Toward the end of 2008, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was musing about a massive political rally in Colombia earlier that year.(FaceBook Foreign Policy)
Toward the end of 2008, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg was musing about a massive political rally in Colombia earlier that year. A young man had started a Facebook group to show his revulsion against the FARC guerrillas, and one month later, on Feb. 4, millions of people across Colombia and around the world rallied in opposition to FARC. The anti-FARC protests were the first ripple in what would become this year's global wave -- the use of social media in massive political movements, as Facebook and Twitter have almost overnight become the world's collective soapboxes, petition sheets, and meeting halls. It may have started in the Middle East with outraged friends on Facebook, but the chain reaction eventually led to landscape-altering citizens' movements and demonstrations not just in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, where despots were toppled, but also Syria, Yemen, Bahrain, and later in Spain, Israel, India, Britain, the United States, and elsewhere. Facebook is a common threa...