Quebec Students Use Social Media to Organize Protestors

Quebec’s tech-savvy students are staying one step ahead by planning protests using social media.

According to an article recently published by Nelson Wyatt of The Canadian Press, the younger, more social protesters have a decisive advantage in how nimble they can be with their communications. On the other side, the Quebec government is slow to “go social,” and still relying on traditional forms of media such as print, radio and television.

According to a recent survey by Sciencetech Communications the protestors’ three hashtags — #ggi, #manifencours and #casserolesencours — produced 700,000 posts in one month alone.

“It’s fair to say the protests would not have been as easily organized without social media,” said Carmi Levy, a technology analyst based in London, Ont.

“Social media has made the protests larger, more interactive, more effective than they would have been had the organizers not had access to these tools.

This trend is building on how the Occupy movement used Facebook and Twitter to organize their protests and centralize their message. In Quebec, students are relying on Facebook and Twitter, as well as relying on blogs to rally their troops. They even developed an Android app to track marches.

“It’s a remarkable transition from the way protests were once managed where basically there was a monolithic crowd, you got a bunch of megaphones and you hoped everybody heard you,” said Levy.

“Today everybody’s got smartphones and they can hear or read everything in excruciatingly real time detail.”