Assignment #5: Final ProjectBuycott: Empowering Political Consumption Under A Veil of Political Neutrality

May 12, 2015

Kelly WilsonUsername: kelly.wilson

Harvard University Extension School LSTU-E 120 Internet & Society: Technologies and Politics of Control

Instructor: Andy Sellars J.D. TAs: Ryan Budish J.D. and David O’Brien J.D.

INTRODUCTION

Did you know that a buck for Brawny paper towels is essentially a buck for the Koch

brothers? Until now, few did and that was excusable. Consumers couldn’t possibly be expected

to weed through the complicated corporate structures that lie behind every mundane purchase.

Now, however, there’s Buycott, and choosing a paper towel brand has never been so political.

Released in May of 2013, Buycott is a web-based app that aims to demystify corporate

structure for consumers and help them align their values with their purchases. On the site, users

create campaigns that enable them to boycott companies for exhibiting unfavorable behavior and

buycott companies for exhibiting favorable behavior.1 As users join campaigns, Buycott

populates a unique list of companies for you to support and avoid. With campaigns selected and

the app downloaded, Buycotters are ready to hit the aisles.

The app uses bar codes and scanner technology to determine the parent company behind

a product, then cross-references the corporate owner against your campaigns and quickly

determines whether you should support or avoid the product you’re holding and why. If it’s a

product you’re supposed to avoid, the app pulls forward a list of alternative product suggestions.

Then the key feature of the app, the family tree, is how you learn that Brawny is owned by

Georgia-Pacific, which is owned by Koch Industries.

Buycott was created by 26 year old Los Angeles coder Ivan Pardo. After seeing a friend

of his memorize a list of brands to avoid and subsequently witnessing the Occupy Wall Street

movement in 2011, Pardo said he, “realized the environment was right for a sort of anti-

establishment app that helped educate consumers about the products they buy” (“Buycott App:

1 For the sake of clarity in this paper, ‘Buycott’ will always refer to the website, which includes both boycotting and buycotting. The use of ‘buycott’ will only refer to the act of intentionally purchasing a product for political, ethical, and/or moral reasons.

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Vote With Your Wallet”). The product was launched into the civic sphere less than two years

later.

Civic life, according to our friends at the Civic Media Project, is comprised of the

attention and actions an individual devotes to a common good. Though the words ‘boycott’ and

‘buycott’ are far from new to civic lexicon, the internet has a nifty habit of lowering barriers to

civic participation and transforming means of communication on a global scale. Buycott in

particular lowers the barriers to participation in the time-tested actions of boycotting and

buycotting.

Ultimately, the site’s goal is to transform the marketplace into an arena for politics,

regardless of what its users’ politics may be, where they’re from, what age they are or whether

they have a criminal record. Buycott is a tool for everyone. As a digital community that exists

squarely in the political realm, Buycott strives - and often struggles - to distance the platform

from the politics; to maintain an air of neutrality and stay above the fray. Staying above the fray

is important for achieving its goal of transforming the marketplace into an arena for politics for

the reasons that follow.

First, if we consider John Locke’s marketplace of ideas rationale for freedom of

expression, it’s clear that Buycott ought to extend an open invitation to all and trust that the

campaigns seeking the greatest social good will attract the most followers and translate into the

most “expression” in the actual marketplace. In order for the best campaigns to win everyone’s

ideas must have a fair chance of making it, thus, Buycott’s platform needs to be neutral so not to

unfairly advantage or exclude any one group.

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Additionally, neutrality frees the site from heading in a rigid direction and gives users the

flexibility to take on whatever unpredictable issues pop up. It means that, as long as people

migrate to the site, Buycott will remain relevant and continue to enable political consumption.

Lastly, Buycott’s neutral stance means that the site is not accountable for user-generated

content. Like Facebook and Twitter, Buycott is not responsible for hateful or mean-spirited

campaigns or comments on its platform. Steering clear of legal liability keeps Buycott’s

operation costs down and ensures that the maximum amount of time possible is going towards

ensuring that the information provided by the site on corporate structure is accurate.

Misinformation would derail Buycott’s mission.

So, as a site striving to transform the marketplace into a political arena while staying

above the fray, how does Buycott do it? It is no easy feat. At every step, Buycott must be

extremely careful not to be captured by the campaigns and causes it hosts. This paper takes into

account Lawrence Lessig’s four forces and primarily focuses on how neutrality was built into the

site’s architecture and whether or not in practice Buycott achieves the neutrality necessary to

empower global political consumption.

WEBSITE ARCHITECTURE

Anticipating the need to stay above the fray, Buycott’s engineers did their best to use the

site’s architecture to shield it from being tainted as partisan. The most important decision made

to this effect was to relinquish campaign creation to users. In an interview with Forbes, Ivan

Pardo stated, “I don’t want to push any single point of view with the app. For me, it was critical

to allow users to create campaigns because I don’t think it’s Buycott’s role to tell people what to

buy. We simply want to provide a platform that empowers consumers to make well-informed

purchasing decisions” (“Buycott to add value to shop Ideology Ap”).

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Buycott’s decision to have user-generated campaigns comes in the midst a great shift of

innovation to users. As Von Hippel notes, “Users that innovate can develop exactly what they

want, rather than relying on manufacturers to act as their (often very imperfect) agents.

Moreover, individual users do not have to develop everything they need on their own: they can

benefit from innovations developed and freely shared by others” (Von Hippel, Pg. 1). Thus,

Pardo’s decision to have user-generated campaigns not only allows the website to stay above the

fray by being hands off in the creation of politically-charged content but it also allows for the

greatest amount of user-relevant content to be created.

Peer production of campaigns also gives the site the potential to create content at a much

faster pace than would be possible if it were left to a small group of California techies. This was

demonstrated nicely by our friends at MIT in the DARPA Red Balloon Challenge where the MIT

team harnessed the power of peer production (using a recursive financial reward structure) and

won the challenge in under nine hours (Tang et al.). Buycott’s reward consists of mainly intrinsic

satisfaction from contributing some small part to what each user sees at the greater societal good.

Since users can create campaigns that are meaningful to them and their situations,

Buycott quickly achieved an impressive international reach. Those in the UK have been using

Buycott since the very beginning, the Irish are making increased use of the app, and, as of the

summer of 2014, 20,000 South Africans had downloaded the app and Buycott was ranked the

fourth free app in the French Apple Store (Newman) (Beanland) (“Buycott App: Vote With Your

Wallet”). If Pardo had closed campaign creation to users and kept it to a small team, it’s possible

that they could have achieved the same reach but it would have been a costly and time

consuming process, and one that would put the site’s neutrality in jeopardy. Additionally, if

Buycott centralized campaign creation it would become difficult to provide its services free of

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charge, an essential component of Buycott’s inclusive, open to all community. These arguments

are almost identical to the ones used to support the Wikipedia model over the Britannica model

of content creation.

Unlike on Wikipedia, however, Buycott users cannot easily edit existing campaigns - that

control stays with the creator. So instead of stacking individual knowledge to form greater group

intelligence (Surowiecki), Buycott is the sum of individual creations where users are limited to

joining, creating, or recreating. Take, for instance, the Support Planned Parenthood campaign

which has 8,246 members. On the “Campaign Background” tab the creator copied and pasted the

organization’s mission statement but failed to provide an end goal or any context for how they

came up with the campaign’s list of 33 companies to support and 5 companies to avoid. In the

comment section, howe.rob calls out the creator for one of the companies in the support column,

saying that “AT&T is one of the largest supporters of the Republican party; the party that is

aggressively trying to destroy Planned Parenthood. Please do some research before you start a

Buycott group, or else you may be doing more harm than good!” Another comment clarifies that

this campaign “SUPPORTS” Planned Parenthood and instructs those who are against the

organization to visit www.fightpp.org. The rest of the comments revolve around an unhelpful

discussion on Margaret Sanger’s stance on racial issues.

It’s been over a year since howe.rob made his comment, but to no avail. AT&T remains

on the list of companies to support and, all the while thousands of users are being instructed to

buycott a company they should arguably be boycotting. This goes to show that correcting

misinformation on Buycott is an uphill battle. Unfortunately for howe.rob, Wikipedia-style

editing is not feasible on this site. If Buycott’s aim is to be open to all, then it can’t have

members of Support Planned Parenthood editing the Avoid Abortion page or the members of

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Support Palestine editing the Support Israel page. That would be a trolling nightmare. So, as long

as Buycotters come from all places and all persuasions, users ought to operate with more

skepticism on Buycott than on any Wikipedia page.

This burden on users is worrisome because the novelty of Buycott is that it widens the

community of political consumers to include non-activists, those who had previously been

excluded due to impossibly high barriers to entry. These non-activists are not to be confused with

“slacktivists” as such a term falsely implies preexisting activism (Tufekci). Misinformation

spread by campaign creators threatens Buycott’s appeal to these non-activists. While the site may

remove the barrier for gaining information about corporate structures, it introduces another: fact

checking every campaign. Ultimately, this is the cost of having the site be neutral and open to all.

Despite Buycott’s desire to stay above the fray, there are architectural flaws. First, all

Buycott campaigns are sorted into the following categories: Animal rights, civil rights, criminal

justice, economic justice, education, Environment, Food, Health, Human Rights, Human

Trafficking, Immigration, Labor, LGBTQ Rights, Other, Social Responsibility, Veterans,

Women’s Rights. These categories immediately convey a leftward bent. Nowhere are the

categories “family values” or “religious freedom” or “rights of the unborn.” Additionally, if we

take a look at the site’s most populated campaigns we can see that there’s a matching user bent

towards the left. To paint a picture of what the Buycott community really cares about, here is a

list of all campaigns that cross the 50,000 member threshold:

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Membership Campaign Category

Campaign Name

420,000 Food Demand GMO Labeling

416,000 Human Rights Long Live Palestine Boycott Israel

156,000 Environment Say No To Monsanto

137,000 Food Say No to GMO-Monsanto Products Boycott; Non-GMO Buycott

103,000 Social Responsibility

Boycott Koch Industries

88,000 Human Rights Boycott Nestle

76,000 Food Buy Organic Brands that Support Your Right to Know

73,000 Food Buy Good Food & Avoid Bad Food "GMO & Monsanto" Update August 14

65,000 Animal Welfare End Animal Testing

50,000 Food No Aspartame In My Food

50,000 LGBTQ Rights Equality for LGBTQ

Initially prompted by liberal-leaning campaign categories, Buycott’s membership base

has clearly taken on a progressive identity of its own. Though there are a handful of conservative

campaigns on the website, they are small. The largest pro-life campaign, Avoid Abortion, has

around 3,000 members and aims to withhold support from 20 companies until support for the

“abortion giant known as Planned Parenthood” is withdrawn. Of the 24 comments on Avoid

Abortion’s page, 17 are pro-choice comments, 3 are pro-life, 3 take issue with the campaign’s

strategy, and 1 is a pro-Palestine comment (of which there seems to always be at least one). One

person calls the campaign “grossly outdated” and, again, redirects people to www.fightpp.org.

RedandBlueAmeri comments, “What a heartbreaking campaign you are running. I have been

speaking out against abortion since Roe vs Wade took place. However, I see it as important to

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realize that about 97% of services that Planned Parenthood provides are health services outside

of abortion. What you are actually boycotting is women's health care.” These comments call out

misinformation and showcase a leftward lean of Buycotters to match the subtle leftward lean of

the site. Conservative pro-life campaigns do not have a natural home or audience on this site.

Perhaps the most infamously uneven debate on Buycott dealt with the Israel-Gaza

conflict that flared up in the summer of 2014. During that time, the site saw a surge of site traffic

that pushed Buycott to a top 10 app in the UK and Netherlands and number one in a number of

Middle East countries (“Barcode Scanning App Used To Boycott Israel”). The “Long Live

Palestine Boycott Israel” group had 400 members in July 2014 and their numbers skyrocketed to

over 300,000 by August 2014 (Newman). In contrast, the “Buy Israeli Products” group has only

made it to 1,855 members to date.2

Not wanting this conflict to pull Buycott into the fray and brand it a pro-Palestinian site,

Pardo had to interfere in this instance and assure audiences that he has no strong views on the

conflict. He told reporters, “It bothers me that a lot of people are downloading Buycott and

thinking that it was written specifically to boycott Israel. It was not, and to counter that notion I

have been actively encouraging pro-Israel groups to start campaigns supporting Israel”

(“Barcode Scanning App Used To Boycott Israel”). In this instance, users created campaigns did

not shield Buycott from getting into the fray. The neutral architecture failed as pro-Palestinian

users took control away from site creators and began defining the community for themselves. So

try as it might to be above the fray, sometimes Buycott’s users undermine the site’s neutrality

and other times the site’s own architecture betrays itself.

APP ARCHITECTURE

2 These numbers do not proportionally represent those involved in the Palestine/Israeli conflict, but rather show how much more popular Buycott was with the pro-Palestinian side. This intractable crisis predates Buycott and it is interesting to see how the site is being integrated and by whom.

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The app gives Buycott its utility. Its most essential components are the barcode scanner

and the corporate family tree. The latter reveals the complex network of corporate ownership but,

unlike in campaign creation, corporate family tree research is closed to users The website is not

very transparent about its inside research process - how many researchers, what are their sources,

their standards, or their review process. On its Q&A page Buycott discloses that it “has a rich,

but ultimately limited knowledge base of corporations and products.” Additionally, Buycott

notes that, “Corporate ownership structure is always changing and can sometimes be complex.

Most companies in our database actually own more brands than we have on record for them.

That’s why we need your help maintaining and improving the integrity of the data.”

By requesting “your help,” Buycott is referring to the fact that users are encouraged to

flag products not yet known to Buycott’s database. Users are blocked from contributing to

knowledge of corporate structure.3 For a community intended to be as diverse as Buycott, this

was a good architectural decision. Once again, trolling poses a big risk here. What if a user

decided to make Koch Industries the parent of all companies? Users must have faith that the

information coming from Buycott, the information that previously made it too burdensome to

engage with political consumption, is accurate. This perception of accuracy necessitates a closed,

neutral research process.

SOCIAL MEDIA SETUP

Turning to Buycott’s social media presence complicates the site’s case for neutrality. On

Facebook, Buycott has over 21,000 followers and posts neutral media hits mentioning Buycott,

however, there are few posts to speak of. In 2014, Buycott authored a total of six posts and

3 With the caveat that Buycott gives “The most active users… the ability contribute more types of data to the database.”

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facebook users have yet to hear anything from the site in 2015. Most of Buycott’s social media

action is on Twitter - and content there flies in the face of neutrality.

It seems like whoever is in charge of Buycott’s twitter page missed the memo. Tweets

and retweets promoting Buycott aside, the site’s Twitter page has opinions that put it directly in

the fray. In no case is this more clear than with the Black Lives Matter protests that started in the

fall of 2014. On November 25, 2014, Buycott retweeted progressive organizer Zach Green

saying, “Tear gas is banned in international warfare, but we use it on fellow Americans. [link]

#Ferguson.” On December 27, 2014, Buycott retweeted Thants the Rapper’s image of a Black

Lives Matter protester along with the caption, “such a powerful protest sign, still looking for who

to credit this to if anyone knows.” And, on March 1, 2015, @Buycott retweeted hip-hop legend

Russell Simmons saying, “Wow. Just wow. → RT @globalGrindNews: LAPD officer shot and

killed a homeless man in downtown LA this afternoon… [link].”

There is, of course, no connection between the Black Lives Matter protests and Buycott’s

mission. These tweets are sure to offend Americans with a different take on the Black Lives

Matter protests as well as alienate its international followers. Of all the ways Buycott could have

accidentally slipped into the fray, using its Twitter page like a personal account seems easily

avoidable.

Buycott’s “in-the-fray” tweets don’t stop at the Black Lives Matter protests. Buycott has

also used its Twitter account to call attention to President Obama’s “new chapter” on Cuba; to

promote the progressive political commentator John Oliver’s segment on marketing to doctors;

and to frequently post articles from the left-leaning publication, The Guardian, that include no

mention of the site. It is impossible to reconcile these tweets with Pardo’s original statement: “I

don’t want to push any single point of view with the app.” As the community takes on a

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distinctively progressive shape it appears to be increasingly difficult for site overseers - who

created the app in response to the left’s Occupy Wall Street movement - to remain dispassionate

and refrain from using the platform to advance what’s clearly becoming “the community’s

viewpoint.”

CONCLUSIONS

Buycott began with good intentions of being neutral and open to all. However, despite

architectural plans - though at times flawed - to make the site a playground for political

consumers of all persuasions, its structure and those now occupying it are very visibly leaning to

the left. Two years after its launch, it seems that Buycott is inescapably in the fray whether its

creators want it to be or not. This puts Buycott in the uncomfortable position of claiming the

neutral high-ground while hosting a community that champions progressive values and ideas.

But Buycott can’t fool people for much longer; its veil of neutrality is wearing thin.

It’s time for Buycott’s creators to embrace the fray and redefine the community’s aim.

Then it could shift its focus to winning campaigns. Such a move would greatly enhance the

overall community feel of the site and really make the site a force for misbehaving corporations

to recon with. If the goal this time around was to awaken consumers to the power of their

spending habits, then next that energy could be harnessed to enact real change. Then Buycott’s

challenge would be being in crosshairs of the corporate world.

FUTURE RESEARCH:

Buycott is a fascinating ecosystem that presents researchers with many paths to venture

down. This paper focused on site architecture, social media presence, and the struggle for

neutrality. Future research could respond to the following questions: Is Buycott normalizing

political consumption? Is boycotting inherently a tactic of the left? How could Buycott use

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architecture and site norms to maximize use of peer production while preventing trolling? Does

Buycott lower the age of political consumers? What accountability measures could Buycott build

into its architecture to encourage meaningful outcomes? How could Buycott make itself

available to those without smartphones? And what lessons could Buycott learn from other

scanner apps like OpenLabel, GS1 GoScan, and Glow?

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