social media

July 18, 2011

Dictators are toppling across the Arab world. What role has the Internet played in their demise? Young people went online to keep up with their friends and youth culture. In doing so, they became politicized. In Egypt, people shared a yearning to oust Hosni Mubarak, but each person was afraid to step forward. Once they saw how many other Egyptians agreed with them, they grew bolder.

With his digital town hall last November...Valenzuela’s assertive use and understanding of social media stand out as a chief positive contribution. This proactive social media presence falls in line with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton’s “21st Century Statecraft.”

Mumbai is a social media-savvy city. It is also a magnet for terrorists who engage in acts of spectacular violence.When the bombings occurred during evening rush hour, shutting down transit networks throughout the famously congested city, residents also kicked in to use the power of cloud computing to help.

The European Union - through the European External Action Service - should engage citizens, both inside the EU and around the globe, through the same medium which enabled protestors to topple autocrats and dictators. That being social media.

More than 750 million people have a Facebook account and more than 200 million people use Twitter, but the EU’s European External Action Service (EEAS) has only 4,132 followers on Twitter and 1,774 ‘likes’ on Facebook. The EEAS, the EU’s main foreign policy group, has all the presence of an ant on social media compared to Barrack Obama, who has more than 9 million Twitter followers.

Thanks to the rise of social media, news is no longer gathered exclusively by reporters and turned into a story but emerges from an ecosystem in which journalists, sources, readers and viewers exchange information. Journalists are becoming more inclined to see blogs, Facebook, Twitter and other forms of social media as a valuable adjunct to traditional media.

It is the most popular subject on China's Internet that no one is allowed to talk about. After overseas media reported the death of former president Jiang Zemin, web-savvy Internet users in China are finding creative ways to jump the Great Firewall, the cloak of Internet security authorities use to disrupt or halt access to things deemed too sensitive for the Internet.

The website is powered by Like For Israel, an online social media initiative formally launched just two weeks ago..A pilot project, Like For Israel is designed to be a tool for pro-Israel activists around the world, regardless of political views...

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