Some still haven't gotten the memo and are now framing declining effectiveness as somehow the "other side's" fault. But how could it be? The people you actually need to convince are those in the middle, and it seems like many protests aren't even trying to reach them anymore.

I genuinely don't understand what a lot of modern protests are attempting to accomplish in terms of persuasion. I see their political goals, but why would going outside and complaining change any minds? Why would blocking traffic and ruining someone's day make them sympathetic to your cause? How is shaming people who aren't already supporters supposed to win them over?

It was always naive to think 3.5% of the population could force the other 96.5% to do whatever they want by making enough noise. It's even more naive to suggest it's everyone else's fault for not listening. And it's completely unhinged to imply that roughly 35% on the opposite political side are somehow bamboozling the remaining 60%.

If you're asking what they should do instead, I honestly couldn't tell you. But not having a better answer doesn't mean the current approach is working. Maybe try doing something that would actually make people like you? Pick up litter, volunteer visibly, something that builds goodwill instead of resentment. I don't know. But whatever this is, it isn't persuading anyone who wasn't already on board.

Everyone already knows dissent exists. Polls, social media, elections make that clear. The question is whether street protests add anything to that awareness, and whether the way they're conducted generates curiosity or just irritation. For a lot of people it's the latter, and waving that off doesn't make the problem disappear.

I don't know if it can be proven or whatever, but I do know it has changed me.

There have been many events where I thought "hey, why is everybody whining about X thing?". "things are fine the way they are". Until I read more about it and changed my mind.

If it was purely online, I wouldn't take it so seriously.

So whether it can proven empirically or not, I know it changed me.

> A crowd showing up doesn't automatically translate to minds changed or policy moved.

Strawman much?

> If the tactics alienate more people than they persuade, visibility alone isn't doing much.

What tactics? What evidence is there that people are being alienated by the peaceful protests, rather than by the murders and other violence and lying of administration officials?

From the top of my head I can think of news reporting both "few (tens of) thousands" vs "hundreds of thousands" (different news reporting different numbers/estimates/etc) in 2025 protests in Serbia/Belgrade, as well as those comparisons of Obama vs Trump inauguration news/photos.

Meanwhile to you as an individual there on the spot - both crowds of say 50K-100K and 1M+ look basically the same = "huge amounts of people in every direction that you look".

If crowd sizes become a significant point of contention it'll become increasingly commonplace for multiple parties to take lots of aerial video and photos that serve as independent verification. You could probably get a pretty accurate estimate of how many people show up to an event by sending drones to take photos every 15 minutes.

In any case, I think the problem you highlight is more focused towards the upper-end, while I was thinking about the lower end of the spectrum. Where some people might be very vocal online, but they're unable to gather more than a dozen or two people for any given protest. If a protest is gathering an unknown number of people that ranges between 100k and 1 million that sounds like a really good problem to have.

Your criticism of inconsistent people estimates are valid, I'm not sure if newspapers have published the set of tools and criteria that they use when generating these estimates, so that's an area where it would be great to see increased transparency.

The "publishing the set of tools and criteria used to generate estimates" is happening, and so far it seems that usually doesn't matter.

It doesn't matter because of course those sources/news that report wildly wrong (be it larger or smaller numbers) are usually (not always, but very commonly) controlled by the governments.

So despite students that organized the biggest protests in Belgrade giving their estimates (based on combo of RSVP and how many people accommodated people from other cities). And those being close to independant research (using drone footage, VR/AR crowd simulations, AI) with loads of posts/videos providing detailed explanations ...

Most "ordinary people" saw (and keep seeing) just the "official version".

No, they really don’t. Have you never heard someone say that they have never met anyone who is X so it can’t be that popular? My own sister thought 2000 was going to be a landslide for Gore because she “hadn’t met anyone who was going to vote for Bush”.

This is not an accurate or thoughtful characterization of what you're responding to; it's not even in the same ballpark.

> is a convenient way to avoid asking whether the criticism has merit.

Pure projection.

Those TV channels were virtually always (and to this day still are) controlled by "the government".

Meanwhile other TV channels, if there even were any, and if enough people even had chance to watch them (because limited frequency/transmission allocations, artificial limits on cable distribution ..etc) - were and still are labeled as "funded by foreign (state) actors that are trying to destabilize our independance/values/etc".

And it's more of the same online.

---

This reminds me of an old website that's an absolute gold mine.

Knock yourself out https://changingminds.org/explanations/theories/minority_inf...

The point is to demonstrate "we are not alone in this feeling", that's it...

Motivating other people to take a stand -- I do not think this is true either. A fraction of the folks who would support the issue regardless may join the protest on the street. But that would be those who support the issue already.

Change comes from the ballot box. Enough people in the street might influence the next election (sometimes for the issue they are advocating; sometimes in the opposite direction). But 6+ months from the next election the effect I suspect is small. My 2c.

It seems more of a fetid cesspit. It promotes anger, division and controversy rather than shared ideas, cohesive action and positive social change. I think I need an example of the good social media can do for society and collective action.

No. I only said that spreading information that there is dissent does not require taking to the street.

you can find dissent to anything and everything at any time on the internet. Dissent exists always. Dissent that causes people to take the streets and risk being murdered, gassed, beaten, arrested, or even just tracked using facial recognition and fake cell phone towers, that's something else entirely.

> Motivating other people to take a stand -- I do not think this is true either.

People in this discussion have already stated that protests have caused them to reevaluate their position on things protesters were demonstrating against.

> Change comes from the ballot box.

If that were true there'd never have been any change in countries that aren't democracies or where voting was a complete sham only to give the appearance of one. Fairly elected or otherwise, politicians can ignore mean facebook posts. They can't as easily ignore thousands of people protesting outside of their home or office.

Where democracy exists at all, protests can change people's minds about their situation, especially when those protests demonstrate and expose horrific abuses by the state. Even if I didn't support whatever was being protested, if I witness things that shouldn't happen in my country and the current administration defends those things and/or threatens worse, I'm going to reconsider my support the current administration and I won't need 7+ months to do it

Obviously this requires the protesters to make a bit of a judgment call. Do I think the typical person leans so strongly towards my side that they'll take it when I force the issue, even if I annoy them? Sometimes the answer is no, and I've definitely seen people do counterproductive protests that way. But sometimes the answer is yes.

That's not the intent.

Protests are one way We the People remind the government who they're supposed to be representing. Who has the real power in a democracy.

This makes 100%, right. But how many actually care and act, what are the dynamics?

Regarding the end of centralized broadcasting, one could argue that social networks might actually act as amplifiers of "small" events.

Edit: https://www.yourdictionary.com/rent-a-crowd (Rent a crowd/mob is often used to claim the protest is attended by people paid to be there, and was first coined in the mid 20th century, but apparently the actual accusation (though) is as old as demonstrations)

Did you read that link? It’s hardly damming.

“Through a fund, the foundation issued a $3 million grant to the Indivisible Organization that was good for two years "to support the grantee's social welfare activities.” The grants were not specifically for the No Kings protests, the foundation said.”

If 7 million people protested, that 3 million over 2 years sure went a long way. They work for pennies.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/October_2025_No_Kings_protests

Thank you for articulating the accusation, giving me the opportunity to respond, but try to take your own advice and read what's actually being said.

When I replied to you, the link in your comment was the below one.

https://abc6onyourside.com/news/nation-world/no-kings-protes...

That's around the maximum time allowed to edit a comment on Hacker News.

For the level of attack you injected in your previous comment, and now a claim of dishonesty, I would need to see some actual evidence of your claims (I know that I never posted that link, and am confused why you would try such a bizarre claim)

@onraglanroad thank you for pointing out the error.

The thesis is once mass mobilization of non-violent protesters occurs, it reduces the threshold for elite defection because there are multiple different veto groups within a selectorate, and some may choose to defect because they either view the incumbent as unstable or they disagree with the incumbent's policies.

I also recommend reading Chennowith's discussion paper clearing up the "3.5%" argument [0]. A lot of mass reporting was just sloppy.

Tl;Dr - "The 3.5% figure is a descriptive statistic based on a sample of historical movements. It is not necessarily a prescriptive one, and no one can see the future. Trying to achieve the threshold without building a broader public constituency does not guarantee success in the future"

[0] - https://www.hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/2024-05/Eric...

Goodhart's law

Violent Action only incentivizes the selectorate to not defect. This is something Kuran pointed out decades ago as did Chennowith.

The reality is the only way to affect change is to incentivize elite defection, and that requires organized nonviolent action along with exogenous variables.

2011: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arab_Spring

2013: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolution_of_Dignity

2018: https://www.occrp.org/en/project/a-murdered-journalists-last...

2025: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6aqBls-qpRM

2026: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/2026/01/iran-authorit... -- outcome TBD ?

The Slovakian incident worked, because Slovakia has a working representative democracy.

In a deeply flawed, or downright nondemocratic system, like Serbia or Georgia, it's very hard to drive change through nonviolent protests.

It also bears mentioning, that the key issue with protesting, is that it, legally speaking does nothing. Legal representatives are under no obligation to do anything in response to protests.

If nobody protests, people who have the choice to do something will see that nobody gives a shit... And why should they stick their necks out for a cause that nobody gives a shit about?

The Arab Spring turned into The Arab Winter in a wave of repression. Some good has come out of it but the link you have provided says this:

Although the long-term effects of the Arab Spring have yet to be shown, its short-term consequences varied greatly across the Middle East and North Africa. In Tunisia and Egypt, where the existing regimes were ousted and replaced through a process of free and fair election, the revolutions were considered short-term successes.[337][338][339] This interpretation is, however, problematized by the subsequent political turmoil that emerged in Egypt and the autocracy that has formed in Tunisia. Elsewhere, most notably in the monarchies of Morocco and the Persian Gulf, existing regimes co-opted the Arab Spring movement and managed to maintain order without significant social change.[340][341] In other countries, particularly Syria and Libya, the apparent result of Arab Spring protests was a complete societal collapse.[337]

I am just pointing out that nonviolent protests usually get it done, especially after crackdowns.

Check out #Post Milošević; and #Legacy; sections on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Otpor (couldn't figure out how to get deeplinks on mobile).

TL;DR: Besides Ukraine and Egypt, they went to a few more places, in some it worked, in others it didn't. And there were revelations of foreign (e.g. USAID) funding.

There’s a big difference between funding organizing groups like Indivisible (which, yes, foundations linked to Soros do - although I suspect not at the magnitude you’re imagining), and directly paying protestors (which doesn’t happen to any notable degree)

Want to understand this? Go to a local Indivisible or Democratic Party meetup and you will see the normal people with your own eyes. Go to a big protest like ‘No Kings’, or a rally during campaign season and you’ll be surrounded by ‘normal people’.

I’d personally be fine with restrictions on where funding for political organizations comes from (although I’m not sure how you make that compatible with the 1st amendment) - but what you’re saying is ridiculous, and it’s a worrying symptom of our current political climate that people can be so out of touch as to believe it.

Despite what the proponents of Citizen's United might have us believe, money != speech, and adding restrictions to political donations is perfectly compatible with the first amendment.

Would-be donors are allowed to advocate for political positions just the same as anybody else. Nobody is stopping them. That would still be the case with donation limits. They can still get on TV and argue their case.

There is already a precedent for limiting donations. Try donating money to ISIS or Hezbollah and see if the government considers that an exercise of your first amendment rights.

On top of being false, that's kind of a non-statement. You probably don't see average people around you protesting because if the average person was engaging in this then that'd imply close to half the country protesting. But they're definitely out there even if a small minority.

The average person doesn't have the time to protest (because how do you protest when you need to go to a job to put food on the table and keep health insurance). Or they're doing fine with the current state of affairs even if they don't like what's happening. Protesting is naturally always going to be a fringe thing and you better hope for everyone's sake that it stays that way or else you end up with a coup or revolution like in less developed nations.

both sides have paid activists because it's a full time job. but those paid activists aren't the crowd.

Instead what I found were a bunch of kind mostly elderly people sharing news that I had read online a week before, and some folks gathering signatures for positions running for office.

You are doing a huge disservice to yourself by staying indoors and making assumptions about stuff that you aren't investigating in person.

Of course organizing takes time and money. The amount can vary.

This is like complaining about water being wet.

If you're just going and printing flyers and putting them on poles that still takes time and money.

So if a single dollar goes to a cause, it’s funded?

You can apply this to protests of all political causes.

You went and beat up on a straw man that no professional organizing or funding takes place at all, a claim nobody made.

source? best I see from the linked fox news article is less than $8M. Note, we have customers sending marketing email and sms spending more than this and they are not getting the same attention No Kings did.

> though Soros' foundations have awarded grants to Indivisible every year since the organization's conception in 2017. In total, the Open Society Foundations have awarded $7.61 million in grants to the group behind the "No Kings" protest [1]

1: this is the direct source that the abc article was referencing: https://www.foxnews.com/politics/soros-foundation-helping-fu...

I was specifically referring to the idea of 'paid protestors'. The extremely online right (which includes many people in the administration) sees a crowd of 10 or 20 or 50,000 people and immediately starts dismissing them all as 'paid protesters', denying the possibility that those thousands of people might have given up their free time to come together and express a political opinion. I think you understand the difference very well.

The major No Kings events were in June and October last year. January is not a great time for outdoors protests in much of the country. Does it somehow make the protests inauthentic if focus has now shifted towards ICE?

I guess I'm not a normal person then. I didn't realize that I was a hyper activist because I drew on some cardboard and that my group of friends was being financed. I better go demand for my Soros-check from them.

Perhaps the protests were less about Twitter than you may be assuming, and more about something else that happened much later than the Twitter acquisition?

That was the point.

If the goal was to "trigger" him I don't think the protests succeed in any meaningful way. Innocent Tesla owner where the primary victims followed by share holder, (damaged) property owners and people affected by insurances premiums due to the vandalism.

And then of course there are still a handful of people in jail for crimes committed in relation to the Tesla protest. Arguably not victims but still a negative effects that clear outweigh any perceived positive effect it all had on Musk.

He left his position as planned from the beginning, the protest had zero effect on what he did trough DOGE.

The negative effects were on all the people fired, thus why Virginia swung massively toward the Democrats in the 2025 elections.

You said the protest lead to him no longer be part of the administration which is factually incorrect. His position was limited from the start and he left as planned.

Elon Musk's role in DOGE was limited because he was designated as a "special government employee", a federal employment category defined under 18 U.S.C. § 202 that restricts service to no more than 130 days in any 365-day period.

https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/202

This was publicly know back in February. The exact date wasn't know since it was not public when he because such a "special government employee". It turns out they started counting days straight from the inauguration date or rather the Executive Order 14158 (Creation of DOGE) date which was on the same day.

It is totally accurate to say he left as planned and thus also totally accurate to say that one of the statements above claiming the protest "won" by pushing him out of the administration is factually incorrect.

Even the DOGE was opaque and its status unclear. Having him with a black eye and chainsaw organising anything was madness. Even Trump eventually saw it.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Department_of_Government_Effic...

I wasn't paid anything. I rode the bus downtown, thinking it'd be easier than driving / parking, which wasn't quite the brilliant strategy I thought it'd be. I marched down the street with literally tens of thousands of people.

There were definitely some people there who seemed to be the activist type (who find something to protest every weekend), but it was mostly normal people. I saw at least three people I know. I saw regular-looking men in cargo shorts and women in straw hats. It was during the football game, and I saw many people wearing team colors and one sign that said, "It's gotten so bad I'm missing football to protest." One guy was wearing a "Jesus is King" t-shirt. A woman was carrying a "Hicks Against Facism" sign. Another guy was carrying his vinyl copy of Rush's "A Farewell to Kings" as a protest sign.

So, not paid protesters carrying boilerplate signs supplied to them by some organization. Just regular people who are not OK with what's going on.

Organization isn't the issue that is of course perfectly normal. But stuff like handing out printed signs, protestors posing for photos in a way that makes it look like the crowd is much larger than it actually is. These kind of things aren't necessary if there is a real significant % of people unhappy enough to go protests. There are also faces known that travel from protest to protest. It's of course their right to do so but it seem strange nonetheless. Maybe they are just filthy rich and have no hobbies or maybe they do in fact get paid and are part of an organization that lets them jet around for free to be a protest groupie.

A form of:

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_true_Scotsman

?

I see them regularly just driving around.

And then they lost and the odds of those people being paid actors seems less ridiculous.

It's a fact that Kamala burned through $1 billion in four months, including paying tens of millions on performances (Beyonce, Lady Gaga,...) and $1 million to Oprah to host an event. That attracted supporters indirectly even though they didn't get "paid". "Incentivized" is better?

Would that Americans use the term more accurately.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_Floyd_protests says $1-2B in damage and more than 19 deaths.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/oct/31/americans-kill... says 25 deaths.

I honestly don't even know what you're referring to. There have been tragedies related collapses of stadiums and trampling due to poor crowd control.

But that is not even remotely similar to what we're talking about.

1. Politics are religion more than ever before. There is a solid MAGA core that will not turn on Trump for any reason. When confronted by uncomfortable truth, they dismiss it as lies. When they can't dismiss it as a lie, they choose not to care. The Democrats have people like this too, but they haven't been hired and turned into a paramilitary goon squad the way ICE has. Yet. The "unreasonables" on both sides of the spectrum are not going anywhere. After Trump dies they could easily be harnessed by someone else. When so many people cannot be swayed, the impact of protests are dulled. The "unreasonables" aren't swayed when the other side protests, and the mushy middle will tend to dismiss many protests as products of people they view as extremists.

2. There is a ruling class (i.e. Billionaires) with a firm grip on power (through both parties) and complete insulation from the public. In his discourses on Livy, Machiavelli observed that Roman officials who protected themselves from those they ruled with forts or castles tended to rule in a more brutal and less productive manner than those who lived among the governed. If you want good government, those governing should feel vulnerable enough to behave reasonably. U.S. billionaires, and the politicians they own, are completely sealed off from public wrath. Minnesota could burn and none of them would get more than a warm fuzzy watching it on the news. If a protest doesn't scare billionaires it will have no impact on how the U.S. is governed.

3. "Flood the zone" is just one of the tactics being used to numb people and encourage them to switch off from politics. The nastiness of hyper-partisan politics is, at times, a distracting entertainment, but it's fatiguing the rest of the time. People rightly observe that both of the U.S.'s diametrically opposed parties tend to do similar things (e.g. tax breaks for the rich) and are funded by the same billionaires every election. If people will scream at you for picking a side in what looks like a sham of false choice, why not just stay home, plug in, and tune out? When a big protest happens, people who are numb and tuned out are just going to change the channel and consume some more billionaire-produced pap.

As a Canadian, what's going on in the U.S. has been terrifying to watch. We're so culturally similar that what happens in the U.S. could easily happen here. Even if it doesn't, we're still subject to the fallout. A classic pattern of authoritarian regimes is to lash out at allies and neighbours in order to give their people threats to fear more than their own government. Well, that's us. If MAGA isn't checked, Canada will likely be subjected to far more than tariff's and threats.

It's hard for Canadians to appreciate how nations elsewhere in the world can harbour such bitter and long-lived enmities against one another. We're now experiencing how they're created. It's not hatred yet, but the trust we once had for Americans is gone and won't return for generations. For the rest of my life, we'll always be four years or less away from what could be the next round of American insanity.

That strategy is also typical of China. Whenever there's a protest (for example the HK protests), it's always financed by western interests. Even volunteers organically organising themselves to help victims of the Tai Po fire were deemed to be western interests trying to discredit China. It's a surprisingly effective tactic.

I just always wonder how we have so many people eating this up when the strategy is so blindingly obvious.

I’m not saying I support the center positions, nor that I don’t support what is often called an extreme position, just that this seems to be a watershed moment globally.

What if political discourse was focused on policy not identity and couched in terms of mutual interest instead of party affiliation? There would still be tensions, trade-offs, conflicts and political strategy at play but the discourse would be infinitely more reasonable.

I think this is what we mean when we talk about "center positions": a "value-based realism" that recognizes that society is nothing but the mutual alignment of values and interests. I don't understand why "common sense" has become so unpopular.

IMHO, that's exactly it. You named it. Common sense is actually missing from more and more people. Why that is? I don't know - lack of basic common sense education, family, primary school, too much facebook, tiktok, common sense defined by YT shorts?

It's going to get far worse once the AI generation grows up.

It makes perfect sense that when an organization loses funding it ceases operations, why is this now evidence of cointelpro?

Heard of ZunZuneo, National Endowment for Democracy, Reporters Without Borders? The DOGE campaign put a spotlight on the ulterior motives of these "independent" USAID funded initiatives.

American soft power is good. It means we don’t need to use direct action aka bombs and missiles.

I just reject your claims on this. US soft power is, for the United States, good and desirable.

Not sure where this is coming from.

It shouldn't be surprising considering how naive people are in general. People actually believe we live in democracies despite a century of evidence to the contrary. Propaganda and indoctrination are highly effective, and why wouldn't they be? I think it's the same reason we end up with so many unhinged people believing in reptilian conspiracy theories ir whatever: the media is always lying to them on a daily basis, so they can't trust it and without educations of their own have no way to distinguish truth from falsity anymore... why not just go with what sounds good or feels right. What other option do they have? Buy in, tune out or be lost. Those are the choices for 99% of people alive. Also, who has the energy anyway? Few are as privledged with time and energy as we are.

In a case of relatively organic or somewhat spontaneous action, 3.5% of people doing something is huge. The reason is because in organic or spontaneous action, those 3.5% probably represent the views of vastly more than 3.5% of people. But as actions become more organized and less spontaneous, you reach a scenario where those 3.5% may represent fewer and fewer people other than themselves. At the extreme example of effective organization (where you get 100% participation rate), those 3.5% of people may represent nobody beside themselves.

I was perusing the dataset they used [1] for the '3.5% rule' and it seems that a more unifying theme is leaders losing the support of their own base. And it's easy to how that could strongly correlate with large organic protest since you've done things to the point of not only pissing off 'the other side' but also your own side.

I think Nixon is a good example of this. There were vastly larger protests against Nixon's involvement in Vietnam than there were for Watergate. Yet the Vietnam protests had no effect whatsoever, while he left office over Watergate. The difference is that he lost the confidence of his own party over Watergate. Had he not resigned, he would likely have been impeached and convicted. Had 3.5% of people protested Watergate, he would even be included on this list, which I think emphasizes that protests (or lack thereof) are mostly a tangential factor.

[1] - https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentId=doi...

Even their own. Jan 6 for example. It was a guided tour given by FBI agitators apparently.

Unless there is some concrete penalty (and even then!) why wouldn’t they believe the thing that makes them feel justified and righteous.

Providing evidence is tricky, because most evidence hints rather than proves, so it's very subject to confirmation bias and is easily dismissed by those who disagree.

There are large filter bubbles right now that make it hard to agree on basic facts. I don't think any of us really knows for sure what's organic and what's synthetic right now.