The Power And Fragility Of Modern Protests

Well over 5 million people around the world took part in the Women’s March. And hundreds of thousands attended the March for Science. With turnouts like that, you might expect such protests to reflect years of planning and organizational effort. In fact, though, they were organized online in the space of a couple months, using new tools like hashtags and Facebook events. Zeynep Tufekci studies what the rise of connectivity means for the efficacy of the protests. She’s an associate professor at the University of North Carolina, and the author of Twitter and Teargas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest.