The events of the Arab Spring have shown the rest of the world the power of social media in protest movements. Through the use of platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube, activists in the region could deliver their message to an international audience, mobilise other activists, and to organise protests. Yet despite the effective use of social media platforms by activists in the Arab Spring, there were still cases when governments attempted to limit access to social media to quell revolutions.

In some situations, using the Internet and social media as tools to express strong political opinions may not work well for activists at all. An activist in Syria who has written anti-government statements on his Facebook had to stop his comments after finding out that he had been blacklisted as a dissident by the ruling party. Stories like this have made some activists reluctant to voice their opinions online for fear that the government will use social media against them by tracking them down. Through a person’s social media account or profile, proficient hackers are able to gain information on the location and identity of the owner. As seen from the lesbian in Damascus hoax, hackers have successfully discovered that the ‘lesbian’ blogger was, in actual fact, a heterosexual American man. This suggests that even if an activist does not reveal his or her true identity in their online posts, the government may potentially be able to find out. In mainland China, there have already been several cases of political activists being targeted for posting their anti-government ideas online.

Another reason why social media may be limited in their usefulness for political movements is that governments can decide to block access to social media websites to prevent the organization of protests. However, the government can be successful in using this strategy only to a small extent. Proxy servers, alternate DNS, mirror sites and other methods of hacking allow users to easily regain access to social media platforms to resume their activity. Also, the great abundance of different social media platforms on the Internet means that activists can switch to other platforms if their original platform was made inaccessible by the government. For example, if Twitter was blocked and TwitterLocal was not, so people could still post anti-government material on the latter.

Finally, because social media is user generated and decentralised by nature, it can be difficult for activists to get communicate their messages. Because political protest movements involve strong and differing views amongst the people who are involved in them, the information coming out of them may not always represent the truth of the situation. As a result, the audience might be left confused about how much of the wealth of information is actually trustworthy.