Twitter, Facebook and Social Activism

The world, we are told, is in the midst of a revolution. The new tools of social media have reinvented social activism. With Facebook and Twitter and the like, the traditional relationship between political authority and popular will has been upended, making it easier for the powerless to collaborate, coordinate, and give voice to their concerns. When ten thousand protesters took to the streets in Moldova in the spring of 2009 to protest against their country’s Communist government, the action was dubbed the Twitter Revolution, because of the means by which the demonstrators had been brought together. A few months after that, when student protests rocked Tehran, the State Department took the unusual step of asking Twitter to suspend scheduled maintenance of its Web site, because the Administration didn’t want such a critical organizing tool out of service at the height of the demonstrations. “Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt empowered and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy,” Mark Pfeifle, a former national-security adviser, later wrote, calling for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by their tools. Facebook warriors go online to push for change. “You are the best hope for us all,” James K. Glassman, a former senior State Department official, told a crowd of cyber activists at a recent conference sponsored by Facebook, A. T. & T., Howcast, MTV, and Google. Sites like Facebook, Glassman said, “give the U.S. a significant competitive advantage over terrorists. Some time ago, I said that Al Qaeda was ‘eating our lunch on the Internet.’ That is no longer the case. Al Qaeda is stuck in Web 1.0. The Internet is now about interactivity and conversation.”

These are strong, and puzzling, claims. Why does it matter who is eating whose lunch on the Internet? Are people who log on to their Facebook page really the best hope for us all? As for Moldova’s so-called Twitter Revolution, Evgeny Morozov, a scholar at Stanford who has been the most persistent of digital evangelism’s critics, points out that Twitter had scant internal significance in Moldova, a country where very few Twitter accounts exist. Nor does it seem to have been a revolution, not least because the protests—as Anne Applebaum suggested in the Washington Post—may well have been a bit of stagecraft cooked up by the government. (In a country paranoid about Romanian revanchism, the protesters flew a Romanian flag over the Parliament building.) In the Iranian case, meanwhile, the people tweeting about the demonstrations were almost all in the West. “It is time to get Twitter’s role in the events in Iran right,” Golnaz Esfandiari wrote, this past summer, in Foreign Policy.“Simply put: There was no Twitter Revolution inside Iran.” The cadre of prominent bloggers, like Andrew Sullivan, who championed the role of social media in Iran, Esfandiari continued, misunderstood the situation. “Western journalists who couldn’t reach—or didn’t bother reaching?—people on the ground in Iran simply scrolled through the English-language tweets post with tag #iranelection,” she wrote. “Through it all, no one seemed to wonder why people trying to coordinate protests in Iran would be writing in any language other than Farsi.”

Article link: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2010/10/04/101004fa_fact_gladwell

Now social media like Twitter and Facebook are the new tools to communicate with people out there.  These tools are vital nowadays that it has been used for political activities. For example in Malaysia, Twitter has been used to persuade people and disseminate information. Many politicians used Twitter to beg the ‘rakyat’ attention. By using twitter, the followers would be retweeting the post if they are supporting that particular person. It helps, but sometimes it would bring to a greater confusion.  By using Facebook and Twitter, the power of the political authority can be easily toppled, making it easier for the powerless like the citizen to collaborate, coordinate, and give voice to their concerns. Moldova in the spring of 2009, protest against their country’s Communist government, the action was called the Twitter Revolution, because of the means by which the demonstrators had been brought together. . Mark Pfeifle, a former national-security adviser said  “Without Twitter the people of Iran would not have felt authorized and confident to stand up for freedom and democracy,”, and later calling for Twitter to be nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. It means that there in Iran people used social media as their weapon to fight for the truth.  I agree with this, that sometimes politicians used social media to propagate what they feel and the sometimes not true information. They just publish the statements, and people just retweet their words either to support or to counter back. There are pro and cons in using social media, it would bring more peace or the other way round.

Written by,
Raja Fazureen