More on the role of social media in Moldova

A few weeks ago, I was part of an interesting debate about the role of Twitter in a protest against the Communist Party’s election in Moldova.

I’d like to say that I think it has been a valuable exchange of ideas conducted in excellent order.

I particularly want to thank all the people who commented on my original blog post – getting these sort of comments makes blogging really worthwhile. 

Thanks also to those of you who have emailed me to point me in the direction of other articles on this topic.

To that end, I recently received one such notification from Stephen Smith at Georgetown University.

He has written a detailed article about social media’s role in trying to work out what really happened during the protests – a story the Western media is hardly interested in:

"…while the events don’t fit the Western media’s narrative of a city full of protesters converging on Twitter and almost pulling off a revolution, technology did play an indispensable role in telling the story of April 7."   

He offers a particularly thorough investigation into the exposure of the ‘boy in yellow’, who was seen hoisting the EU flag over the parliament building, arguing that:

"the crowd-sourced investigation into the violence went into overdrive, and blogs began uncovering even more evidence that the boy in yellow was a provocateur."

You can read all of Stephen’s article at Splice Today.