Tweeting about a revolution

Want to change the world? Start a Tweet-storm. Armed only with smartphones, protesters across the globe are routinely using social media platforms to present their own version of live events, dodging mainstream media outlets to quickly spread the word around a city, a country, and even the planet.

From the Arab spring and Turkey's brief banning of Twitter in March, to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and Hong Kong's Occupy Central with Love and Peace (OCLP) movement, social media is playing a pivotal role in the success - and the failure - of protest movements everywhere.

Platforms including Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, Vine and WhatsApp can also become critical sources of news during emergencies, if trusted news and government websites get hacked or taken over.

However, social media is mostly about getting exposure. "In today's online-focused society, social media makes or breaks a protest," says Dinah Alobeid at the New York office of the analyst company Brandwatch, who has been studying the social media activity surrounding the OCLP movement. "There is no middle ground. If it's not trending on Twitter or flooding Facebook, then it most likely isn't gaining traction on the ground."

The social media conversation about OCLP was only fleeting. Data from Brandwatch shows that between September 11 and November 10, there were a mere 127,000 mentions of OCLP on social media. (Although that's possibly because other hashtags were created after the protests broke out in late September, such as #OccupyMongkok, #OccupyCausewayBay and even #OccupyHK. Then came #UmbrellaMovement.)

Social media has played a huge role in struggles elsewhere. "When the Turkish prime minister banned Twitter, tweets about the ban and those from Turkey itself increased significantly," Alobeid says. "When Boko Haram kidnapped more than 200 schoolchildren in Nigeria, the #bringbackourgirls hashtag and social activism campaign brought global awareness to the situation."