Machinery of dissent: Exploring the techno-social practices of modern protests

Rudnik, Alesia Article Machinery of dissent: Exploring the techno-social practices of modern protests Internet Policy Review Provided in Cooperation with: Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society (HIIG), Berlin Suggested Citation: Rudnik, Alesia (2024) : Machinery of dissent: Exploring the techno-social practices of modern protests, Internet Policy Review, ISSN 2197-6775, Alexander von Humboldt Institute for Internet and Society, Berlin, Vol. 13, Iss. 4, pp. 1-30, https://doi.org/10.14763/2024.4.1816 This Version is available at: https://hdl.handle.net/10419/312557 Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen: Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. Terms of use: Documents in EconStor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. You are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. If the documents have been made available under an Open Content Licence (especially Creative Commons Licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/de/deed.en Volume 13 | Machinery of dissent: Exploring the techno-social practices of modern protests Alesia Rudnik Karlstad University [email protected] DOI: https://doi.org/10.14763/2024.4.1816 Published: 25 November 2024 Received: 6 February 2024 Accepted: 24 July 2024 Funding: The authors did not receive any funding for this research. Competing Interests: The author has declared that no competing interests exist that have influenced the text. Licence: This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (Germany) which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/de/deed.en Copyright remains with the author(s). Citation: Rudnik, A. (2024). Machinery of dissent: Exploring the techno-social practices of modern protests. Internet Policy Review, 13(4). https://doi.org/10.14763/2024.4.1816 Keywords: Science and technology studies (STS), Labour, Protest, Belarus Abstract: Protest mobilisation and coordination require competences that extend beyond political leadership and communication. Technology, which has become a daily part of humanity, pushes protest leaders to obtain skills in navigating social media to achieve effective communication and leadership. Labour practices behind protest mobilisation are gradually complexifying and require a broadening of our understanding of human actions behind the implementation of technological solutions in the context of political protests. Focusing on the example of the Belarusian protests of 2020, this article examines the human and non-human labour behind the production of protest mobilisation content, protest coordination, and protest reporting. Based on semi-structured interviews with 18 respondents, the paper is the first to examine the practices and routines of Telegram channel editors and moderators, activists, politicians, and marketing specialists. The analysis contributes to our understanding of protest-related labour, which is often unseen and divided between humans and technology, and its consequences for the protest movement. Issue 4 Introduction On 25 August, the owner of the Telegram messaging platform, Pavel Durov, was arrested by the French authorities on accusations of lack of moderation on the platform that provides for an uncontrolled criminal usage of the platform across the world (Mackintosh & Vernon, 2024). Although Telegram has faced criticism regarding its security standards over the last years (Doffman, 2024), the platform’s affordances and structure appealed to many dissidents in autocracies (Rogers, 2020; Akbari & Gabdulhakov, 2019). While the platform does not provide an automatic end-to-end encryption, for several years it was the only messenger with a function of deleting previous messages on the receiver’s and sender’s sides. Additionally, Telegram allows for creation of clients and bots for the Telegram channels, that are friendly to users without developers’ competences (von Arx & Paterson, 2023). For many, a combination of features of social media and a messaging platform made Telegram’s interface user-friendly (Rogers, 2020). Finally, in 2018 Pavel Durov publicly stated that the platform will not comply with the demand of the Russian government to share the data and content of the encrypted messages of Telegram users: “Privacy is not for sale, and human rights should not be compromised out of fear or greed”, wrote Durov on his Telegram channel on 13 April (Durov, 2018). The Belarusian protests in 2020 provide one recent example of an event when these affordances of Telegram and the stance of the platform’s owner impacted the unfolding of the protest episode. In the aftermath of the rigged presidential election in August 2020, political opposition and civil society mobilised Belarusians in a series of large-scale protest manifestations (Kazharski, 2021). A peculiarity of the protests was both their unprecedented scale (Onuch & Sasse, 2023) and the strong role of the Telegram messaging app. During the Belarusian electoral campaign of 2020, for the first time, Telegram took on the functions of mediation, mobilisation, serving as a political movement’s maintenance platform (Wijermars & Lokot, 2022). However, while Telegram is often prescribed a key role in the Belarusian protests’ mobilisation, protest-related tasks of oppositional politicians, activists, and owners of large Telegram channels often remained unseen. This study views protest organisation as labour, which implies the performance of tasks related to mobilisation, obtaining, and sharing information, the coordination of protest-related actions. Labour as a set of tasks constituting work (van der Zande et al., 2019) is often divided between humans and nonhumans by means of delegation of some of the tasks to technology (Johnson, 1988). Adopting the lens of science and technology studies (STS), in particular, the concepts of labour and 2 Internet Policy Review 13(4) | 2024 delegation, this article follows traces of the protest organisers of post-electoral protests in Belarus in 2020. The analysis first discusses protest-related labour performed by protest leaders and practices of delegation of protest-related tasks to technology. It secondly presents a reflection on the opportunities and consequences of high reliance on technological solutions that emerge as humans and technology assemble within the socio-technical network for political protest. Two research questions guide the article: 1. What type of labour was associated with protest organisation at times when technology became a mediating component of the protest network in Belarus in 2020, and what fuelled decisions of protest leaders to delegate protest-related tasks to technology? 2. What consequences emerge as a result of the delegation of protest-related tasks to technology? Analysis of other actors of the network, such as ordinary Belarusians participating in protests, or the Belarusian authorities, – deterring and repressing protest movements – has already been published by several scholars (Mateo, 2022; Chulitskaya & Matonyte, 2024; Greene, 2022; Onuch & Sasse, 2023; Rudnik, 2024). This paper is the first study on Belarus to analyse practices of integration of technology into the labour of protest coordinators, based on analysis of in-depth interviews with key actors involved in protest organisation. By exploring protest-related labour and the division of protest-related tasks between humans and technology during the electoral campaign that merged with post-electoral protest in Belarus, this article seeks to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of how human-technology interactions play out during protests in autocratic states. The study identifies and critically examines automation of protest labour and organisation, contributing to scholarship on human-technology relation in social movements. The article first discusses an STS approach to understanding the labour and delegation that emerge as humans and technology co-construct relationships within a protest network. Secondly, I present the article’s methodological approach to re-assembling the protest network and following the traces of its actants. Thirdly, I discuss the results of 18 interviews with Belarusian protest organisers, alluding to the concepts of labour and delegation. Finally, I conclude with a discussion of consequences of protest-related labour’s delegation to technology. 3 Rudnik Networks, labour, and delegation Knowledge, morality, craft, force, sociability are not properties of humans but of humans accompanied by their retinue of delegated characters. Since each of those delegates ties together part of our social world, it means that studying social relations without the nonhumans is impossible. (Johnson, 1988, p. 310) STS is among the fields with a strong interest in examining what is at stake when humans interact with technology on a daily basis and the effects that their mutual existence produces for social and political life (van Dijck et al., 2018). A shared view among STS scholars suggests that humans and nonhumans interact within various networks assembled under particular circumstances and that both humans and non-humans possess agency, an ability to promote change in another entity or a network in general (Sayes, 2014). Studying social relations implies paying close attention to humans and nonhumans interacting within networks. Networks are understood as chains of relations that emerge as a result of actors’ performances, or actors exercising their agency (Gershon, 2010), and “an actor is always also a network” (Kirsch & Mitchell, 2004, p. 688). In that sense, networks are not stable chains of actors and relations. Rather, it is repeated performances, patterned actions, that grant stability to a network (Gershon, 2010). While, within a network, multiple roles are taken by actors, consciously or unconsciously, most of a network’s nodes become mediators – entities that contribute to potential changes in other actors’ behaviour or processes within networks (Gershon, 2010). Examining what appears to be an actor requires paying attention to whether an object or a person “makes a perceptible difference” (Law & Mol, 2008, p. 58). Adhering to this logic, the protest network examined in this study is understood as an unstable situational or contextual chain in which the actors engaged in protest organisation are seen as having a perceptible impact due to their contribution to the network. Two of the concepts that inform this paper and are closely related to the performances of actors within networks are labour and delegation. Labour as a concept appears throughout various disciplines, from economics to political theory and STS (Acemoglu & Restrepo, 2019; Crawford, 2021; Latour & Woolgar, 1979). Although the interest in labour and work encompasses various aspects, a common foundation for understanding labour is that it refers to “tasks that constitute jobs”, a set of functions, duties, and tasks that require the possession of certain skills and, usually, a workspace, where labour is performed (van der Zande et al., 2019, p. 47). 4 Internet Policy Review 13(4) | 2024 Labour manifests as either manual or cognitive and consists of both routine and non-routine tasks, depending on the workplace (van der Zande et al., 2019, p. 54). Van der Zande et al. analysed the potential of “labour substitution” by technology and argued that, although technologies have the potential for substitution in various types of tasks, they remain limited in providing labour related to “creativity, problem-solving and complex communication” (2019, p. 66). Kirsch and Mitchell (2004) point out that, with industrialisation and the development of technology, “machines both compete and co-operate with workers, deskilling and cheapening much social labour but at the same time maximizing the efficacy of other forms of labour” (p. 697). Crawford addresses labour and its division between human and nonhuman actors, examining the daily work of an Amazon fulfilment centre. In a context where labour is shared between humans and machines while transporting and unpacking goods, humans are not always the most “valuable or trusted components of Amazon’s machine” (Crawford, 2021, p. 55). During times of labour automation, humans often perform roles that give the impression of machines doing all the work. Additionally, human workers have to constantly adapt to how the machinery works, learn new duties, and expand their knowledge. As a result, much labour remains unseen, “downplayed and glossed over” (Crawford, 2021, p. 66). In view of a common understanding of labour and following STS’ interest in the division of labour between humans and technology, this paper treats labour as a set of tasks related to the protests in Belarus during the summer of 2020. Following the traces of networks, actors, and human-material relationships within these networks, scholars such as Mol (1999), Crawford (2021) and Winner (1980) have turned to anthropological methods of observation and the rigorous examination of workspaces, material infrastructures, labour, skills, knowledge, datafication, and automation. What Crawford refers to as labour automation, some other scholars define as delegation. For Latour, delegation implies replacing a human-driven process with a non-human or material solution that minimises the effort, work, or labour involved (Johnson, 1988).1 Latour introduced the concept of delegation in the work “The Sociology of a Door-Closer” (Johnson, 1988). Passing from one room to another requires a human to go through a wall that separates one space from another. Since blowing a hole in the wall every time that a human needs to pass to another room seems impractical, ineffective, and definitely requires a lot of physical effort, humans created the door (Johnson, 1988). For smooth closure and opening, a door has hinges. Latour suggests that the amount of effort and work re1. Bruno Latour wrote “The Sociology of a Door-Closer” under the pseudonym of Jim Johnson. 5 Rudnik quired to pass through the wall without a door with the minimal effort it takes to traverse the wall by pushing a door handle and opening a door. The door as a construction, with hinges and a handle, represents a delegation of labour that a human performs to minimise the effort of passing from one room to another. The hinges also allow the door to close when people forget to do so and, in this way, receives the function of delegation from a doorman, who would otherwise be needed to close the door every time passers-by forget to do so. The cost of installing the hinges appears to be much lower than paying the doorman for this disciplined work (Johnson, 1988). However, no matter how effective the construction of a door-closer is, there will always be humans whose efforts to open the door are insufficient: for example, the elderly or children. This is when the function of a doorholder becomes delegated to the carpet, or a chair holding the door open (Johnson, 1988). The door now possesses competences that it has received from a human, but in turn it disciplines and authorises particular behaviour in a human: gently opening some doors or pulling harder to open others. In Latour’s understanding, the conversion of a significant effort to a minimal one represents a case of delegation. To trace examples of delegation to nonhumans, Latour suggests: “Every time you want to know what a nonhuman does, simply imagine what other humans or other nonhumans would have to do were this character not present” (Johnson, 1988, p. 299). The concepts of labour and delegation open the way for tracing practices of competence transfer from human actors to digital platforms and material artefacts in mobilising, coordinating, and manifesting the Belarusian protests. The ambition to study a social movement and protests by applying the lens of STS is not novel; however, it still appears to be rather underexplored terrain (Breyman et al., 2016). Breyman et al. encourage integrating social movements into the loop of STS, which in turn enables a more nuanced understanding of contemporary movements (2016). STS scholars have shown interest in conceptualising interactions between humans and technology by exploring the agency of human and nonhuman actors (Breuer et al., 2015), examining the mediating role and actorness of platforms as they become an element of sociotechnical networks (Wijermars & Lokot, 2022; van Dijck, 2013). Applying the logic of obtaining knowledge through an empirical investigation of the labour involved in a protest network by following the traces of both the human and nonhuman actants that performed the labour (Law, 2010), this article seeks to broaden our understanding of humans and technology during times of protest, as well as exploring salient and unnoticed practices that render such protest mobilisation and organisation (Sayes, 2014). This approach is not only important in relation to a deeper understanding of the Belarusian uprising of 6 Internet Policy Review 13(4) | 2024 2020, but it is also a contribution to a deeper exploration of human-technology relations in autocracies, the integration of technology into protest movements, as well as the problematisation of automation of labour and practices associated with social movements. Methodology In this article, I aim to trace the labour practices that were associated with protest organisation, as technology became a mediating component of the protest network in Belarus in 2020; and to understand how the consequences of delegation of protest-related tasks to technology can be conceived. Inspired by the methodological tradition of STS described above, I first determined the actors involved in the organisation of protest-related activities by following traces of protest events, social media footprints, and people (Law, 2010). To do so, I drew upon public sources, such as analytical reports and independent media, and information provided during the interviews. After mapping out the network and identifying potentially available respondents, I conducted semi-structured interviews with 18 participants who were related to the organisation, mobilisation, and maintenance of the protest movement in Belarus. Following the aim of exploring protest-related labour practices, I turned to the opposition politicians and their teams, representatives of the electoral and civic initiatives Holas and Honest People, moderators and administrators of Telegram channels that were popular at the time. Eighteen respondents were interviewed for this study in October 2022 and January 2023. The interviews were semi-structured, asking the respondents to reflect upon their tasks, routines, and work tasks during the summer of 2020 related to the active phase of the Belarusian political protests in August 2020 and the preceding electoral campaign in June – July 2020. In addition, the respondents were asked to reflect upon the unfolding of the political campaign, protest coordination and maintenance, security, and safety measures and risks. Most interviews were held offline in Vilnius and Warsaw, where most respondents resided at the time, apart from four respondents who preferred to talk online. Interviews lasted between 55 and 117 minutes and were held in the Belarusian and Russian languages, in which the author is fluent. The interviews were transcribed in the original language and the quotes provided below were translated by the author. As the interviews concerned the sensitive topic of political engagement and as most respondents had been targeted by the Belarusian authorities for pursuing their political engagement, the analysis excludes any identifying characteristics. Additionally, the study was approved by the Swedish Ethics Author7 Rudnik ity. Following the understanding of labour and delegation discussed in the previous section, I analysed the interview materials by tracing all the conveyed and salient protest-related tasks, analytically scrutinising them under several themes, and reflecting on the delegation of functions to technology mentioned by the respondents. Hence, working with the interview materials, I drew upon both participants’ reflections of the work tasks and my own interpretation of salient labour practices performed by the respondents. Following the actors: socio-technical network of the Belarusian protests Belarus is a consolidated autocracy governed by one of the longest ruling autocrats, Aliaksandr Lukashenka (Bosse, 2021). Since 1994, after Lukashenka won the only free and fair election in the country (Bennett, 2011), within the next five years, the country saw a drastic decline in freedom of speech, an increased pressure on independent media, human rights organisations and oppositional elites, as well as increasing ties with Russia followed by Russification of education and state institutions (Rovdo, 2009; Rudnik, 2024). The opposition, represented by the leaders of the Belarusian national movement, made multiple attempts to contest Lukashenka’s political decisions, such as during the 1995 referendum on granting the Russian language the status of the official language, and the 1996 referendum that significantly broadened the president’s powers. By the same time, independent newspapers and radio stations were shut down or had to adapt to the harsh system of state censorship. In 1999-2000s four Belarusians, journalist Zmicer Zavadski, former minister for internal affairs Yury Zakharchanka, oppositional politician Viktar Hanchar, and businessman and oppositional politician Anatol Krasouski, disappeared, for which many public figures blamed Lukashenka. By the time of the Rose and Orange revolution, the Belarusian opposition was marginalised due to limited access to state media, a lack of institutional representation, and a rather narrow political agenda (Rouda, 2009). Consolidated around several leaders, the opposition took a chance to mobilise citizens for the electoral campaign in 2006. Post-electoral protests, that united about 20,000 in central Minsk, resulted in a brutal crackdown: at least 500 Belarusians were detained, along with the two oppositional candidates, while the election was not recognised as free and fair by the international community (de Vogel, 2022). In the 2010 election, the opposition movement was unable to agree on a joint candidate, which resulted in nine alternative candidates on the voting ballot. Just as in 8 Internet Policy Review 13(4) | 2024 For executing such a load of tasks, ideally, we had to have a media holding with 100 employees. However, due to high security stakes, we were only about 10 people. Some of us managed multiple channels at once. This was also due to the fact that Ihar Losik, who administered Belarus Golovnogo Mozga [one of the largest Telegram channels – author] was imprisoned and we had to take over so that the work of the channels didn’t stop. (Editor of four Telegram channels in 2020) Many Belarusians who joined the electoral campaigns had a background in marketing or IT. Honest People’s leader explained that the idea to create the initiative emerged within the network of marketing specialists who believed that they can create, maintain, and popularise a country-wide election monitoring. Similarly, as indicated above in the quote of Holas’ leader, the idea of Holas emerged within the Belarusian IT community. The majority of the electoral initiatives’ core team and thousands of volunteers worked for free, driven by the idea of a short and successful campaign. The representatives of Holas highlighted that, besides working for the initiative for free, the initiative’s leaders invested personal money in creating the alternative voting infrastructure. For the politicians, private business investments became another way to fund their activities, although most of these businesses preferred to remain anonymous due to security risks. Telegram channels’ editors mostly relied on advertisements and some seed funding from businesses and mostly worked overtime, even when the work was paid. Leadership and high engagement of IT and marketing professionals within a protest network explains that at least half of the respondents described the campaign and protest organisation activism as a “working case”, relating to their duties as a service they provided to their customer, the Belarusian society. Thus, the respondents saw themselves as fulfilling their work duties, specified functions and tasks. The electoral initiatives structured their work by creating departments responsible for communication, volunteering, the collection of signatures for candidates, the organisation of electoral rallies, and consultations with security experts. We saw the campaign and forthcoming protests as our working case, where society is a customer. Our media market doesn’t have so many professionals, and therefore almost every talented person was engaged in some of the initiatives. We had a core team of three to five creators, who wrote texts, a couple of people who designed. Our work was organised into departments, with approximately 10 people managing it at top level. The full team was about 40 15 Rudnik people, 100 more coordinators across the country. At first, we engaged thousands of volunteers and later 10,000 were registered as election observers. We expanded and scaled our initiative with thousands of volunteers across the country who were in permanent contact with their managers and administered registration, education and feedback from the observers. (Representative of Honest People initiative) The tasks executed by activists, oppositional politicians, and editors of Telegram channels on any given day varied in size and type, were often spontaneous and required skilful team members who could simultaneously perform several functions: from participating in a discussion on political strategy to making verification calls to members of the initiative groups: “Some of our days were chaotic as I would come to the office and take part in planning which political messages should be communicated by our politicians, organising the structure of our volunteering network and in the evening verifying initiative group members by phone” (Representative of the Babaryka team). This description echoes an STS-understanding of how most of the socio-technical networks are organised: with chaotical and unstable relations and role of network’s members (Gershon, 2010). In an attempt to reassemble protest-related labour practices among the respondents, I asked them to describe their daily routine by providing details of the tasks and functions they undertook and their responsibilities. Below, I analyse protestrelated tasks that illustrate a variety of cognitive, creative, communicative, and organisational routines and ad-hoc duties performed by the respondents in relation to the protests in Belarus during the summer of 2020. Protest-related tasks of protest leaders The maintenance of protests and the organisation of the Belarusian opposition campaign involved numerous tasks that required leadership, marketing, and communication skills as well as political and strategic planning. In particular, relying on the interview materials, I identified the following tasks: facilitation of protestrelated communication; development of strategies and tactics of mobilisation and coordination; framing of protest messages and demands; developing and managing networks of volunteers; organising digital infrastructure of alternative electoral participation. While facilitating protest-related communication, Telegram editors and moderators were also collecting feedback messages from Belarusians on the streets. These 16 Internet Policy Review 13(4) | 2024 messages were anonymously sent to the feedback chatbots, a function available on Telegram. The moderators then verified the information and decided whether to share the updates received to the channels. In this way, a “substitution of labour” of collecting live-updates in one window, allowed Telegram editors and moderators to collect thousands of messages and facilitate protest-related communication via their channels (van der Zande et al., 2019). I can hardly remember how many messages we were getting on the Telegram chatbot. But I think it was thousands per 10 minutes. On 9-11 August, we had no verification at all, we were basically sharing everything we received, every 15 seconds we were getting new messages, so it looked like subtitles to a movie. (Editor of one of the Telegram channels in 2020) What the respondent above calls “subtitles to a movie” resonated with how other interviewed editors and moderators of Telegram channels viewed their work during the most active phase of protests, in August 2020. In a way, the metaphor signifies the precision of the work executed by the editors. Just as subtitles should match the actual words spoken in a movie, the reporting by Telegram channels needed to match the events on the streets of Belarusian cities, covering as many events as possible. While for ordinary Belarusians the experience of using feedback chatbots was perceived as having a relationship with technology (Rudnik, in press), the labour that remained unseen included hours of work to verify information via additional sources, report on ongoing events, as well as based on the analysis of developments on the streets, to propose tactics of protest. The development of strategies and tactics for protest mobilisation, coordination, and communication was another form of protest-related cognitive task that united multiple groups of activists. Four respondents described the process of performing strategic planning related to protests as follows. Politicians, independent media representatives, Telegram channel editors, and political bloggers created a closed Telegram chat for strategic communication related to democratic resistance during the summer of 2020. Between 10 and 20 opinion leaders were constantly discussing what should be communicated to the public, which protest locations should be chosen, or what the topic of a particular manifestation would be. The discussions in this chat, combined with online calls, led to joint strategies regarding protest organisation and communication. For example, one of the Telegram channels’ editors explained that in the chat the members discussed: “which channels would publish information about the upcoming manifestation. In most cases it was Nexta, which then had most subscriptions, and other channels immediately 17 Rudnik reposted this information.” Some editors claimed that they felt the responsibility for protestors was in their hands and therefore cooperated with other editors and social media celebrities in order to secure the safest and most rational demonstration route, or an idea for creatively framing the marches’ messages and slogans. The reflections of the respondents about how exactly their work was organised hint at the sporadic character of protest maintenance labour: “Sometimes on Friday we had no idea where to lead the manifestation on Sunday and what theme should be proposed for a protest” (Editor of one of the Telegram channels). Respondents also highlighted that the framing of protest-related messages and ideas and developing mobilisation strategies, which were often referred to as bottom-up ideas, were mostly generated by politicians, Telegram editors and activists. For example, the initial plan to gather by the polling stations on 9 August at 8pm was generated among the narrow circle of politicians, as highlighted by one of the interviewed oppositional politicians: Many ideas that we think were self-organised, they came from us. For example, the idea to gather by the polling stations at 20.00 came from us. We discussed it among ourselves and sent a request to Telegram channels to distribute this idea. This example somewhat contradicts a common belief about the purely horizontal character of protest mobilisation and coordination in Belarus. In addition, the example highlights the tasks of strategic planning and creative communication performed by the respondents (van der Zande et al., 2019). Respondents recalled the formulation of protest messages, such as creating short slogans and concepts, as their recurring task. Gershon points out that the patterned and recurring activities and performances impact the stabilisation of a network and decrease its chaotic state (2010). Creative cognitive labour (van der Zande et al., 2019) required a specific set of professional skills, as the following story about the organisers of the women’s marches illustrates. Two experienced marketing specialists decided to organise a women’s demonstration that would publicly respond to the violence employed by the police against the protestors on 9-11 August 2020. They agreed upon “the most stereotypical image of anti-violence: females in white dresses with flowers” (one of the organisers of the women’s marches), believing that the police in a patriarchal society would not detain female protestors. Knowledge of marketing strategies, the framing of messages, the functioning of social media algorithms, 18 Internet Policy Review 13(4) | 2024 and the perceptions of society helped them to match their protest proposal with the demands of society, gauged by the leaders via personal experience of protest participation offline and analysis of narratives on the social media. The organisers decided to openly write a call to join these women’s manifestations on Twitter; the message read: “All who want to join in the organising of women’s manifestations, join this Telegram group” (One of the organisers of the women’s marches). Within days, this Telegram group had gathered thousands of participants. Women in this chat discussed the ideas and self-organised the manifestations without any moderation by the initial organisers. We had a closed group but after 12 August women started to share this link to different chats and on Twitter and in just one day there were around 10,000 women. We were in shock, but we realised that we’d hit the vibe of the people. Thousands of women started to generate ideas. (One of the organisers of the women’s marches) Beyond development of the strategies for protests and framing of protest messages, electoral initiatives Holas, Zubr and Honest people, offices of the opposition politicians and Telegram channels were responsible for developing and managing networks of volunteers, assistants, protesters. As the respondents from the electoral initiatives mention, the ambition to engage as many Belarusian citizens as possible into monitoring the election and maintaining the systems of alternative vote count required thousands of volunteers across the country. Honest People’s volunteer networks grew from dozens to thousands of local coordinators just in a few weeks. For Holas, volunteers played a crucial role in verifying registrations on the platforms, some of the voting ballots. In the case of the offices of the politicians, volunteers across the country were responsible for assisting in signatures’ collection for the candidates, as well as organising local campaign meetings. When the electoral phase has merged into the protests, these networks of volunteers became platforms for coordination of the strategies for local protests, sharing useful links, and discussing the political situation. Creation and management of the volunteer networks required work from dozens of leaders, managers, whose main tasks related to verification of wannabe volunteers, education of new volunteers, and collection of information and data. Coordination of the country’s platform for alternative vote count, required organisation of effective digital infrastructure. As Holas respondent indicates, an idea of the founder was quickly supported by many within the IT-sector; the proposed infrastructure required skills of frontend-, and backend developers, designers, man19 Rudnik agers, and many other professionals, to be found within the Belarusian IT-sector. In the end, the Holas team conducted multiple tests of Beta-version of alternative voting, tested multiple possible security breaches, and delivered a final version just weeks before the election. Promotion of Holas as an alternative voting platform was supported by other electoral initiatives, independent media, opposition politicians, Telegram channels, and volunteer networks. The Belarusian protests are often referred to as horizontally organised (Gabowitsch, 2021). Nevertheless, my interviews with activists, politicians, and editors of Telegram channels shed light on various dimensions of power relations that emerged as the protest network unfolded. Decision-making regarding the location and timing of protests, as well as their themes, was primarily organised through the closed Telegram chat that involved between 10 and 20 people at different stages. The editors of Telegram channels, activists, journalists, and political analysts, as well as some politicians, collectively discussed proposals for protest framing, security related to protest organisation, and logistics. As a result, the chats, where protest ideas emerged, involved only a limited number of leading activists among thousands in the protest leadership network. As some respondents illustrated, ideas and flashmobs, which were seen as bottom-up proposals, such as wearing white ribbons on election day as a symbol of support for the opposition, were formulated by particular activists and promoted through digital platforms. Additionally, as Telegram channels became a primary source for live updates on the Belarusian protests, Telegram editors possessed greater power in terms of decision-making. Which information sent through the feedback chatbots by citizens would be published on the channels, which locations and timing for the protests would be selected – these decisions lay in the hands of about 10 people responsible for editing and moderating the largest Telegram channels. Although the Telegram channels’ editors pointed out that Belarusians would not just do anything the channels suggested and would make a lot of decisions upon gathering, all the respondents in this group felt a high degree of responsibility and power in coordinating these large groups of people. Protest organisation in Belarus in 2020 was closely connected to the preceding electoral campaign and implied various forms of labour that often remained unseen. Teams of opposition candidates, electoral monitoring initiatives, and media channels gradually expanded their primary functions to activate protest participation, coordination, and reporting. While organising the protest movement, framing protest demands, or supporting protest participants with electoral monitoring initiatives, the editors of Telegram channels and individual activists combined multi20 Internet Policy Review 13(4) | 2024 ple functions and roles. Often, small teams of people led processes previously unfamiliar to them (Jiang et al., 2022). Protest-related labour included both cognitive and manual tasks, involving both routine activities and ad-hoc duties related to the rapidly developing political situation (van der Zande et al., 2019). Additionally, the organisation and performance of protest-labour implied a tight integration of technology, that during the electoral campaign and the following protest episode acquired functions of the mediator that contributed to optimisation and acceleration of several processes within the protest network (Gershon, 2010). While some of the protest-related tasks were shared between humans and technology, creativity and problem-solving tasks related to framing protest manifestations and making decisions about whether to publish certain information received through the feedback chatbots were primarily executed by human actors within the protest network (van der Zande et al., 2019). In the next section, I examine how the delegation of some of the protest-related tasks to technology can be conceived. Consequences of protest labour delegation to technology To examine the delegation of protest labour technology in more detail, I asked the respondents to reflect upon how exactly they engaged digital platforms and technology into their work. As Latour (1988) had suggested, in order to analyse delegation to technology, I had to imagine what the human would have to do to fulfil the function executed by technology. As every respondent highlighted, protest-related labour was partially shared with, assisted by, or delegated to technology. Below, I rely on examples of human-to-technology delegation of two protest-related tasks outlined above – facilitation of protest-related communication; organising digital infrastructure of alternative electoral participation – to illustrate relations of protest organisers with technology during the protest episode in Belarus in 2020. This illustration allows me to later reflect on the consequences of such delegation. One of the delegation examples regards organising digital infrastructure of alternative electoral participation via the alternative vote platform Holas. Prior to the election, the team of developers suggested that voters register on Holas chatbots on one of the existing messaging platforms, Telegram or Viber. Registration required a phone number for the Belarusians voting inside the country and a submission of a photo of a passport for the Belarusians voting in the embassies, which was verified by the trained neural networks and, in debatable cases, by humans. The respondent from Holas explained that what emerged as an idea to “verify the election” within the IT community, rapidly attracted other actors within the net21 Rudnik work, which among all, was reflected in a number of people registering on Holas chatbots. According to Holas’ founder, one tenth of Belarus’ population and about one sixth of those eligible to vote, registered on the platform prior to the election day. Understanding the interest in the platform, Holas sought ways to recruit more volunteers and organise anonymous digital infrastructure to optimise verification and count of votes. Establishing a functioning alternative vote infrastructure, a decision to delegate such functions as verification and vote count was taken by Holas leaders: “to maintain such a system at the scale and quality we did, we would need over 1,000 people just for the verification of the ballots. Therefore, neural networks, the chatbots, wasn’t just a choice but the only choice”. On election day, voters were to take a picture of their voting ballot. The picture illustrating their vote should later be uploaded to Holas through one of the communication channels, with which the voter had registered prior to the election. After receiving hundreds of thousands of ballot pictures, volunteers had to verify each ballot. Holas representative explained that one of the means to achieve voter security and at the same time verify each submitted vote was a digital infrastructure that engaged neural networks. To perform the verification, neural networks were trained to verify the ballots by identifying a vote for a particular candidate and two signatures from the voting clerks. Despite this, they granted each submitted vote an ID and eliminated any repetitive votes. The respondent clarifies, the repetitive submissions occurred very often as the voters, in an attempt to overcome an internet shutdown, sent their votes multiple times. Later, Holas in cooperation with Zubr collected official voting protocols presented by the polling stations’ managers. They compared the verified votes with the official results reported by the electoral commissions using neural networks. As a result, Holas collected 550,000 pairs of official protocols and citizens’ votes photographed and sent through the chatbots. Together with Zubr and Honest People, Holas shared data on alternative vote results, evidence of electoral fraud and violations in the reports that later served as evidence of electoral fraud in the Belarusian presidential election of 2020 (Voice, 2020). The complexity of the data collection, verification, and analysis required not only the professional skills of marketing and communication, but also an understanding of how technological solutions could be incorporated with regard to users’ security and the accessibility of the alternative voting to various groups of people across the country. Thus, delegation of human functions to technology during the electoral campaign involved the organisation of alternative digital polling stations, the analysis of election protocols, and voting ballots using neural networks and the 22 Internet Policy Review 13(4) | 2024 coordination of data collection through digital registration and photo uploads through Telegram and Viber chatbots. In a nutshell, this can be referred to as the optimisation of protest-related work tasks, – or in Latour’s understanding, minimisation of labour and effort of the humans involved (1988) – which allowed these organisations to cover broader groups of citizens, speed up some processes like the verification of ballots, and increase the accuracy of the vote counting by delegating this task to neural networks. Respondents in this study saw Telegram as the safest means of communication during the protest episode. In addition, the internet shutdown, ordered by the Belarusian authorities in the first days of protests, pushed millions of Belarusians to use Telegram, as it was one of the few platforms accessible via VPN, simultaneously providing for news, mobilisation instructions, and networking (Rudnik, 2024). The second example that illustrates delegation of protest-related tasks to technology concerns the facilitation of protest-related communication via feedback chatbots, created by the owners of mobilisation Telegram channels. Feedback chatbots represented an automated collection of information, where the users, communicating with Telegram bot, pushed buttons with a message pre-written by the Telegram editors, who created a bot, and proceeded further to the window that allowed them to submit photo, video, audio, or text content. On the request of Telegram channels, protestors regularly sent thousands of messages to the Telegram channels’ feedback chatbots that served as a substitution (van der Zande et al., 2019) for information collection on the ground, or reporting from the streets. By delegating information aggregation, Telegram editors simultaneously gained access to thousands of live updates from town squares across the country. This automation broadened the geography of information aggregation and allowed for an increased scale of mediation by technology while relying on a rather small number of people (Gershon, 2010; Latour, 1988). Sometimes the automated collection lagged behind due to the internet shutdown and the need to identify what messages from their chatbots were important, to verify whether they seemed true and, finally, to decide whether they were worth publishing. Verification involved reliance on available sources and communication with editors of other channels (asking whether they had received the same message). This verification required human resources and could not be automated. At the same time, when a decision to publish the verified live update was made, the dissemination of this news reached millions of subscribers to the channels due to the infrastructure of the socio-technical network of Telegram channels, independent media, and local group chats. In this way, the aggregation of live updates and their distribution appeared highly mediated by the Telegram feedback chatbots. This example of dele23 Rudnik gation to technology illustrates the decentralisation of information collection, distributed among human editors and the infrastructure of Telegram, which enabled the simultaneous aggregation of live updates from protests, while preserving the anonymity of the sender. Contrary to the previous protest episodes in Belarusian history, high reliance on alternative platforms of communication was explained not only by the deprivation of any access to state media. Integration of technology into the campaign and protests was driven by the leaders of the electoral initiatives, oppositional politicians, and activists, many of whom, with a background from non-political occupations, had experience in instrumentalising social media in their professional life. In this regard, automation of electoral campaigns, organisation of digital infrastructure for the voters, and branding of political protest was seen as a natural work task for many engaged protest organisers. As a respondent from Viktar Babaryka’s team commented: We focused on social media and we had a team that could provide us with good production materials, we had the best photographs, speechwriters, stylists, designers, lawyers. Because of that we were able to grow the audience quickly, we didn’t have to raise interest from independent media because the political campaign had quickly fired up on social media. On the one hand, delegation of maintenance of protest infrastructure to technology enabled growth of the protest network, broadening the movement’s scope and its geographical outreach (Mateo, 2022). By mediating communication between peer-citizens, politicians, Telegram channels, digital infrastructure afforded the creation of an alternative politics, in which the voices of the independent media, Telegram channels, opposition politicians, and ordinary Belarusians were not directly censored by the state and impacted the broadening of space for alternative voices to be heard (Gershon, 2010). Technology provided platforms for wider coverage, the popularisation of protest-related content and enabled the significant scaling-up of the mobilisation potential of the resistance movement. As one of the respondents explained: “The technology we needed was already out there, people were using it every day, we just needed to come up with a creative way to use it” (Representative of Babaryka team). Finally, the movement’s integration of technology allowed for the broad outreach to international audiences, as the country’s internet was almost fully shut off for the first key days of the protests. On the other hand, high reliance on technology problematised several dimensions 24 Internet Policy Review 13(4) | 2024