The Evolution Of The Twitter Revolution

[Commentary] Perhaps the most important and consistent observation about the role social media plays in global protest movements is that it isn’t static; it evolves just as the movements and the media themselves do, analysts said.

Whenever Twitter and other social networks appear to have played a defining role in a protest or revolutionary movement -- from Iran to Egypt to Turkey to Ukraine -- there’s typically been a succeeding narrative that says it was less influential than it seemed at the time or functioned in a different manner. While these analyses are often valid, said Joshua Tucker, a New York University politics professor who’s studying social media’s role in the protests in Ukraine, they ignore a larger lesson: that social media as an organizing and broadcasting tool is growing with each protest movement and shows no sign of slowing. “It’s becoming increasingly difficult to imagine protests that don’t utilize social media,” he said. “If you want to understand protests moving forward -- what leads to protests, the dynamics of protests -- you have to get a handle on how social media impacts protesters.”