What social media did for Ferguson

When a grand jury decided not to indict Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson for shooting an unarmed teenager, Twitter predictably lit up -- a sudden, sweeping surge of 3.5 million tweets that spiked just before 9:30 p.m. Eastern and simmered for hours.

#Ferguson was active in the US, of course. But a visualization of tweets on the hashtag, published by Twitter, show tens of thousands of tweets outside the US as well: Messages from Germany, Spain and Britain. Tweets from Chile and Brazil. South Africa. South Korea. Indonesia. Mongolia. Saudi Arabia, even. The death of a teenage boy in a small town outside St. Louis had somehow come to mean something to people all over the world, for a variety of reasons: the racial inequities that many thought it exposed; the escalation of violence on the ground; the stubborn impression that, even in the world’s most powerful democracy, justice simply wasn’t being done. Each of those tensions and impressions and escalations also had a megaphone it wouldn’t have had 10 years ago. They became the purview of the many, not the few.