The Facebook and Twitter Revolutions: Active Participation in the 21st Century

In the past few years, a wave of protest has spread across the world. The particularity of these uprisings is the use of the Internet as a basic support to them. Scholars have analyzed these movements as closely related to a generation that is building on the Internet their possibility of getting organized as a force of social change. That is, the Internet is seen as a way of promoting the active participation of young people in political issues. Public opinion and mass media hail the Arab Spring revolutions as beneficial movements towards the democratization of oppressive regimes. On the contrary, when disobedient movements arise in democratic countries, they are generally more cautious in evaluating these movements as an enrichment of democracy. This cautious opinion also concerned the use of social media. In this article, the so-called Twitter revolutions are discussed in light of those theories of social psychology that analyze the relationship between disobedience and democracy.