A Twitter Revolution

The international version of Speigel Online had arecent article titled, "Fearing Uprising, Russia Backs Moldova's Communists" about the student uprisings in in Moldova to protest the Communist rule of that country. 

Similar to other uprisings in the region, these appear to be student and citizen uprisings against the corruption in the government. One of the notable things about these recent protests is how effectively Twitter was used to both communicate among the protesters and to communicate events to the rest of the world. 

Riot police took back the Moldovan parliament and presidential buildings on Wednesday, and Thursday was calm in Chisinau. But a large protest in the capital was brewing on Friday -- organized on a Twitter stream tagged #pman, which stands for the initials of Chisinau's biggest square-- with protesters claiming the government would use the threat of a Romanian coup as a reason to arrest people illegally.

"Communists block students in their classrooms and threaten them with exmatriculation if they protest," claimed one Twitterer on Friday. "Somebody help Moldova pleaseeee," wrote another.

This sort of thing is getting more and more common. As Spiegel notes: 

In the West, the uprising looked like another post-Soviet "color" revolution, a people's movement against an old-guard Communist regime, such as Georgia's 2003 "Rose Revolution" or Ukraine's 2004 "Orange Revolution." From Moscow's perspective, that's exactly the problem. "The Moscow authorities are afraid of spontaneous mass protests in the regions … and, for this reason, Russian television is showing what is happening in an exclusively negative light," Dmitry Oreshkin, a Moscow-based political analyst, told Reuters. "It is beneficial for the Kremlin to show the consequences of peoples' protests to justify why it needs to be tough."

It will be interesting to see how authoritarian governments react to these tactics.  The United States Government is already starting to go down that path. The Cybersecurity Act of 2009 would federalize control over the nation's internet infrstructure and according to the EFF: 

"One proposed provision gives the President unfettered authority to shut down Internet traffic in an emergency and disconnect critical infrastructure systems on national security grounds." 

Maybe there are good points in the Cybersecurity Act. But we also have to be careful to give the government a tool for shutting down dissent on the internet. 

As the Moldova protests show, telecommunications and internet infrastrcuture are becoming crucial tools for bringing about political change and giving oppressed people hope.