The politics of the Internet and social media in Asia

It is hard to believe that the primary tools and websites that we associate with Internet use today are at most a little more than a decade old. Facebook and Flickr were founded in 2004, and Reddit, Twitter, and YouTube were founded in 2005. China’s social media giant Qzone was founded in 2005, Sina Weibo was founded in 2009, and most recently founded was WeChat in 2011. In this relatively short period of time, social media has become the most visible if not the defining feature of contemporary Internet use. Moreover, tools and applications that were primarily designed to facilitate innocuous communication have become sophisticated tools in social and political movements worldwide. From the Arab Spring protests of 2011 that led to the overthrow of authoritarian regimes in Tunisia and Egypt to the Occupy Wall Street movement of late 2011 or Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement in 2014, social media has been openly utilized to organize and publicize protests, to counter dominant media narratives and propaganda, and to disseminate information both among protestors and with the outside world. ¹ Most of the tools we associate with such movements (social networking, microblogging, video sharing, live streaming, etc.) were originally designed to facilitate banal conversations and communication among millennials, and yet these applications have had dramatic social and political consequences.