For the past six years, since March 2006, Twitter has been booming all around the world to spread news and also personal information with millions of people. It allows users to share text posts with their followers in 140 characters or less, known as “tweets.” The social networking site is used every day to spread news to the world, especially during presidential elections and reforms in various countries around the world.

In June 12^th, 2009, Iranians began a protest because they did not like the leadership of their current president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. He was known to have terrible economic policies and have no respect for the human rights of the citizens of Iran. His opponent, Mir-Hossein Mousavi, a reformist and progressive leader, was favored more by the people. When the results were released and the public found out that Ahmadinejad was elected as their new president, Iranians began to protest claims that the ballots for Mousavi were not accounted for in the election.

The protest was reported on Twitter nonstop, and citizens would express their complaints and unhappiness with the election and president. Surprisingly, Iran has the most bloggers per capita than anywhere else in the world. The social networking site was also used to plan protests around the country and also get the perspective of civilians participating in the protests, thus also raising awareness. This way, the entire world was informed of the hardships and complaints of Iranians. Many Twitter users would also use #iranelection or #iranprotest so other users could track their posts using Twitter’s “Trending Topics” feature. Due to the mass tweets about the protests, it was named “The Twitter Revolution.”

“The Twitter Revolution” is similar to the recent Kony 2012 outbreak, which got more than 84 million views in less than one month. The video created by Invisible Children went viral on Facebook, another social networking site. From my own experience of seeing the video go viral, more than 60 of my friends on Facebook shared the video on their timelines. After the first 20, I decided to watch the video myself, but unlike most of my friends, I didn’t share it because I knew that everyone would have already seen it. Unfortunately, the video was not what everyone thought it was, therefore it allowed for the creation of rebellions on the video and the charity.

Social networking can be a positive invention in the world of technology, but also a negative one as well. Although you can view other people’s perspectives on what is going on, some of the information that is shared may not be true (as it is the same for Wikipedia) – they are not completely reliable sources. In our current world, it’s hard to know what is real and what’s not.

Founded on November 24^th, 1999, IndyMedia (also known as the Independent Media Center) launched for the first time. This website would allow independent media organizations and journalists to cover different news stories from around the world. IndyMedia eventually expanded to 150 different outlets worldwide in multiple languages as well.

IndyMedia originated in 1999 during the anti-WTO protests in Seattle, Washington. During that time, corporations led the media coverage of the protests and monitored what was shown to the public so images of violence were exposed. However, this did not display the actual issues of the protest. This would confuse bystanders watching the protest on the news, and therefore they needed a source to discover what the protests were about. As a result, IndyMedia was created as a different voice for the people.

From a journalism aspect, the development of IndyMedia started citizen journalism where the public could comment and share news stories easily. Through commenting, people could see the opinions of other people and then form their own independent opinion. Due to this new addition to news sites, more people began to sign up for blogs and share their point of view to the world.

Commenting and sharing news articles with peers and the public has developed into something bigger in these past few years. Especially on Facebook, we are now able to share our own opinions on people’s status, which are initially their original thoughts. Also, when someone shares a link or a photo, we are able to comment on that as well, thus contributing our personal ideas and views.

IndyMedia also influenced many movements for activism. Since people were now able to provide their opinions, many people also agreed with that and wanted change in the world for the topics at hand. Most articles posted on IndyMedia are about protests or stories that are not generally known about, or given priority to on other news sites. Due to this, the articles are posted only every few months. For example, the last article that was published was on October 10^th, 2011 and the previous one was posted on April 2^nd, 2011. This is only for global issues though – the outlets for IndyMedia, such as the San Francisco outlet, has posts or updates at least twice every week.

It is interesting to see how social media has changed the way people interact with each other on a political scale. Commenting and sharing has evolved into blogging and contributing your own point of view to the public, which ultimately creates new ideas and changes for everyone to contemplate. It’ll be intriguing to see how the site will continue to thrive in the next few years.