When Social Media Takes Sides!

With all the mayhem that’s happening in the MENA region, something is appearing repetitively in all the "revolts"; twitter, facebook, etc…

In a nutshell, if you're trending on the social media platforms it’s either your going UP, or most probably (nowadays) you're going DOWN! In order not to exaggerate, it might just mean that something is cooking and the word is getting out.

In this information age, nothing remains hidden, as much as nothing remains clear. To those that were following the massive (sometimes bloody) protests that are happening to overturn dictators, kings, sultans, revolution leader, etc (you name it)… have probably noticed how everything on the internet becomes like a rolling snowball:

1)      Hastags are created

a.       For every event, a corresponding hashtag is directly created to attribute a specified search criterion, mainly for those that want to know more about this subject or to those that want to update the globe with news regarding it.

b.      Hashtags have been personalized in a way that WILL mark history, bearing the name of a protest martyr, or the date where that revolution started, or simply a pointer to the place of origin of that special massive event

2)      Workgroups are initialized:

a.       You will see a bunch of people, peeps, tweeps, users…. That are getting along together (not necessarily physically, virtually is enough) to try and help as much as they can in providing the maximum amount of information (stop404.org) to all those interested in that particular subject, and the fever catches those not interested too just because of the traffic people are generating on the internet.

b.      Other than sharing information, workgroups have been started to actually help. Help in what when your behind a PC? Well, some have started missing persons list (@samerkaram). others have went on field and in the midst of the action to provide a live news coverage, not like the one a reporter would normally do but a coverage coming from people truly engaged in the action (@bloggerseif, @sarahkaram1)

3)      Alternatives found:

a.       The recent happenings have proved how easy it is to pull the plug off the internet, but not as easy to silence people. During a complete communications blackout, just get your hands on any telephone, call a number provided by the giant Google, your words are transformed and routed through the internet cloud for everyone to see.

Now this post is neither to state facts all of you already noticed, nor to praise people that have really worked (whether in good intentions or bad ones) to share what’s happening on the ground. It’s merely to state a change in the usual ways of information sharing especially that in addition to the users that are updating the whole world on what’s happening, major news agencies have followed the same pattern where their breaking and live news coverage sometimes reached the social media platforms before they even broadcast it on their TV/Radio stations, noting that they adjusted their news to the tags created by the users who initially started broadcasting the information.

But a couple of things arise from all of the above, the accuracy of the news shared, and that some people might use these platforms to spread some misleading info. Plus, we just need to hope that this new un-Orthodoxe way of acting doesn’t promote what @abzzyy referred to as “couch activism” because that’s when protests won’t make a difference no more!

 But the point remains; you don’t have Facebook and twitter (amongst other tools) on your side… You’re days are numbered!