Spreading a Message One Facebook Friend at a Time

Just a few years ago, Facebook was still the place to keep tabs on next weekend’s party line-up or to find out what your friend’s cousin ate for dinner last night.  For some it still serves such “social networking” purposes.  But for others, it is a tool, a means through which to deliver a message to thousands of people in a just a few clicks.  A small but active non-profit organization in Israel, Breaking the Silence, has just this year come to realize and make use of Facebook, and it has seen its message spread because of it.  

Breaking the Silence is an organization run by veteran Israeli soldiers who have served in the occupied Palestinian territories over the past ten years.  The goal of the organization, with a staff of ten, is to “bridge the gap of information between what the soldiers see, experience, and participate in during their service, and what the Israeli public is aware of,” explains Avital Aboody, a current staff-member and New Israel Fund/Shatil Social Justice Fellow.  It doesn’t take much to realize that this organization probably does not have a ton of support in its home country, as a majority of Israelis have shifted to a more conservative political stance since the second Intifada began in 2001. 

The staff of Breaking the Silence claims that they are not particularly media savvy and not unique in any way with regard to utilizing social media tools.  According to Aboody, the “primary goal of using the website is reach as many people as possible and to enhance our ability to raise widespread awareness.”  While most non-profits prioritize raising funds through their websites, Breaking the Silence is not all that concerned about funds, which it receives from various foundations and donor governments.  The organization’s goals, instead, are “increased awareness and transparency between the public and the military,” says Aboody, and Facebook, in this light, has lately been a key to their success.

With a Facebook group and profile in place, Breaking the Silence has been able to “maximize our ability to communicate with our allies around the world,” says Aboody.  So far, she exclaims, joining Facebook “has been very very successful and has allowed us to attract a lot of new people to our events,” including tours of the occupied territories and lectures about the daily actions of the Israeli military.

As a politically active organization in a region of the world where tensions are deep and war has occurred every decade since the late 1940s, Breaking the Silence must rely heavily on its ability to find remote allies to strengthen its power base at home. Aboody explains how the organization has recently faced “efforts by the government and an NGO-monitoring organization to censor our information to keep us from ‘breaking our silence,’ but media tools have been helpful because we can quickly elicit the support of like-minded groups who are willing to stand behind us and vouch for our legitimacy.”  As they see it, they can’t be all over the world at all times with a staff of their size, but with Facebook they can easily make their message seen and heard by many more people than they were capable of reaching beforehand.      

It may sound like the days of “grassroots” advocacy (picketing for hours and staking out on the streets for days to get petitions signed) are just about over.  Do activists no longer see the value of face-to-face interactions, opting instead for YouTube, Facebook, or Blogspot to engage the public with their message?  Are they spending more of their time navigating the Web than they are actually changing the world?  While this might appear to be the case for Breaking the Silence, the organization’s staff-members do not report feeling like they spend more, or much, of their time for that matter navigating social media sites.  Because it’s so easy to keep up the Facebook group page and profile, and the website designer manages the website, most of the staff are spending the majority of their time continuing the one-on-one interactions with people on the ground.  They continue to take people on tours of the territories, hold lecture series, and interview veteran soldiers about their years in the Israeli Defense Forces. 

The internet is just part of the process of engaging with the public; it is not the process itself.  If anything, for the passionate employees of non-profit organizations who want to make the world a better place, social networking sites like Facebook are simply a more efficient and effective way of continuing the legacy of grassroots advocacy and inching that much closer to their desired goals, and they still get to find out this weekend’s party line-up and what their friend’s cousin ate for breakfast while they’re at it.

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