‘You knew that history was taking place’
Social media fueled Act 10 protests, set stage for future movements
With just three letters, state Sen. Lena Taylor shook the state.
That was Feb. 17, 2011, the day the Wisconsin Senate was scheduled to vote on then-Gov. Scott Walker’s proposal to all but end collective bargaining for most of the state’s public workers.
But the 14 members of the Senate Democratic caucus were nowhere to be found.
That’s when Taylor posted “brb,” shorthand for “be right back,” on Facebook.
Spoiler alert: Neither she nor the state’s other Democratic senators would be right back. They were instead spotted at the Clock Tower Resort and Conference Center in Rockford, Illinois, and spent most of the next month in Illinois trying to block a vote on the Republican governor’s bill by preventing a quorum.
Taylor said she had no idea her post would go viral.
“We didn’t know what we were jumping into at that moment,” Taylor said in an interview with the Journal Sentinel. “No idea. No idea that we would start getting donations from across the world. No idea that people from other countries would be like, ‘We stand with Wisconsin legislators.’ I mean, no idea.”
The decision by Senate Democrats, dubbed the “Fab 14” by supporters, to skip town was just one of many unprecedented developments during the fight over Walker’s plan. The bill, now known as Act 10, brought tens of thousands — sometimes 100,000 protesters or more — to the Capitol in Madison. Many brought signs. Some brought vuvuzelas, drums and bagpipes. Others brought sleeping bags or inflatable mattresses and occupied the rotunda and halls of the statehouse.
Another groundbreaking development during the Act 10 battle: the use of social media during the 2011 Wisconsin protests for sharing information in real time and using it as a tool for mobilizing.
In the 10 years since Act 10, the use of social media in politics and protests has become the norm. But back then, social media was in its relative infancy. Facebook and Twitter were both less than 10 years old, and many still associated Twitter with events like South by Southwest and the World Cup rather than political movements.
Taylor credited Facebook and Twitter with improving the ability “to communicate with people about what was going on.”
“If it was not for Facebook, and of course the media — you know, oldfashioned media — we would have just been some people that left to deny quorum. And nobody would have hardly known what was going on,” Taylor said. “The fact that social media exists the way that it does for us is what created an opportunity that had not really existed for us like this, I think, ever before.”
‘Real-time mobilization’
Labor organizer Peter Rickman wasn’t sure what was going to happen, or how many people would actually show up, for the Valentine’s Day protest planned just days after Walker’s proposal first became public.
“To this day, I will never forget the feeling I had walking up State Street before everybody gathered,” Rickman said. “And feeling like my heart was basically in my knees or below. It was just sort of like, ‘Oh God, what is all this going to be like?’ And then people showed up unasked.”
At the time, Rickman was an officer with the Teaching Assistants Association, a graduate student employee union formed at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He and other TAA leaders initially had been planning to deliver valentines to the governor’s office to protest cuts to the university. Then Walker unveiled his anti-collective bargaining bill and organizers unanimously agreed to overhaul the event to also address workers’ rights, Rickman said.
The Valentine’s Day protest drew more than 1,000 people, many of whom were UW-Madison students, and helped launch what would become the largest and most sustained protests at the state Capitol in Wisconsin history. The protests grew by thousands, then tens of thousands, as a broad range of people — including teachers, nurses, students and retirees — filled the statehouse and Capitol Square.
“The tools of social media at the time provided a medium for real-time mobilization,” Rickman said.
He stressed that organizers on the UW-Madison campus already had spent the previous two years trying to build an “anti-austerity front” among blue-collar workers, faculty and academic staff, undergraduates and the TAA.
“The organizing work had been done prior to that, so that mobilizing through social media could actually work,” Rickman said.
He added that tools like Facebook and Twitter allowed activists to reach a wide array of people.
Wisconsin wasn’t the only place in early 2011 witnessing massive protests. Anti-government protests were spreading through much of the Arab world, and the mobilizing done over social media was partly credited for fueling what came to be known as Arab Spring.
“I think that was in the minds of a lot of people,” said Rickman, who now serves as president for the Milwaukee Area Service and Hospitality Workers Organization.
There were so many comparisons between Wisconsin’s 2011 protests and Arab Spring that “The Daily Show” brought a camel to Capitol Square. It didn’t go well — the camel slipped, got tangled in a fence and fell down on the ice.
Randy Bryce, then a union ironworker, said he and other organizers heavily relied on Facebook during that time to plan protests and build networks.
“We used Facebook to organize everything that was going on,” he said. “And then that grew to a network, so that whenever Governor Walker traveled someplace, we would find people wherever he was going that would meet him and protest.”
Bryce, who also served as the political coordinator for the ironworkers, said he helped organize a protest in Horicon on Feb. 13, just days after Walker’s proposal became public.
“We had like 250 people show up and I thought that that was a big deal,” said Bryce, who ran for Congress two years ago but lost to U.S. Rep. Bryan Steil.
Bryce, a Racine resident, became a frequent visitor to Madison, where the Capitol protests were quickly growing.
“It was incredible,” he said. “You knew that history was taking place.”
‘Desperate to get information’
It seemed like it was going to be a quiet night.
With Wisconsin’s Democratic senators still holed up in Illinois, many thought there was little that Republican senators could do to advance Walker’s bill. The crowd of protesters who’d packed the statehouse for several weeks had thinned.
That’s when the Capitol press corps heard Republicans heading back to the Senate floor, thanks in part to the oldfashioned “squawk box” that broadcasts goings-on in the chamber directly to the Capitol pressroom. One skeptical GOP senator quietly told reporters they were going to try to “cram” the proposal through that night.
As with so many of the fast-moving developments of early 2011 after Walker “dropped the bomb,” reporters took to Twitter to report the news. The reaction from bill opponents was intense and immediate. Their message: Get to the Capitol. Now.
Within minutes, protesters — some carrying sleeping bags — could be seen rushing toward the state Capitol.
That was March 9, 2011, the night Republicans advanced Walker’s measure by stripping out the fiscal measures and passing it through what’s known as a conference committee.
There was only a two-hour window between the committee and the floor votes, giving opponents a small amount of time to get to the Capitol. But that didn’t stop people from arriving by the thousands and filling the statehouse with thunderous chants of opposition as GOP senators passed the bill.
So many protesters packed the halls of the Capitol that night that police officers took GOP senators out of the building through an underground tunnel. From there, a city bus — obtained by then-Capitol Police Chief Charles Tubbs — whisked them away.
It was a night that showed how seismically Wisconsin politics, organizing and the nature of news had changed. No one waited for that night’s newscast or tomorrow’s newspaper. News came as it happened, in real time, on smartphones. The virtual messages on places like Twitter and Facebook led to real-life action at lightning speed.
State Sen. Kelda Roys, a Madison Democrat who was then a member of the state Assembly, said she’d already been using Facebook to distribute information to constituents, but during Act 10 started using it to provide real-time updates, especially while the Capitol was occupied by protesters.
“I remember doing a lot of Facebook videos,” she said. “I’d be in the Capitol and I’d be trying to show people what it was like, and what was happening, for all of the people who were outside and couldn’t get in. And for people who were watching around the country, to really give them a sense for what was happening, and to try to explain and break it down.”
Roys said state lawmakers are normally “toiling away in obscurity,” but it was clear many people deeply cared about Act 10.
“People were desperate to get information,” she said. “And to have that direct line of communication, I think, was really new.”
Tubbs, a constant presence during the 2011 protests, also stressed the importance of communicating with protesters. Tubbs said he’s proud of the approach he and other law enforcement officers took, which emphasized clear communication and working together to keep things peaceful.
Tubbs, who now serves as director of Dane County Emergency Management, said he was busy with the massive crowds inside the building but realized the importance of social media. University students worked with him to address any false information spreading online, he said
“University of Wisconsin students helped monitor the social media sites and get credible, factual information out to the public on what was really taking place at the Capitol,” Tubbs said.
Those false rumors included that Tubbs had been fired, that police in riot gear were preparing to storm the building and that statehouse windows were being nailed shut. Another rumor circulating was there was “supposedly a dead body in the Capitol and we’re hiding it,” Tubbs said.
‘A catalyst for organizing’
Kathleen Bartzen Culver, a UW-Madison journalism professor and the director of the Center for Journalism Ethics, said she believes the flood of photographs and videos from the 2011 protests helped people become emotionally invested in the Act 10 debate.
“What I recall really striking me in the moment was how we made a transition into social media as a visual medium,” she said. “Still moments in time of, you know, thousands of people gathered, and the rotunda packed, and people sleeping on the floor. And I don’t know that it would have had the same impact, the same sort of lasting impression, if it had been text instead of visual.”
Walker supporters also used social media to push back against the protests. For example, conservatives seized on a controversy that erupted soon after the protests began, when some doctors gave out sick notes to protesters near the Capitol.
The issue was covered extensively by the conservative MacIver Institute, and then by mainstream media outlets.
“That incident took place right outside our offices. I saw that and said we need to capture this footage,” said Brian Fraley, who was then communications director for MacIver.
The video was picked up by Drudge Report, Fox News and other outlets, he said.
“Our site crashed from the onslaught of hits,” Fraley said. “Within 5 minutes I set up a temporary site that contained only the video. We recorded more than 300,000 web visits that day.”
Fraley said that MacIver used social media “to capture events that otherwise were not covered, and paint a more complete picture of the occupation.”
Sites like Facebook were also used to identify people involved.
“You had social media activity trying to suss out who were the UW medical school physicians and residents who
“We didn’t know what we were jumping into at that moment . ... No idea that people from other countries would be like, ‘We stand with Wisconsin legislators.’”
Sen. Lena Taylor On reaction to Democrats leaving Wisconsin to prevent quorum for Act 10
were handing out doctor’s notes for people to get excused from work for protesting,” Culver said. “Using these tools not just to participate in a protest, or amplify a protest, but also to try to subvert the protest. I think that was really striking to me.”
Michael Wagner, also a professor in the University of Wisconsin Madison’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication, leads a research center that has been studying the last decade of Wisconsin politics, including the 2011 protests and the wave of recall elections in 2012.
“Social media is a catalyst for organizing,” Wagner said. “It helps people connect in both public and private ways in order to try to exact their political goals on a set of politicians, or try to get attention from the news media, or to try to communicate with other like-minded activists.”
He said that both liberals and conservatives embraced social media at the time, but used it to achieve different things.
“The organizing kind of advantaged the left, and the political communication advantaged the right,” Wagner said.
For example, Wagner said an analysis of social media use found “the biggest hub of conversation in Wisconsin Twitter in 2012 when the recall happened was Charlie Sykes,” the former conservative radio talk show host.
Sykes said that initially, Walker’s fight against collective bargaining “seemed like a total loser,” adding that conservatives initially weren’t fired up about it.
“It was sort of out there, like something to think about. But it wasn’t visceral and it wasn’t emotional,” Sykes said. “And what happened was that the narrative shifted from the actual substance — at least on the right — to the fight. To the reaction to the protesters. And I think what social media did was to amplify that narrative that the protesters were, you know, were going too far.”
Sykes, who is now editor-at-large of the Bulwark and a contributor to MSNBC, said Act 10 felt like a battle of “our tribe versus your tribe.”
“Social media’s ability to sort of freeze-frame certain elements of it and then to change the narrative was incredibly effective,” he said. “In a lot of ways, I think of Act 10 now, looking back on it, as being kind of a precursor of tribalization.”
Act 10 also changed how people talk to each other — or stop speaking altogether, Wagner said.
“One thing that really happened, and I think social media had a role to play here, was that it was a catalyst for in your face communications about politics,” Wagner said. “And the consequences of that have been that a lot of social relationships that go beyond social media — face-to face relationships — have fractured since Act 10.”
For his part, Walker said in a recent interview he believed the divisions in the state escalated because of the Senate Democrats’ absence and the nonstop attention his proposal received.
“I think what happened, as much as anything, it just escalated it to the point where it was in our face all the time,” Walker said. “It was like a soap opera. Every day people would tune in to see when are they coming back, what’s going on today, what happened this time.”
Wagner noted that a number of Wisconsinites reported they stopped talking to somebody about politics, or ended friendships altogether, because of their views about Act 10.
“It was really the beginning of how partisan, contentious politics began to fracture social relationships that used to not be affected in the same way by political disagreements,” Wagner said. “And so politics has just become more of our identity, and part of that is because we live on social media.”
Wagner added, “Wisconsin politics has been ahead of the curve for the times the country is facing.”
Patrick Marley and Bill Glauber of the Journal Sentinel staff contributed to this report.