By Te-Ping Chen, Fiona Law and Newley Purnell
HONG KONG--A proliferation of social media tools is creating new
opportunities--and complications--for pro-democracy protesters in
Hong Kong, helping them draw more activists to the streets while
also making it tougher to keep them on message.
During unrest in places like Egypt, Iran and Tunisia in the past
few years, social-media stalwarts Facebook and Twitter have played
central roles, and in some cases were the only major social-media
options available.
The expansion of social media tools, especially messaging apps,
has given Hong Kong's protesters an edge in reaching supporters en
masse. Smartphones are abundant in the relatively affluent city,
which, unlike mainland China, has speedy, uncensored Internet.
But it has also added to the cacophony of noise and mixed
messages that have fragmented Hong Kong's pro-democracy movement
from the get-go, at times making it harder for protest leaders to
manage their followers.
Hong Kong's protesters have relied heavily on WhatsApp, online
message boards and encrypted messaging services that offer more
security, such as Telegram Messenger. One inventor is offering an
app designed to give protesters an early warning if police start to
move on them.
With the number of social media users approaching one billion in
Asia, according to research firm Webcertain Group--nearly five
times the number of North America--the region has become a crucial
testing ground for such new technologies, and a driving force
behind the growth of messaging services.
Last Friday, protest leader Benny Tai called on followers to
pull out of the gritty shopping district of Mong Kok, where
antiprotester violence was breaking out. But some activists quickly
turned to social-messaging services to rally friends, despite the
call to stay away. Placid Cheung, 22, a finance worker, says he
used a WhatsApp group to get people out to Mong Kok to support the
students. The night proved to be a moral victory for the
protesters, showing they could stay in the streets even when under
attack.
"We don't pay a lot of attention" to protest leaders, he said.
"Even if they say, 'don't go,' we would still go."
Protesters are tapping an array of social-media platforms to
spread information, including some that were either not around or
not as widely used a few years ago.
One advantage of services like WhatsApp, protesters say, is that
users can exit groups and delete message histories if they are
apprehended by police, making it harder to trace contacts and
communications.
Other protesters are using Telegram, a Berlin-based messaging
app launched last year. The company says it uses encryption
services to keep its users' data private and secure, and runs the
service as a noncommercial endeavor.
Then there are services such as FireChat, a free
mobile-messaging app launched in March that allows users to
communicate in the absence of Internet or cellular connections. It
saw a surge of downloads when the Hong Kong protests first gained
momentum and leaders worried about phone signals getting
jammed.
Some protesters are using multiple services at once to reach the
largest-possible audience, posting photos more or less at the same
time on Facebook, Instagram and Weibo, a Chinese microblogging
service.
Demonstrators are deploying "a complex landscape of
communication tools" now, said Mart van de Ven, a Dutch data
scientist who lives in a tenement near the Mong Kok protest
site.
Mr. van de Ven said he has built an app for the protesters
called Rally the Brollies, using a common British term for
umbrellas--a symbol of the pro-democracy movement after protesters
used them to block pepper spray.
The app provides a digital alarm system intended to alert crowds
if police move in on demonstrations. If that occurs, the alarm will
be triggered through a Twitter hashtag sent out by student leaders.
Those who registered will hear their smartphone alarms go off at
full volume and get a text message.
"We're hoping it won't be necessary to use it," Mr. van de Ven
said.
To be sure, protest leaders are also using more-traditional
services such as Facebook. Scholarism, a group of younger students,
has more than 300,000 followers on its Facebook page, and a handful
of volunteers dedicated to keeping it updated with relevant news
and messages from leaders.
Among them: William Liu, an 18-year-old freshman at Hong Kong
Baptist University who works from midnight until 5 a.m., posting
information from a Samsung laptop.
At midnight on Wednesday, Mr. Liu reposted articles from Apple
Daily, the city's influential pro-democracy tabloid.
On a typical night, he refreshes the pages every 10 to 15
minutes, checking other pro-democracy outlets that carry heavy
weight with protesters, including SocRec and Passion Times, news
outlets run by activist media groups that help rally the movement's
foot soldiers.
In the early days of the protests, when police clashed with
demonstrators, leaders sent out urgent messages on Facebook calling
on activists to join them in the streets.
A few days later, they counseled protesters to think of the long
game. "Don't assume this will end too soon," Scholarism's
17-year-old leader, Joshua Wong, said on his Facebook page.
Protesters should "take turns in holding on to the streets."
The Hong Kong Federation of Students, meanwhile, has 10 people
who are loosely charged with keeping its Facebook page fresh.
But many rank-and-file protesters either don't follow the
Facebook pages because they have other preferred options--or they
don't trust them.
"I don't rely much on social media like Facebook because
sometimes people post things that are fake," said Maggie Chan, a
volunteer at a supply station in one protest area. "Sometimes the
pages can be hacked. So I mainly rely on what my friends tell
me."
Protest leaders have tried to minimize such issues by using
services like Telegram to talk among themselves. But they are
less-effective for communicating to the public at large.
On Wednesday, Scholarism tried a different, decidedly old-school
idea: It sent a team of 50 people armed with megaphones and
leaflets to different districts across Hong Kong, hoping to "spread
the message and mobilize people," said spokesman Oscar Lai.
"We want to explain to them why we are doing this Occupy thing
and why we are blocking the traffic."
At the protest sites, some volunteers use yellow Motorola
walkie-talkies donated by supporters, instead of smartphones. The
walkie-talkies work great when too many people are using their
smartphones, slowing Internet speeds, one volunteer said.
Andrew Browne, Jenny Hsu, and Isabella Steger contributed to
this article.
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