A "Twitter Revolution"? A Second Look at the Uprising in Moldova

Nancy Scola | April 10, 2009 - 10:02am | 4 comments | Email This!

Back in my high school days, I hosted a sophisticated little soiree amongst some close friends that happened to turn into a raging kegger requiring of police intervention. How'd it happen? One friend called another, who called another, who called another, who called another, who called another. So on and so forth. (This was the prehistoric days before cell phones, so news of the party was traveling via land lines, if you can believe it.) Eventually, my house was packed to the gills with a rowdy bunch of strangers. Things finally came to a head when someone decided that it would be a good idea to bring lit tiki torches inside the house.

Now, is it fair to call that an epic house party a product of telephone technology? It seems a bit silly to do so. At the time, it seemed to me much more a product of the degenerate class of people I went to high school with. It's a question on my mind as people start to take a second look at went went down in the Moldovan capital city of Chisinau, where a reported 10,000 people gathered in the central square of Piata Marii Adunari Nationale and stormed government buildings there. The New York Times ran a story of the protest by writer Ellen Barry that put a heavy focus on Twitter. That, it seems, kicked off a frenzy of similar stories telling the tale of how young Moldovans, angry about the certification of election results that put the ruling Communist Party at 50% of the vote, took to Twitter and Facebook to generate the Chisinau protest.

But Daniel Bennett, a PhD student embedded at the BBC to study the impact of new media on war coverage, isn't so sure. "As it stands, the Twitter revolution is a myth," he writes. Bennett traces the spark of the protests to a core group of young activists, with investigative journalist Natalia Morari, exiled back to her home country after exposing corruption and possibly murder in Vladamir Putin's Russia, at the center. Morari herself, reports Amnesty International, now says that she only intended to organize a few hundred people. The several thousand that turned out, she argues, where opposition groups who took the opportunity of the small protest to throw, in effect, a rager. Says the group, "Amnesty International considers that they were exercising their right to freedom of expression and peaceful assembly and if arrested for organizing a peaceful assembly for which they had notified the authorities, Amnesty International will consider them to be prisoners of conscience." And Wired's Nathan Hodge reports that Morari and other organizers will be charged with "calls for organizing and staging mass disturbances."

For his part, Moldovan President Vladimir Voronin is convinced that it was actually Romanian nationalists behind the uprising, and has closed the border with the country that many young Moldovans see as a beacon of hope. Some in the opposition are arguing that Moldovan president Vladimir Voronin organized the uprising against his own party so that he might engineer a crackdown.

Bennett has a look at Morari's Live Journal blog and finds no mention of Twitter. (She does, though, talk in retrospect about the флэш-моба that went down on Monday, which of course is Russian for "flash mob.") Writes Bennett about the New York Times piece that started the "Twitter Revolution" meme, "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." To be sure, the Twitter stream of the #pman hashtag -- shorthand for the park in which the protests took place -- is still flowing rapidly. Understanding what's happening in there is, alas, hampered by my dreadful Romanian. But you have to wonder how many of the reporters repeating the "Twitter Revolution" theme speak it much better.

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Comments

That's not how I see it ...

by JonPincus on April 10, 2009 - 11:35am

Nancy,

Just as the People Power revolution Manila in 2001 is described as "the SMS Revolution", Chisinau in 2009 is likely to be remembered as the Twitter revolution: the moment when new technologies were deployed at scale in a way that fundamentally changed the dynamics.

Sure, a lot of the reporting has goten it wrong: the protests were organized and publicized via a lot of mechanisms, with Twitter playing a relatively small role at that stage. Focusing on what Twitter isn't misses the importance of what it is.

Twitter's played a key role in many ways: an information network when sites are blocked or overloaded, lightning-quick two-way engagement with supporters all over the world and a way of calling international media attention to the issue. Compare-and-contrast the attention to what's happening in Moldova with the Ukraine "Orange Revolution" a few months ago.

And on top of that, Twitter's a powerful symbol that technology is on the side of the young protestors and their allies. The state controls TV, harrasses and arrests local journalists, denies international journalists entry to the country ... and they can block access to sites and shut down the internet providers. Phones are much harder to block though -- shutting off cellphone service to the entire country for a protracted period of time would be very difficult. SMS is great for one-to-one communication, but not so good for a broadcast. Twitter and similar tools make a huge difference.

the Twitter community in the whole of Moldova is around 100 to 200 strong ...

More accurately, it was around 100 to 200 strong when the protests started. I suspect it's much larger now, and people have a lot more experience, much richer connections, and ties to international supporters.

And looking at it differently, if 100 to 200 Moldovan Twitterers could have this much impact in a "flash mob" situation, what could 1000 to 2000 Twitterers do working together? Or 10,000?

So I agree with Steve Ellis' position in the excellent Twitter-strations on the rise on Bulletproof blog

The fact that this comes just one week after social media played a major role in protests surrounding the G20 Summit serves as proof positive that activists have found their ideal communications tool.

jon

—

jon -- http://talesfromthe.net/jon

Spontaneous & Planned Revolutions (oh, and Twitter)

by StartHere on April 10, 2009 - 12:24pm

I agree with Nancy that we probably shouldn't be giving Twitter so much credit, at least not yet. At the same time, I agree with Jon that we can't completely dismiss it either. Perhaps this wasn't the "Twitter Revolution", but we can't deny that social software is becoming a very successful part of grassroots activism worldwide. Facebook has been getting a lot of credit for this as well, and with good reason.

I think social software and mobile technology will play more and more of a role in planning for actions as well as aiding with in-the-moment strategy and communication, but there is also something to be said for the "power of the people" to gather (or I guess, create "flash mobs") spontaneously without modern forms of communication.

The 1917 Russian Revolution is a great example - An event that began as a small march for women's rights and (against the warnings of the Bolsheviks who felt it wasn't the right time) turned into a full-blown revolution, generally unplanned and spontaneous (and successful in the short term). Perhaps if the Russians had social software back then, they would have been able to plan for what to do after they won the revolution.

Social software is starting to play a big part in organizing activists, and while it's not necessary to create a spontaneous mass action, it will likely prove helpful in planning for actions (and their aftermath) as well as keeping people in touch during the action. Perhaps the "Twitter Revolution" is what they'll end up calling these next 5 years in the history of technology?

A few other perspectives

by JonPincus on April 12, 2009 - 10:01am

Evgeny Morozov responds to Daniel Bennet in Moldova's Twitter revolution is NOT a myth on Foreign Policy with some excellent points, including

In the case of Moldova, it's possible that Twitter has made much bigger impact on the new media environment outside of (rather than inside) the Twittersphere by simply feeding a stream of blogs, social networks, and text messages with content. In my view, people who point to the low number of Twitter users in Moldova as proof of the mythical nature of the subject have conceptual difficulties understanding how networks work; on a good network, you don't need to have the maximum number of connections to be powerful -- you just need to be connected to enough nodes with connections of their own.

and

Finally, my original reasoning for dubbing this a "Twitter revolution" rather than a "Grape revolution" was to signify that it's qualitatively different -- mostly because of the role that technology played -- from the color revolutions in Georgia and Ukraine. I still think that this is the case -- and it's very hard for me to accept the opposite when I see Twitter still full of buzz around what happened.

Ethan Zuckerman's Unpacking the "Twitter Revolution" in Moldova is also well worth reading.

jon

PS: StartHere, I completely agree that multiple social network sites had major roles in organizing and getting the word out about the demonstration. It was fascinating watching the information on #pman twitter stream about which sites were blocked and overloaded. So like Evgeny, I think of "the Twitter revolution" as highlighting the general social network aspects as well as the specific role of Twitter.

—

jon -- http://talesfromthe.net/jon

Re:

by StartHere on April 13, 2009 - 12:53pm

@Jon - yes I agree!