The politics of resentment, from the tea party to Occupy Wall Street | Need to Know. N.Y.P.D.’s ‘White Shirts’ Take On Enforcer Role. An Entire Country's Student Body Stands Up to Privatization. Yemen’s Protests and the Hope for Reform. In early March, as tens of thousands of people were calling for revolution, Ali Abdullah Saleh, who has been the President of Yemen for the past thirty-three years, staged an enormous celebration of himself. Uprisings across the Middle East had already swept away two of Saleh’s peers and were threatening to bring down his own regime. In the capital, Sanaa, thousands of Yemenis filed into the Stadium of the Revolution, their loyalty insured by the promise of payments after the rally.
Some climbed into the bleachers; others gathered on the field, where an array of blue and white plastic lawn chairs faced an elevated stand reserved for the President and his men. Outside the stadium, about a mile away, protesters, who had been gathering for weeks, condemned Saleh, chanting “Leave!” The crowd cheered, and thousands of people raised their arms, some holding up posters. Saleh is a short, stout man, with a thick-necked demeanor and a sandpapery voice. But this time Saleh’s tone was soft. Egyptian Names Baby 'Facebook' For Site's Role in Revolution. <br/><a href=" US News</a> | <a href=" Business News</a> Copy Looking for a name for their newborn daughter that celebrated the recent events in Egypt, an Alexandria couple skipped calling her "Tahrir Square" for something a little more trendy -- Facebook. Baby Facebook's father, Jamal Ibrahim, told Egypt's Al-Ahram newspaper that he "wanted to express his gratitude about the victories the youth of January 25 have achieved and chose to express it in the form of naming his firstborn girl," according to a translation by the blog TechCrunch.
Social media played an integral part in coordinating three weeks of protests that ended in the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak, after three decades in power. The Egyptian government quickly realized the power of the Internet in fomenting revolution and shutdown access across the country. The Political Power of Social Media. On January 17, 2001, during the impeachment trial of Philippine President Joseph Estrada, loyalists in the Philippine Congress voted to set aside key evidence against him. Less than two hours after the decision was announced, thousands of Filipinos, angry that their corrupt president might be let off the hook, converged on Epifanio de los Santos Avenue, a major crossroads in Manila. The protest was arranged, in part, by forwarded text messages reading, "Go 2 EDSA. Wear blk. " The crowd quickly swelled, and in the next few days, over a million people arrived, choking traffic in downtown Manila.
The public's ability to coordinate such a massive and rapid response -- close to seven million text messages were sent that week -- so alarmed the country's legislators that they reversed course and allowed the evidence to be presented. Since the rise of the Internet in the early 1990s, the world's networked population has grown from the low millions to the low billions. Don't have an account?