Occupy Central Hong Kong is now underway. The Chinese government, in control of Hong Kong since 1997, stripped Hong Kong’s right to free elections last month. Over this past weekend of Sept. 27-28, 2014, tens of thousands took to the streets and shut the city down in protest. This is where social media comes in, or maybe not.
Instagram was blocked in China, according to Hong Kong journalists. It’s funny how Instagram was blocked when people were posting pictures of Chinese police officers using tear gas and pepper spray on demonstrators. And now that the site are blocked, protestors can’t use Instagram to let the world know the police brutality that’s going on over there. Then there’s FireChat, the new app in town. You can get it with your Apple and/or Android device. It’s a chat room, a huge one at that, where people from all over the world can communicate over WiFi, cellular, Bluetooth, even Apple’s Multipeer Connectivity Framework. So FireChat? can survive anything, even an ahem…sudden…network shutdown. So one activist leader named Joshua Wong started using FireChat to talk about his experiences with Occupy Central. Others followed. At one point, over 33,000 people from Occupy Central were in the same chat room at once. Most of the chats I found were in Chinese. But I found one quote in English saying, “MTR has boom tears 3 times”.? I’m not sure what that means, but I’m sure it wasn’t pleasant. And add that to the pictures we’re seeing.
So thank goodness for Fire Chat. Eventually, someone is going to translate to what’s really going on. At least those who’re in the midst of the battle can communicate with each other. And of course, it’s all over mainstream media. My takeaway is, no matter how much a government tries to block or censors things, social media is going to expose it. Remember Iran 2009?