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Moldova's Twitter Revolution: an inside look

by Amy Judd | April 8, 2009 at 06:25 pm

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As the uprising in Moldova continues, protesters are using social networking tools such as Twitter, LiveJournal, and Facebook to coordinate their protests and decide what is their next move. It seems as if many in the crowd are tweeting, updating and uploading from the centre of it all to tell the world what is going on.

Tweets are coming in every few seconds to #pman (short for Piaţa Marii Adunări Naţionale, the Romanian name for the capital city's biggest square). Demonstrators are complaining, for example, that the authorities had tried to block cellphone coverage in the center of town. Posting on Twitter, Ciprian wrote: "Communists take ur dirty hands out of our country! Don't cheat! Don't block sites and communications! Don`t block path to our freedom!"

Protesters are using Cloudapp as well, that aggregates material onto a single page; everything from Twitter updates to blogs and video. LiveJournal is alive with journal type updates:

Natalia Morar, described in the Russian press as one of the organizers of the anti-Communist flash mob, posted an announcement today on her LiveJournal page.

Twitter user 1arsz posts frequent updates from the protests (in Russian though).

The use of social-networking in mass organized events like this is not new, but on this scale it is quite impressive.

Over at Foreign Policy, Evgeny Morozov has a great post on yesterday's events. He asks: "Will we remember the events that are now unfolding in Chisinau not by the color of the flags but by the social-networking technology used?"

An excellent question really as now more focus is on how the protesters are drafting the events, versus what is actually happening there.
Moldova is not a country that reveives a lot of international press coverage anyway. However, these young people, armed with their phones, cameras and video cameras are starting to change that and this is only the beginning of the social media revolution and the role it will play in world politics.

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