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Moldovan Protests: Was it really a “Twitter Revolution”?

source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/creepysleepy/3429118253/

Since Tuesday’s protests and riots in the Moldovan capital Chisinau, there has been much analysis on how this group of protesters was formed.  Initial reports focused primarily on the use of Twitter, while paying scant reference to other social media tools, let alone the still relevant power of human mobilization.  The extent to which Twitter has been connected to the event has even led to unfortunate outcomes such as the charging of Natalia Morar, a Moldovan activist blamed for starting the “revolution” using the application.

The analysis on the technological aspects of this event in the past few days have revealed a different story.  It still involves Twitter, but Twitter has a different role.  While Twitter had a part in the pre-protest mobilization in and around Chisinau on Monday night, it may not have necessarily turned the protests into mobs or rioters, nor did it necessarily invoke the violence that occurred on Tuesday, as some believe.

As Evegeny Morozov, a fellow at the Open Society Institute, pointed out, Twitter’s more important role was getting the information out to the world, bringing it international attention and keeping the story alive and buzzing, as well as acting as a channel to push out user-generated content from on the ground.  After some great immediate analysis of the Twitter scene in Moldova (which was a follow up to his initial, but still quite insightful assessment on Tuesday), Morozov found that there were actually very few registered Twitter users in the country, and he suspects that most of the Tweets on #pman were not on the ground and were elsewhere in the world, taking information and pushing it along.

Aside from the fact that the government of Moldova quickly shut down cell phone service for the square where the riots took place, it seems there is limited use for Twitter in terms of mobilization efforts once you already have people in the square.  The violence was somewhat self-contained and more of a product of human beings being human beings than a technologically enhanced provocation.  As you might predict, the use of a megaphone became more useful than using Twitter.

However, the broader set of social media tools beyond Twitter seems to have played a greater part in the process of mobilization than originally thought, as Daniel Bennett hints at in his blog post discussing the events.  One commenter to Bennet’s blog, Julien, stated that “If it were social media, I’d say it were rather social networks like Facebook. I saw messages from Moldovan contacts the evening before asking to gather for the first meetings on Monday.”  Even more telling was this comment by zerolab:

“As evisoft stated, Twitter was used for the initial organization and consequent spread of information. Add facebook statuses tied to twitter updates and a few other means like SMSes, word of mouth, LiveJournal.

There is no doubt about Twitter’s role on starting/organizing the protests, but they’ve evolved into something bigger and way too hard to coordinate anything.”

There’s no doubt that there was a complex system of social media tools that were being used prior to and during the event, but they went beyond Twitter, and included blog aggregators like blogosfera.md, Facebook, and regionally-specific social networks such as Odnoklassniki.

The use of Twitter cannot, however, be discounted.  This is a very interesting case of more sophisticated tactics for activism.  People have realized the ability of the tool not only to draw people to your cause, mobilize efforts or provide information, but they were able to harness it’s ability to spread information with the explicit goal of attracting attention to a particular event that otherwise may have gone largely unnoticed.  For them, personally, this means international pressure on a government and an election that determines their very well-being.

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• Gallery: Moldova Protesters Take to the Streets … and Tweets (wired.com)

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