Social Media and Global Activism

Is Social Media Growing Up – Can Social Media Actually be Used as an Instrument of Change in Our World?

Just this week there have been many mainstream news stories that have talked about how Twitter was used to get information out to the people during the elections in Iran because the government had a strangle hold on the media in that country.

When the Iranian government clamped down on independent media in the wake of hardline President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s re-election, Twitter user Alison Gianotto decided to get involved.

In nontechnical terms, Gianotto used Twitter to communicate with others. Together, they set up a system that masked the origin of the communication, allowing Iranians who used it to send and receive Web traffic without being censored.

Twitter, once the realm of techies, found itself thrust into the center of media and world politics. CNN.com featured images sent from cell phones in Iran through Twitter accounts. Firsthand reports from the social networking service were featured in The

According to Associated Press reports, even theWhite House was glued to the screen. Officials’ reliance on tweets from Iran was so great that the State Department asked Twitter to hold off on a scheduled outage for maintenance so the information would continue to flow.

The question now is, could Social Media be used to bring about human rights change in our world?

Twitter has been criticized by many for being just a lot of noise from an ADHD generation as millions of people spend hours glued to their computer screen.  But could it really be used to bring about real Human Rights change around the globe?

I have always thought Knowledge is power but…

Any tool has the power to be used both for good and for evil so only time will tell…

What do you think?