The Twitter Revolution for Activism

The twitter revolution is being seen as a tool to help gear up for country changing activism – recently Foreign Policy magazine published an article on how twitter is helping young Moldavian fight for their rights,

Foreign Policy: Ever since yesterday’s announcement that Moldova’s communists have won enough votes to form a government in Sunday’s elections, Moldova’s progressive youth took to the streets in angry protests. As behooves any political protest by young people today, they also turned to Facebook and Twitter to raise awareness about the planned protests and flashmobs. Led by youth NGOs like HydePark and ThinkMoldova, the protests began very peacefully – as a flashmob, where young people were simply supposed to hold lit candles in the vicinity of the square.

However, things got out of hand – and, with or without Twitter’s help, the crowd got much larger, reaching as many as 10,000 people, who first picketed Election Commission headquarters, the president’s residence (windows are reported to be broken – and there are also reports that this building has been stormed), and other government buildings before storming the building of the Moldovan Parliament, which happens to be just across the road.

Watching the events unfold on twitter I’m glad to take solace in the fact that even we here in Pakistan were part of digital history during the Long March to have harnessed this power and maybe put it to good use – we even had the hashtag #LONGMARCH as one of the most trended topic during the five days when Pakistan screamed for Judicial Independence

I had a discussion yesterday at the Media & Activism seminar at the Goethe Institute where we discussed extensively on how to harness this technology and put it into better use for the future for Pakistan, many ideas came through and I hope we can contribute enough to make a difference