The role of social media in the Occupy movement

        In recent Hong Kong, there is the boycott of classes and then the Occupy movement. It's aims is to fight for the democracy and the "real" election. Social media has became a very important character in this social movement.

        Since nowadays almost every Hong Kong people get a smart phone. It is very easy to access to the social media like Facebook even they have no computer with them. They just need to pick up their smart phone, turn on the application, they can access to the internet world. Since almost every Hong Kong people can access to the social media, it is a very useful tools to spread information and to call student or Hongkonger to join the protest. Since those social movement need a large number of participant in order to get effect, it is a very good way that using the social media to promote the movement. It is because compared to the hard-copy promotion like poster, the poster just can be seen by someone who physically pass by. But it is more convenient to look at the social media online rather than that. More people could see the promotion of the protest. And more seen means more participants. Therefore, Social media just a promotion tool of the protest.

        It is not difficult to notice that there are a lot of groups or pages on Facebook that is related to the protest. They would post on some news on their wall so that although some people do not join the protest, they could know what is happening in the protest area. In this area, the social media become a role of reporting news. They just like the news reporter. Posting what the actual environment of the protest could let the people knows more about how is going on. It could also stimulates more people to join the protest since they would see how the police act unacceptably. It is also a channel for people to record the history. People could just upload the photo, video, audio to the social media in order to share, and to make a copy of that useful material since every information about this protest is very important.

        It is good that social media become a platform to record the true. But it is the case just when they are recording the actual true. Since it is very easy to arouse people through the social media because of the easy-access, some people would just post some fake news onto the social media in order to change people's mind about the protest. For example, there is the case that some anti-protester just post a picture that showing a police-dressing man is bleeding in order to accuse the protester that how violence they are. But the photo finally proved that it is just a photo taken by HKTV and they are just shooting drama. Therefore, the guys in the photo is not a policeman. He is not bleeding either.

        Therefore, as we can see, the social media is playing a very important role on the social movement. It is a critical platform to catch people's support to both yellow and blue stands. But it is really unhealthy and immoral to post fake news onto the social media since sometimes it is very hard to determine whether the news is true and believable or not.  

        

        Also, to the protester, it is also good for them to look at the social media since they may know the actual environment of the protest area. It is sometimes hard to know the situation of the protest area if you are in it. But since people are keep updating news to the social media, so they would know where is the main group of police and they could leave the danger zone before some violence clash happened between two stands.

        In my own experience, it is impossible to connect to the internet since there are too many people in the protest area, they are just keep try to connect to the internet with their mobile devices, That would lead to the clash of the internet service.