical mass around an issue it makes a lot of sense to be there.
Using the platform effectively, however, means using it cautiously. This is especially true in repressive environments like Syria, where authorities are currently arresting activists for subversive social media activity. The below tips are relevant for anyone and everyone looking to organize online for social or political change.
1. Take Care of Your Information
Your content and your contacts are on Facebook’s servers; not yours. If your account gets deactivated by mistake or because you violated the company’s Terms of Service, you’ll lose all of this information unless it’s backed up.
Under Account Settings go to: “Download your information,” then “Learn more,” and then click on the download button. You can also get an Adobe Air application called SocialSafe or a Firefox extension called Archive Facebook which downloads your profile, social graph and photos onto your hard drive.
These apps, however, will not download your contacts, so save those somewhere else manually. It’s a tactic used by Egyptian activists running the We Are All Khaled Said page in the weeks before Internet access there was shut off.
2. Use HTTPS
Regular old HTTP (what you likely see right now in the address bar at the top left of your web...
