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Civil unrest Moldova in April, 2009 and and election fraud protests in Iran in June, 2009 make it clear that social media is now part of activists' toolkits. With the ability to route around censorship and route around restricted internet access, microblogging tools like Twitter and Identica, and social gathering sites like Facebook increase the power of social change activists.

In "The fire and the food: Why there's no such thing as a Twitter revolution" Ivan Boothe writes:

It appears that Twitter was a good tool to use in the cases Jon cited and I mentioned above. But if organizers limit themselves to seeing Twitter as a strategy in and of itself — without considering the strategy apart from the tool — they risk overlooking ways to run a more effective campaign on other platforms, or augmenting a campaign using multiple platforms.

Boothe is a good reminder that Twitter, like any other tool, is not the strategy itself. Whether Facebook, MySpace, or Twitter, if you think of the tool as an end in of itself and not as a method, a tactic used, to get where you want to go you are setting yourself up for failure. So how do we best use social media?

What is social media good for?

• Getting news out quickly: If the situation on the ground is changing quickly, it is unlikely that the media, any media, is going to be able to get the news out faster than word of mouth. Tools like Twitter provide a technological extension of word-of-mouth information dissemination.
• Getting information through barriers: How authorities in Iran responded to social unrest by clamping down on peoples' abilities to disseminate information is instructive. How Iranian activists responded to the clamp-down is even more so. When internet sites are blocked they used SMS; when SMS was blocked they used proxies. Whatever the barrier Iranian activists routed around the damage and got information out.
• Routing around censorship: While many journalists are courageous in covering civil unrest their sponsoring organizations are not always so. In any case, being an institution or an organization makes it easier for authorities to bully journalists and the organizations they work for. Activists using social media face many of the same dangers as journalists but their diffusion and relative anonymity makes them harder to contain.
• Facilitate ground mobilization: Using social media can facilitate ground mobilization. Facilitating mass organization, such as flash mobs, is made easier with social media but is still primarily an organizational task that takes people power. Social media can make your audience more receptive to organizing by making the event seem cool and encouraging people to join by creating an impression that the event, whether for social change or not, is in.

Bibliography

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Moldova_civil_unrest
2. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2009_Iranian_election_protests
3. Evgeny Morozov - http://neteffect.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2009/04/07/moldovas_twitter_revolution
4. Nathan Hodge - http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2009/04/inside-moldovas/
5. Ivan Boothe - http://rootwork.org/blog/2009/04/fire-food-why-theres-no-such-thing-twitter-revolution
6. Kevin Drum - http://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2009/06/twitter-revolution
7. Marc Ambinder -http://politics.theatlantic.com/2009/06/its_too_easy_to_call.php
8. Bruce S. Trachtenberg - http://comnetwork.typepad.com/my_weblog/2009/06/somehow-it-all-adds-up.html
9. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flash_mob