As Barbara Streisand discovered, adopting a militaristic posture against a tech-savvy mob of civil libertarians is not going to be of much help: Many of them run their own servers and blogs - and have thousands of friends on their social networks - so overzealous attempts to silence them only lead to wider dissemination of sensitive information.
The Tunisian blogger and activist Sami Ben Gharbia has written passionately about how U.S. government involvement in grassroots digital spaces can endanger those who are already vulnerable to accusations by nasty regimes of acting as foreign agents.
There are a lot of people that think the Internet is going to bring information and democracy and pluralism in China just by existing.
If you want to amplify the data that you have, you need media, you need lawyers, you need the judiciary. Especially when governments try to shut down a particular website or when litigating on an issue.
Governments do not care about your Facebook-assembled opinion. Incompetent politicians don't read your tweets; there are reasons for them being out of touch. Change does not come about for 'likes' on a page, though the ideas for it may start there.
Turkey has a very young, dynamic, curious population. In Europe, Facebook and Twitter are mostly about sharing daily experiences while for Turkish people, social networks are political platforms.
Donald Trump has his Twitter account, but so do I, and so do millions and millions of Americans. So the way that we can organize around that is different than what we had in the past, and we can use that tool for good, not just for evil.
Obama will win the 2012 election, thanks in part to the tech community rallying behind him due to issues like SOPA, visas, and free speech.
The Internet treats censorship as a malfunction and routes around it.
Now is a time where social media allows people to be heard on a different level. Everyone is using their voice.
21st-century activism is different perhaps in the sense that the individual can be more present in the process, especially via social media, but the underlying drivers remain the same as desire to change the status quo.
The internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it.
It is true that authoritarian governments increasingly see the Internet as a threat in part because they see the U.S. government behind the Internet.
Political activists in Hong Kong and Taiwan use Facebook as their primary tool to mobilize support for their causes and activities.
Don't underestimate questions from the crowd; technology has made voters more informed than ever.
BP wants Twitter to shut down a fake BP account that is mocking the oil company. In response, Twitter wants BP to shut down the oil leak that's ruining the ocean.
A free and open Internet is a despot's worst enemy.
In the old days, money controlled politics. Today, information controls politics. So I think with the advent of the Internet, the power of wealth has been diminished. Look up all the people you know who spent millions and millions of dollars and fell short.
There's social media where people's politics are out there, they're forwarding articles and seem engaged, but it's only online. We tweet and pat ourselves on the back, thinking we have done something, said we're interested, but it needs more work.
I think we need to fight against Trumpism in the courts, we need to fight at the ballot box and online, and we need to do peaceful protesting. We need to use every lever at our disposal to make sure that the president doesn't hurt our country, our values, and our people.
The Chinese government clearly does pay attention to public opinion expressed on the Internet - the extent to which they choose to adapt their practices based on it, or ignore it, seems to vary.
Even with censorship, the Internet is a force for change.
The Impact Channel and OurPlanet were created to increase awareness of environmental and social causes within the MySpace community.
Today, for the first time - and the Obama campaign showed us this - we can go from the digital world, from the self-organizing power of networks, to the physical one.
Internet outrage can seem mindless, but it rarely is. To make that assumption is dismissive. There's something beneath the outrage - an unwillingness to be silent in the face of ignorance, hatred or injustice. Outrage may not always be productive, but it is far better than silence.
