How the Internet Changed the Game

From Forums to Feeds

Before Twitter threads and viral hashtags, there were online forums—places like Indymedia and MoveOn that felt a bit like crowded town hall meetings, but online. Indymedia started around 1999 and gave anyone a chance to report on global protests, especially during events like the Seattle WTO demonstrations. This meant the news didn’t just come from big TV stations; people at the scene could write and post photos themselves. MoveOn worked differently: it focused on email, sending around petitions and news to millions of people in the U.S., rallying them on topics like war and climate change.

These early platforms worked because they flattened the barriers to getting involved. If you were frustrated with some political issue, you could log in, see what others were talking about, and join a conversation or organize an event. But there were limits: the technology was clunky, information spread slowly, and forums could get lost in long, winding threads that were hard for newcomers to follow.

Everything shifted when social media arrived. Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube didn’t just connect you to a single topic; they connected you to everyone, all at once. Posts moved quickly, algorithms surfaced the loudest voices, and a single tweet could reach thousands (or millions) in minutes. For instance, during the Arab Spring around 2011, tweets and Facebook posts helped people plan protests in Egypt and Tunisia without needing to agree on a single leader or a detailed plan in some prickly online forum. Instead, information flowed in real time, and public posts had a ripple effect that went far beyond small activist groups.

This change also made message spreading faster and more visual. Instead of reading long blocks of text, people could share a short video, an image, or a meme, getting their point across quickly. That’s one reason why campaigns like #BlackLivesMatter later found their footing—an image or hashtag could say more, travel further, and bring people together across continents in ways that old forums never could.

Smartphones in Your Pocket, Movements in Your Hand

When smartphones became common, everything changed again. Suddenly, your phone was a camera, a publishing tool, and an organizing hub, all in one. Instead of waiting to get home to post on a forum, you could shoot video of a protest as it happened, stream it live, or send updates to group chats. Think of a phone as a Swiss Army knife for activism.

A clear example is the Ferguson protests in 2014. When a police shooting happened in Missouri, people recorded videos, tweeted updates, and streamed events live from their phones. This real-time coverage forced the world to pay attention. In Nigeria, the #EndSARS movement used WhatsApp and Twitter groups to organize protests, share news of police actions, and warn each other about danger—all from their phones.

Smartphones didn’t just make activism faster; they made it more accessible. You didn’t need a fancy camera, a press badge, or programming skills. Anyone who could text or snap a photo could help organize, report, or amplify a cause. This is why even small movements in faraway places started to appear on the global radar. If you had a phone and a network connection, you could make your struggle visible.

Open-Source Tools: Power to the People

To really understand how digital activism works, you have to meet open-source tools. An open-source tool is a piece of software whose code is public—you can look inside, change it, or share it for free. For activists, this matters for two big reasons: control and trust.

Take Signal, for instance. It’s a messaging app, like WhatsApp or Messenger, but its code is open and its security is respected around the world. Activists in places like Hong Kong or Belarus used Signal to plan protests, knowing that their conversations were encrypted and couldn’t be read by snooping governments or companies. When people don’t have to worry about who is reading their messages, they can organize more freely.

Then there are crowdsourced mapping tools like Ushahidi, which started after Kenya’s 2008 elections. People sent in reports about violence by SMS or email, and those reports built a public map showing where trouble was happening. This kind of tool lets people turn local knowledge into something everyone can see and act on, from disaster response to election monitoring.

Open-source matters because it’s public and flexible. If a government blocks a tool or a company changes its rules, activists can often tweak open-source software or build new versions. It’s like having a toolkit that anyone can improve, instead of waiting for a big company to fix what’s broken.

These digital tools have made new kinds of organizing possible. They have helped make activism more participatory and more secure, breaking old barriers and creating new ones. But they don’t solve everything. Technology can’t replace trust, courage, or face-to-face connection. Still, when you see people using their phones to share a protest livestream, joining a Signal group to plan a rally, or updating an open map to warn others about police roadblocks, you’re seeing the ways the internet changed the game—and keeps changing it, for everyone.