Shared Voice

Yesterday I was thinking to myself about how useful Twitter can be for internet activism and protests and trying to figure out how I could lend my talents to activists everywhere.

I've known about thunderclap for a while, but one of the things I see as a flaw is that it doesn't really jive well with anonymous culture. For example, consider the case study here:

You're an activist who has found something troubling, you've decided to be a whistleblower, but you need to get your message out to as many people as possible. Organizing a Thunderclap is public, which means that you're going to lose some of the shock element from your leak.

So what do you do?

Well, I've made SharedVoice, which is an extremely simple twitter application that solves this usecase. It's simple and developer friendly: setup a simple webserver with Apache, MySQL, and PHP by following the setup instructions and then setup your configuration file named conf.json, something like this:

{
	"apiKey" : "YourTwitterAPIKey",
	"apiSecretKey" : "YourTwitterAPISecretKey",
	"dbname" : "databasename",
	"dbuser" : "databaseuser",
	"dbpass" : "databasepass",
	"dbhost" : "databasehost",
	"tweet" : "Anonymous exposes cop as member of KKK behind letter threatening to kill #Ferguson protesters http://bit.ly/11c5xIq	"
}

Once this is setup, the text in the "tweet" will appear on the page. In the screenshot above, the text there was "This is a test. Pay no mind. This is a test". After you've got the small page setup, you can simply start sharing the link to people you trust to spread your sentiments, and then once you're ready, hop onto the server to run post.php or setup a cronjob to fire at a specific time/date.

It's a simple tool, but I'm hopeful that someone will make use of it. As far as version's go, you'll need to use PHP < 5.5 since the mysql_* functions are deprecated after that point.