Prescient Moments

Posted on March 12, 2021

Her grandmother told her education was the golden bracelet Turkish girls needed. Zeynep Tufekci has become an authority on what the intersection of information technology, society and government has wrought, and will.

by Elizabeth Leland ’76
illustrations by Haley Hodges ’19

Known for her research on the social impact of technology, UNC’s Zeynep Tufekci never expected to become a guiding voice in America’s response
to the coronavirus pandemic.

With most of the world still oblivious to what was coming early in 2020, Tufekci was planning a trip to Hong Kong to study how social media was influencing the political protests there when she read about a mysterious viral pneumonia in Wuhan, China. Fearing the worst, she postponed her travel and on Jan. 7 ordered a batch of face masks.

And then she waited for the United States to mobilize. “I kept waiting for the scientific establishment to step up, and also the media to step up, and say, ‘Hey, you’ve got to get ready.’ All around me, people were planning conferences and trips. In February, I got distraught because nobody was getting ready.”

Zeynep Tufekci (ZAY-nep too-FEK-chee) is not an epidemiologist. But she had studied and taught the sociology of pandemics enough to question the messaging from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the World Health Organization and national news outlets.

When no one else stepped up, she decided that she must.

Her article for Scientific American, published just as the public was beginning to focus on the dangers of COVID-19, went viral. Tufekci outlined steps people should take to prepare, assuring them that: “Preparing for the almost inevitable global spread of this virus, now dubbed COVID-19, is one of the most pro-social, altruistic things you can do in response to potential disruptions of this kind.”

A couple of weeks later, she wrote a second article for The New York Times, boldly faulting the CDC for saying that only health workers needed to wear face masks: “Many health experts, including the surgeon general of the United States, told the public simultaneously that masks weren’t necessary for protecting the general public and that health care workers needed the dwindling supply. This contradiction confuses an ordinary listener. How do these masks magically protect the wearers only and only if they work in a particular field?”

Recalling her trepidation at stepping outside her field of expertise and criticizing leading health officials, she said, “I really thought this was the end of my public writing career. I’m going to go out and say the CDC and WHO are wrong in the middle of a pandemic and I don’t have the right Ph.D. It’s kind of outrageous. I am very much on the side of science. I do not want to appear like an anti-vaxxer. I am looking like someone who is defying the top health authorities in the world, and I’m saying they’re wrong.”

The authorities were wrong. A senior health scientist at the CDC told The Times that Tufekci’s outspoken criticism of the agency was “the tipping point” in the CDC’s decision in April to advise everyone over age of 2 to wear a mask.

In its story, The Times noted that Tufekci also had been right about other “big things.” She warned in 2012 that news coverage of school shootings could inspire more shootings. In 2013, she argued that Facebook could contribute to the ethnic cleansing of Rohingya Muslims in Myanmar. And in 2017, she documented how the YouTube recommendation algorithm was pushing people to political and social extremes.

A sociological approach

Five years ago, the Review described Tufekci as having “emerged as a leading voice at the intersection of information technology, society and government,” avoiding academic niches and instead expanding her interests “as social media, big data and privacy concerns invade our politics and personal lives.”

“She’s a legend,” said Jeremy Howard, a research scientist at the University of San Francisco, who began following Tufekci on Twitter long before the coronavirus pandemic. “Not only is she always right, she’s always right about a month before anybody else. My wife and I were not particularly thinking about COVID-19 in February. Then Zeynep wrote the article for Scientific American, and we immediately went and bought supplies. Being aware of what Zeynep talks about is definitely an important part of my way of knowing what’s going on in the world.”

Howard later co-wrote an article with Tufekci for USA Today about the need to wear face masks. He attributes her insight to an unusual combination of social science and computer science skills. “She’s very familiar with data analysis and also familiar with important social concepts like how people behave and how societies behave. She’s got a rare mix there,” he said. “She’s also got a very big heart — she cares about things, she cares about people.”

Earlier this year, her understanding of human nature proved right again. Writing for The Atlantic on Jan. 5, Tufekci warned that then-President Donald Trump was “leveling a loaded gun at our democracy” by calling the election results fraudulent. She predicted: “What people believe they should do is how they will eventually act.” The next day, a mob of Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol.

Reflecting on the violent insurrection, Tufekci made the case in an article a week later that an even more dangerous threat to democracy than the mob was that 139 Republican members of the House and eight Republican senators voted a few hours later to overturn the election. “Throwing out an election isn’t like disagreeing on tax policy or stimulus checks,” Tufekci wrote. “It’s not something to move on from or forget.”

If those lawmakers do not pay “a high political price,” she warned, they will try it again.

At Carolina, Tufekci teaches “Big Data, Algorithms and Society.” She is a McColl Term Associate Professor in the School of Information and Library Science and adjunct professor in the sociology department. She also is a faculty associate at the Harvard Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society and a former Andrew Carnegie Fellow (2015-16).  She made up a word to describe her field of study: “Technosociology,” reflecting her interest in the social implications of emerging technologies.

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“I was long interested in pandemics. I used to teach about pandemics when I taught ‘Introduction to Sociology’ because they’re a good way to understand a good range of topics — how the world operates … its interconnectedness. There are so many things that are important in the world that you can learn from, say, the SARS episode. And I would teach all that.”

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When she lectures or gives a talk, Tufekci speaks without notes, her words tumbling out in a well-organized stream of consciousness with only a hint of a Turkish accent. She uses her hands, her sense of humor and personal experiences to enliven and explain complicated subjects ranging from artificial intelligence and machine algorithms to privacy and surveillance.

Fred Stutzman ’00 (’11 PhD) heard her speak at a Social Software Symposium he helped organize at Carolina in 2006, when Tufekci was teaching at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County.

“Listening to her talk about her research and her thoughts on social media, she was just somebody you had to pay attention to,” said Stutzman, now CEO of the internet blocking app Freedom. “She was ahead of the curve in the sense that she really saw the connection between what we call information science and sociology and how those two fields intermix. And she brought a very sociological approach to the study of technology.”

In 2011, when Gary Marchionini, dean of the School of Information and Library Science, had the chance to recruit Tufekci to Carolina, he jumped at the opportunity. “She’s a force of nature,” Marchionini said. “She’s insightful, articulate — the kind of articulateness that allows her to explain complicated things in understandable ways — and very grounded. She’s going to pull out sociology theory and computational theory and information theory to back up her arguments.”

Armful of bracelets

Growing up in Turkey, Tufekci drew inspiration from her grandmother whose parents had pulled her out of school after the fifth grade, intent on finding her a husband. A teacher secretly entered her in a scholarship competition for a prestigious boarding school and convinced the family to let her attend. She later became a teacher at the same elementary school where Tufekci studied. In a blog post, Tufekci recalled: “When girls get married in Turkey, they are often gifted bracelets made of gold — to be used in emergencies or when savings are needed. My grandmother always said that education was the most important pair of ‘golden bracelets’ that girls needed.”

Tufekci has an armful of golden bracelets. She learned to read when she was about 4, and from then on, she said, she read anything she could find. Newspapers. Children’s books. Adult novels. Encyclopedias (the P’s were a favorite). Even the paper bags fashioned from old magazines that grocers used in packing vegetables.

“My grandmother always drilled into me that women need to be strong, and the way she thought of being strong is education,” Tufekci said. “You’ve got to have an education. You’ve got to have your own job. You’ve got to stand on your own feet.”

Tufekci learned to stand on her own feet early. When she was a teenager, she became “borderline to actual homeless” after her father abandoned her and her younger brother to their alcoholic mother. She left home for good after high school, took a job as a computer programmer at IBM and paid her way through Istanbul University, where she got a sociology degree.

The first time she logged onto the internet was shortly after it was introduced in Turkey in the mid-1990s. She was hooked from the start. She said she hadn’t been as transfixed since she read Crime and Punishment in high school.

On the internet, she made a discovery that shaped her career. She learned about the Zapatistas, a peasant uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, and how sympathizers outside of the country were using the internet to help the revolutionary struggle. After enrolling in graduate school at the University of Texas at Austin (where she got her master’s and doctorate), Tufekci traveled to Chiapas to see for herself. The people there didn’t have electricity, much less access to the internet — and yet a global social movement girded their cause.

From there, she studied movement after movement, from the Arab Spring in the Middle East to Occupy Wall Street in the United States, often donning a gas mask and joining the throngs in the streets. Her conclusions about the effects of social media on these protests sometimes ran counter to prevailing wisdom.

Successful protests in the pre-internet era — such as the civil rights movement — required hard work and meticulous organizing, which she believes is why they were sustainable. Although today’s protests may draw hundreds of thousands of people with the help of social media and can be successful, Tufekci says that numbers don’t guarantee staying power. Social media is good at attracting attention — at starting a protest — but not as good at sustaining a movement.

“I have also seen movement after movement falter because of a lack of organizational depth and experience, of tools or culture for collective decision making, and strategic, long-term action,” she wrote in her book, Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest. “Somewhat paradoxically the capabilities that fueled their organizing prowess sometimes also set the stage for what later tripped them up, especially when they were unable to engage in the tactical and decision-making maneuvers all movements must master to survive.”

“Viruses are fascinating, right?”

When the coronavirus interrupted her plans to travel to Hong Kong to study the massive anti-government protests there, Tufekci shifted to writing instead about the coronavirus pandemic. There was a symmetry in that circumstance.

“I was long interested in pandemics. I used to teach about pandemics when I taught ‘Introduction to Sociology’ because they’re a good way to understand a good range of topics — how the world operates … its interconnectedness. There are so many things that are important in the world that you can learn from, say, the SARS episode. And I would teach all that. Viruses are fascinating, right? They’re little buggers. I had a broad interest in them, but clearly it wasn’t my field.”

Tufekci said she recognized how serious a situation the world faced after China silenced its whistleblowers and then shut down Wuhan, a city of 11 million. “I study authoritarians,” she explained. “There’s a saying about them: ‘You don’t look at what authoritarians say, you look at what they do.’ ”

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“My grandmother always drilled into me that women need to be strong, and the way she thought of being strong is education. You’ve got to have an education. You’ve got to have your own job. You’ve got to stand on your own feet.”

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Her fears were confirmed when she read the first published scientific studies out of China about the virus and its atypical symptoms. Tufekci began firing off tweets, warning about human-to-human transmission and the need for millions of tests in the United States. “With an urgent enormous effort,” she wrote, “this could be contained.”

Her initial articles drew the endorsement of national health experts, and she was invited to take part in a conference call with officials of the World Health Organization (whom she assured that wearing masks would not lead to reckless behavior). She also joined more than 100 public health experts, including a Nobel laureate virologist and medical and scientific professionals from Harvard, Stanford and MIT, in a letter in May asking U.S. governors to “require cloth masks be worn in all public places, such as stores, transportation systems and public buildings.”

As COVID-19 continued its relentless spread, Tufekci followed up with more articles in The Atlantic — including one about ventilation (as important as social distancing) and another about the dangers of superspreader events (ironically, just days before a COVID-19 outbreak at the White House).

Among the experts Tufekci interviewed for the piece about ventilation was virologist Ryan McNamara, a research associate scientist at UNC’s Lineberger Comprehensive Cancer Center. McNamara is part of a team studying the evolution of the coronavirus in North Carolina. Like other science and health professionals, he began following Tufekci’s work because of her initial articles about the coronavirus.

“There’s a market for her kind of thought-provoking, deep-diving, critical-thinking pieces,” he said. “I am reading literature constantly in my corner of this field … and the questions she’s asking are broader, societal issues and how it impacts the greater community. I think that her articles really fill a void.”

In the midst of her research and writing and the national attention that followed, Tufekci also found time for her 11-year-old son, taking mountain bike rides and walks together in Carrboro and helping with his remote learning if needed. “He likes to lecture me on masks,” she said. “No, seriously!”

One day, she said, they got out of her car in a parking lot. The closest other person was about 100 feet away. “My son says, ‘Mom, in North Carolina it’s the law that you have to wear masks in public places, and you just stepped out of the car without your mask on.’ And he wouldn’t listen to me that I was about to put it on. He doesn’t think of me as an authority on masks.

“I just love the fact that despite how much of my life I put on the line to get the masks orders [from the CDC and WHO], I am now getting lectured by my 11-year-old. To impress him, I would have to go viral on TikTok rather than The New York Times.”

It was October when Tufekci recalled that exchange. By then, she had devoted more than nine months to COVID-19 and was proud of what she accomplished. “If, as The New York Times reports, it was pivotal to changing policy in the United States, this is more than I could have hoped for,” she said. “I created this groundswell. I was happy.”

But she also felt conflicted.

“I really, really want to start writing about technology and society and all of those things that I work on normally. What should Twitter do? What should Facebook do? How should we fight misinformation? I’m not doing it because I’m writing 5,000 words on ventilation or dispersion.

“It’s kind of difficult for me because it is high stakes. I care about everything.”

—Elizabeth Leland ’76 is a freelance writer based in Charlotte.

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