Revolutionary Twits
Protests in Moldova Explode, With Help of Twitter!
A crowd of more than 10,000 young Moldovans materialized seemingly out of nowhere on Tuesday to protest against Moldova’s Communist leadership, ransacking government buildings and clashing with the police. The sea of young people reflected the deep generation gap that has developed in Moldova, and the protesters used their generation’s tools, gathering the crowd by enlisting text-messaging, Facebook and Twitter, the social messaging network.
The related posts on Twitter are being posted at a record-breaking rate – I’ve been watching the Twitter stream for the last 20 minutes – and I see almost 200 new Twitter messages marked with “pman” (virtually all of them in Romanian, with only one or two in English)… All in all, while it’s probably too early to tell whether Moldova’s Twitter revolution will be successful, it would certainly be wrong to disregard the role that Twitter and other social media have played in mobilizing (and, even more so, reporting on) the protests.
In fact Twitter did not play that big role. The story is quite simple – young and active bloggers decided to have a flash-mob action, lighting candles and “mourning Moldova” because of Communists victory… They agreed on the time and place of the action through the network of Moldovan blogs (blogs aggregator blogosfera.md), and social networks like Facebook/Odnoklassniki, etc…. That was a civic protest, which grew up out of a flash-mob initiative organized through blogs and social network connections, and then which grew even bigger as the protesters used mobile phones to summon their friends and classmates.
Mihai Muscovici… suggests that the Twitter community in the whole of Moldova is around 100 to 200 strong and there is scant mention of the organisation of the protests at all apart from a rather vague quote the Times has put in at the end of the piece… As it stands, the Twitter revolution is a myth. What happened, and is still happening, in Moldova is a protest organised using social media.
Last word to Evgeny:
It really helped that even non-technology people in the U.S. and much of Western Europe are currently head over heels in love with Twitter. It’s really good that the Moldovan students didn’t organize this revolution via Friendster or LiveJournal (which is still a platform for choice for many users in Eastern Europe). If they did, they would never have gotten as much attention from the rest of the world.
Indeed. The reason I’m posting this – even though it’s not strictly speaking “humanitarian” – is because it shows three things which to some extent follow from each other:
- It’s hazardous to use press coverage to determine what tools are being used and what tools are working in a crisis. The press frequently have even less understanding of the tools than they do of the crisis, and they <em>will</em> focus on what’s “popular”. It’s very difficult to verify the claims about these tools while the crisis is unfolding, so I find it hard to blame them – they need people to read their stuff – but the people making the claims need to be more careful.1
- They need to be more careful because media coverage of technology is the product of the echo chamber that dominates the technology sector – and steers the media when it comes to reporting on technology. No offense to all those tech guys providing their opinions to the media – they are smart, no doubt – but because they’re tech guys they love Twitter, and discuss it a lot, so that’s the headline we read.
- The good news is that Facebook (and other social networking sites) have demonstrated their utility as organising tools in advance of a protest; mobile phones we already knew are of maximum utility even while the crisis is full on (right up until the network goes down). Twitter – maybe good visibility for people on the periphery or further out, but I’m just not convinced that microblogging in general is of much use in a crisis. Head over to Jon’s place for the opposing point of view.
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- To be fair, in that initial article they only refer to Twitter as part of a suite of tools, but the general tenor of coverage has been “The Twitter Revolution” or something similar. [↩]
Interesting that your nay sayer, Daniel Bennett, sits at the BBC. The other night when the earthquake hit here in Rome I immediately jumped on Twitter and started posting. It led to me doing a live interview with the BBC. As my name scrolled across the screen I watched the presenter’s lips moved and I heard the questions through my mobile. Here’s my Tweet:
aidworkerdaily: Just did live interview with BBC.
It’s a shame my 5 minutes of fame came on such a tragic night and at 4am. Perhaps Daniel should should ask BBC’s @nathan_williams what he thinks of Twitter.
Jon Thompson
8 Apr 09 at 16:51
FYI – Inside Moldova’s Twitter Revolution (http://tinyurl.com/dmvwrc)
Jon Thompson
8 Apr 09 at 16:56
I like the idea that he’s “my” naysayer… maybe I can complete the set? I don’t think Bennett’s take is that Twitter is useless for journalists – who are clearly now pulling it as a resource – but that claims about how it was being used to organise the protests are largely without substance?
Paul Currion
8 Apr 09 at 17:04
Certainly early on the hype cycle when it comes to _organizing_ via social media, Twitter is particular. But on the _reporting and documenting_ side, we might be seeing something genuinely worth the hype. Certainly it raises awareness internationally. More, it gives unprecedented look at the detailed, individual actions and events that are usually lost, misrepresented, and glossed over as the “story” of an event unfolds. Even if it’s only a couple dozen twits, that’s sufficient. What we may see is the minute by minute social structure of a revolution.
Mikel
8 Apr 09 at 17:45
Reporting – yes definitely, although I think it’s easy to mistake the stream itself for the water in the stream, if you see what I mean. Documenting – if we mean “documenting” as in recording an event in a reasonably permanent form, then absolutely not.
I get the sense that the international exposure here is at least partly because of the novelty value of Twitter. In any case, that novelty value will be gone within a couple of years at most, and then it will be business as usual. International journalism is over, I think, but Twitter can’t replace it.
Paul Currion
8 Apr 09 at 17:56
Paul-
Interesting Moldovian mash-up via Trackernews.net: http://pman.cloudapp.net/
Twitter is international journalism.
Cheers,
Jon
Jon Thompson
8 Apr 09 at 19:13
Well, that mash-up is great but it isn’t “international journalism” – if it is, then my desktop RSS aggregator (Liferea, if anybody’s interested) is also international journalism. Which it clearly isn’t. I’m still not convinced that Twitter is journalism, any more than a telephone call to my dad to tell him what’s happening is journalism – while all journalism is a broadcast, not all broadcasts are journalism?
Paul Currion
8 Apr 09 at 19:24
[...] another thing to throw into the mix. Part of my thoughts (parts of my thought?) was generated by a post by Ethan Zuckerman entitled [...]
Revolutionary Twits Redux at humanitarian.info
8 Apr 09 at 19:33
Thanks to Paul Currion for saying what I would have said before me. If you read the rest of my blog – see Bangalore post as one of many examples – you’ll see that I’m all in favour of journalists using Twitter. In fact, I’ve trained some of them how to use it!
My point in this instance is that nobody has come forward with much evidence that Twitter was the main organisational tool either before or at the protests. (Ironically, I’ve at least pulled some tweets together that might suggest an organisational role, which not many other people have done who make the claims for a Twitter revolution). Twitter was used, but was one of many tools. And I think there is a strong case to suggest that blogs, forums, text messages, emails and word of mouth were as important as Twitter if not more so.
There was some highly misleading reporting on this. It seems pretty obvious to me that ‘thousands’ of young people were not all Twittering in Moldova at the protests for the reasons I outlined in my post. And yet this was claimed by several articles.
Daniel Bennett
10 Apr 09 at 1:01