Twitter and the online revolution in Moldova

 

An anonymous reader on slashdot writes:

“Reacting to allegedly fraudulent election procedures, students are storming the presidency and parliament of the small eastern European country of Moldova. It is reported that they used Twitter to organize. Currently twitter and blogs are being used to spread word of what is happening since all national news websites have been blocked. If the 1989 Romanian revolution was the first to be televised, is this the first to be led by twitter and social networks?”

Jamie points out this interesting presentation (from March 2008) by Ethan Zuckerman about the realities of online activism, including how governments try to constrain it.

UPDATE 1 - Daniel Korski from Global Dashboard writes:

Text messaging played a key role in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution, but in Moldova they have gone one step further and are using Twitter to organise the days’ events. As this blogpost explains,  the most popular discussions on Twitter in the last 48 hours have been posts marked with thetag “#pman“, which is short for “Piata Marii Adunari Nationale”, the main square in Chisinau, where the protesters began their marches.

The BBC reports here.

G20 update; crowdsourced crisis information live

More cameras than protesters?

It appears that the amount of media presence, Internet and otherwise, is having a large magnifying effect on the perception of the protests themselves.  A Google blog search at 16:36 found over 997,000 blog hits for “G20 protesters“, over 3 million web pages, and nearly 15,000 news items.  That is probably several orders of magnitude higher than the number of protesters actually at the site.

Traffic on Twitter seems mixed, with a large amount of discussion on the role and impact of the media.  Notes such as;

4.28pm:
On Twitter, Snufkin21 says Stop the War protesters booed the mediapresent “for hyping up the G20 violence”. The huge media presence has been criticised by a number of people on Twitter who believe it’s encouraged extreme elements to “play to the gallery”.

Are intermixed with live accounts such as;

4.07pm: 
Police on horses have carried out two charges down Threadneedle Street in a bid to disperse protesters, says Alok Jha, who is at the scene. Alok said everything had been calm beforehand and demonstrators have not been impressed by the police response.

Mixed messages

There are a variety of conflicting claims being made, about the magnitude of violence, the presence of the media, and the reaction of the police.  Reading the Twitter feed directly (Twitter search, #G20) yields a confusing array of opinion, advice, updates, and news items.  Including the following excerpts;

DanSpring: Well done the Police today at #G20. Felt safe in Romford disaster recovery office!

pgb63: Stephen Harper tasered at G20!

Acostaf: Getting far away from #G20, Cannon st and London Bridge working as normal

Protests + Internet = Force Multiplier

This is an interesting mix of content, coming fast and furious from all angles.  It is reminiscent of  many aspects of the ongoing discussion between Paul Currion and Patrick Meier, about the issues around crowdsourced crisis data.  Paul writes that, “crowdsourcing is unfamiliar, it’s untested in the field and it makes fairly large claims that are not well backed by substantial evidence.”

Among it’s dangers, we argue, is the rapid magnification of false or intentionally deceptive data.  Patrick calls this “crisis magnification“.  We discussed it in depth in here.  What we are seeing with the G20 protests in an excellent example of this.  No matter what is actually happening on the ground, there is a massive, unfiltered, and confusing amount of information being generated. 

Here comes everysource

While we can argue that this massive generation of fresh live content is a good thing (as Patrick does here), it is clearly a new thing, with uncertain outcomes and value.  Clay Shirky, author of “Here Comes Everybody”, writes about the problem of filtering this massive amount of information.

The old ways of filtering were neither universal nor ideal [referring to TV and print]…  Mass amateurization has created a filtering problem vastly larger than we had with traditional media; so much larger, in fact, that many of the old ways are simply broken.

What is interesting, he notes, is that although it is possible to for everyone to read anyone’s blog, Twitter feed, or website, it is not possible for anyone to read everyone’s information.  

In fact this isn’t the way it works.  The vast majority of this content is generated by people close to or within your social network (personal or professional) and is intended for people close to or within your social network.  Web 2.0 and social media has taught us that although there may be over 250 million blogs on the Internet, the vast majority of this information is local, read by practically no one, and only intended for your friends and colleagues. 

Crowdsourced crisis information FOR YOUR FRIENDS

Could the same principle apply to crowdsourced crisis information?  Crowdsourced crisis information won’t be broadcast in the traditional sense, with millions of people listening to a single source.  Instead, communities of trust and relationships will build over time, with individual air workers, responders, and agencies building networks of trusted information sources just as we build networks of trusted friendships.

It isn’t as if field workers and disaster responders will go to any old Twitter feed they find and trust any bit of information they get texted about.  As in all social media, they will go to the ones they trust first.  Crowdsourcing doesn’t change this, it just lower the bar of entry for participating in the conversation.

Paradoxically, this new flood of information might end up having the opposite effect; crisis responders who only pay attention to their trusted sources and ignore the “weak signals” flooding in from all sides at once.  

Or maybe the opposite might happen?  Maybe the promise of crowdsourced crisis information has nothing to do with aid responders.  Maybe it will work just like Facebook, MySpace, and other forms of social media work.  A bomb goes off in your neighbourhood, you text your friends, who Twitter their work colleagues, who call their parents, who write a blog post read only by their cousins.  Maybe the AP will pick it up, maybe there will be value for figuring out how many dead and wounded need treatment.  

But at the end of the day, perhaps crowdsourced crisis information isn’t all that different from any kind of shared information; it all depends on who you talk to.

G20 protests live and networked

There are a series of very interesting developments around the G20 protests in London today, indicative of new uses of technology for advocacy and collaboration.

Twitter / live blogging

The Guardian has a liveblog of protest related events, found here.  They post an interesting Twitter roundup, as below:

9.18am: 
Twitter round up:

Last Hours: “Cops & security guards on every corner of the city.”

Christian Action: “Lots of jeans & trainers in City today. Strange air of anticipation.”

Russell Brand: “Today at the Bank at noon I shall be protesting by being enraptured with joy and beauty and not being bludgeoned into tedium.”

Pop Chris “Staff @ RBS, Bishopsgate are told that once in, they cannot leave the building until end of business. Expecting the worst.“

Visualization

Also from the Guardian, a very beautiful interactive visualization, scenario planning style, of different groups involved in the protests.

Live video

G20 Voice is streaming live video from different events, here.  They also have a Twitterstream here.

G20 activists hope Twitter will give them the edge over the police

The Times (of all places!) reports on the use of Twitter by ‘militants’ to plan protests in London ahead of the G-20 meeting here, today.

“Militant demonstrators aiming to disrupt next week’s G20 summit will use Twitter and text message alerts to stay one step ahead of a massive police operation.”

You don’t say?  Young politically active groups using mobile technology to out-organise, out-think, and out-maneuver stodgy old bureaucracies dedicated to defending the status quo using mid-20th century conceptual frameworks?  Quelle surprise!

UPDATE – As of Sunday, the protest didn’t seem to amount to much of a system disruption.  See the Guardian article here.

UPDATE 2 – “Middle-class academics, squatters and students” must use Twitter too.  I bet Marx would have used Twitter if he could have figured out how to sync his Blackberry.