Social Media Helps To Mobilise The Masses

Ben Paige has never done this before. "It's a bit unnerving, a bit awkward" he admits, but squares his shoulders and politely stops the man walking towards us with the question; "Excuse me, are you concerned about the NHS? Would you sign our petition?"

The man ducks his head away and walks faster, and the next passerby does the same. Paige tries again with a young couple who come along next; the mother, pushing their bright-eyed six-month-old daughter, is focusing on getting past us, but the young man stops and says: "Yeah, we'll sign it." He reaches for the pen and starts filling in his details, telling us: "I saw your friend back there with the placard and wanted to sign straight away. We were talking about this the other day, and I just think it's plain wrong what the government is doing." He hands the petition and pen back and gestures down at his daughter. "It's her future, isn't it."

Paige, 35, is a care worker, and was never particularly politically active. "I used to sit in the pub and moan, go on long self-righteous rants but never actually do anything, and I just got really sick of it," he says. But five months ago, infuriated by what he was hearing from the coalition government, Paige did a search on Facebook for "anti-cuts group" and signed up for half a dozen. A couple of weeks ago, the Brighton Stop the Cuts Coalition sent him a message asking for volunteers to spend a day gathering signatures for a petition.

Now, he is one of thousands of people across the country who have, in the last few years, found themselves unexpectedly mobilising in a whole new way.

Linda Butcher, chief executive of the Sheila McKechnie Foundation (SMK) charity, which yesterday celebrated the sixth anniversary of its awards for campaigners, believes there is a growing culture of campaigning. "I look at some of the campaigns coming in now, and I think would this person have been campaigning five years ago? Something has really altered," she says.

Creativity and energy

Since SMK was set up in 2005 following the death of high-profile campaigner Sheila McKechnie, who led Shelter and the Consumer Association, the campaigning landscape has altered beyond recognition. Climate change has roared up the agenda, thanks in part to the creativity and energy of environmental activists who were willing to be both outrageous and funny in their grabs for headlines. The campaigns that followed got the UK talking about both the environment and about activism, and veteran green campaigner John Stewart believes they allowed people to see how effective campaigning could be in stopping projects such as the power station at Kingsnorth and a third runway at Heathrow.

Equally significantly, web 2.0 gave birth to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter, described by commentator Will Hutton as a "new architecture … which allows people to connect with each other in revolutionary ways." Activists have grabbed it with both hands, using Facebook and Twitter to emit callouts for people to meet at a certain place to protest. Only this month, it was used to bring together strange bedfellows such as anarchists and Travellers to try to protect the Traveller community at Dale Farm, Essex, from eviction.

Richard, a leading direct action campaigner, says: "Web 2.0 is great if you've got an emergency protest; you can get something out very quickly." But he adds: "We managed pretty well before it. It's not everything. But it is great for speed."

Alison Smith, one of last year's SMK winners, uses social media through her website Pesky People to enforce access for disabled people. In May, for example, Samantha C – who is partially sighted – wrote a blog for Pesky People about her visit to the BBC's Doctor Who Experience, where staff, despite her efforts to contact them in advance and inquire about accessibility, had been muddled, patronising, and even downright rude, she says. "I expected the Doctor Who Experience to get it wrong, accessibility wise. Call me a cynic, but we learn from previous experiences. What I didn't expect was to be treated in such an invalidating, rude, condescending and defensive manner," she wrote, finishing off with a list of recommended changes. Smith posted the blog, and then tweeted widely about it.

Within hours it had received hundreds of hits, and a few days later the BBC was in contact, promising to work with Pesky People to revise its disability awareness training. Smith says: "Social media is so important for disabled people because it opens doors and gives us a voice, it reduces our isolation. Collectively we can come together and be listened to. It's visual and instant and reaches a mass audience quickly."

More control

Jackie Schneider, a former SMK winner for her effective campaigning to improve school food, points out that social media also gives small groups far more control over their message. "You don't have to spend hours begging to use a photocopier, or if your local paper won't run a piece, you can just write your own. I recently got involved in a new, local campaign to save one of our playing fields and we got the word out with Twitter incredibly quickly."

All campaigners warn, however, against confusing the tools with the campaign; social media is never a substitute for human contact. "Social media is great but you can't beat a packed room for democracy," says Neil Jameson, founding executive director of Citizens UK.

Perhaps the most significant development in campaigning has been the mushrooming of the anti-cuts movement; much of it inspired by UK Uncut, which came to public attention last autumn after a spate of sit-ins in high street stores. Brighton Stop the Cuts Coalition brings together 60 groups ranging from local unions to smaller groups such as the Brighton Benefits Campaign, a pensioners' forum, a campaign around the postal service, and Queer Mutiny Brighton.

"We called a meeting with the local unions last year and it was obvious that there was a lot of support for a coalition," says Peter Knight, the National Union of Journalists' delegate who worked with the local trades union council on the initial meetings. "We had a launch meeting in September 2010 and it was packed out. We set up the Facebook page and the website, which draws more and more people in, and we have a delegates' meeting every month or so, with 60 different local unions and campaigns sending along members. We organise demonstrations and petitions on issues ranging from the closure of a local nursery – which we got stopped – to opposing the privatisation of the NHS. Fundamentally, what we all have in common is that we are absolutely opposed to the cuts."

Hundreds of similar groups continue to spring up across the UK, bringing together trade union groups with people who have never campaigned before but, like Paige, have felt forced to act because of their opposition to government policy.

Butcher says: "UK Uncut showed how campaigners could use social media to go from 0 to 60 in a few seconds. [It] is allowing people to network and liaise in a way that would have been infinitely harder – even impossible – 10 years ago."