Twitter and Tear Gas

A great analysis of the role social-media played in networked protests within the last decade, by an activist/academic with first-hand experience. Tufekci examines how digital networking tools - Twitter, Facebook, etc - help speed up and empower protests movements, that later mostly fail when it comes to collective decision-making, as their short timeline never allows them to develop those skills.

Looking at Tahrir Square, Occupy Wallstreet, Gezi Park, the Umbrella Movement.. she examines their origins, how technologies helped them to organize, to activate the masses. She looks at the political repercussions of Facebook's real-name policies. How anonymity for activists doesn't allow them to attract followers, while non-anonymity leads to harassment. How social media sites give activists and citizens a chance to report disturbing news from within their own country that nationally-controlled mass media stays quiet about. Yet also how the algorithms on these same sites increasingly drown out those news stories / cries for help by favoring likes and happy stories.

Sometimes some of the content felt repetitive, but all in all this is an important book about the overlap of social media and political activism.