The last decade showed how social media could topple governments and make social change - and it's only getting crazier from here

The power of social media became clear in December 2010, as Tunisian protesters used it to topple the 23-year-long regime of a strongman leader. As Egypt, Libya, Yemen and Syria followed suit, it looked like the foundation for lasting political change.

The Arab Spring, sometimes dubbed the Facebook revolution or Twitter revolution, shook regimes across the Arab world. But it started simply, with an argument between a police officer and a Tunisian street vendor over a fruit and vegetable cart.

His self-immolation struck a nerve in Tunisia, provoking weeks of demonstrations across to countries and ultimately unseating their president of 23 years, Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali.

And it didn't stop there. Massive demonstrations were mobilized within hours, across countries like Egypt, Libya, Jordan, Yemen and Syria.

Online activism was crucial: "We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world," one Egyptian activist explained in 2011.

Protesters had some outside help from hackers, who have a long tradition of creating tools to help protesters dodge Internet censorship by giving them access to a VPN or proxy server, according to cybersecurity researcher Keren Elazari.

In this case, Elazari says the hacking collective Anonymous "helped dissidents get access to the Internet when their regimes tried to shut it down," carrying out operations in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and other countries.

By early February 2011, Egypt's President Mubarak was swept out of office. Libya's Mohammed Ghadafi's 42-year-long regime ended with his capture and death later that October. Yemen's Ali Abdullah Saleh stepped down in November 2011, and Jordan's King Abdullah dissolved parliament and called for early elections in October 2012.

The Arab Spring was just the beginning: A new generation of digitally-savvy protesters had tapped into global social networks, leading to mass protests in countries like Russia.

As the Arab Spring protests were spreading through the Middle East, protests against another leader were also raging further west. A controversial Russian parliamentary election result in December 2011 had caused an uprising among Russia's digitally-savvy youth, who accused the United Russia party and its leader Vladimir Putin of tampering with the results.

As protests continued in early 2012, Vladimir Putin became president in the face of unprecedented public opposition. The digital world stayed critical in mobilizing mass demonstrations.

Russians using smartphones filmed authority figures bribing subordinates to get out the vote for United Russia, the New York Times reported. They also camped out in polling stations as amateur observers. During a rally that drew tens of thousands of protesters onto the street, Russians actually broadcast the event live, holding iPads over their heads.

Back in the US, social media started to prove foundational to movements like Occupy Wall Street, which used Facebook and Twitter to get organized.

Decentralized and leaderless, Occupy Wall Street grew from the aftermath of the Great Recession and attracted many of those discontent with the relationship between the government and the financial sector.

After a demonstration in Manhattan's Zuccotti Park led to hundreds of arrests, the hashtag — and the movement — began to pick up steam around the country, as tags like #OccupyBoston and #OccupyDenver began to show up on Twitter.

Facebook listed no fewer than 125 Occupy-related pages, and #OWS accounted for roughly 1 in every 500 hashtags used on Twitter, it was reported at the time.

And its impact on mainstream American politics has been lasting. Policy proposals like taxing the billionaires and Medicare for all trickled into Congress during the 2010s, as the call to rethink American capitalism and narrow the wealth inequality gap grew stronger.

In 2014, #BlackLivesMatter grew from a hashtag into a movement, providing a blueprint for the digitally-savvy activists who came after.

The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter can be traced back to a 2013 Facebook post by a California-based activist Alicia Garza.

But it took on a life of its own beginning in 2014, after Michael Brown was shot dead by a police officer in Ferguson, Missouri, according to a Pew Research Center analysis on race and social media. When a grand jury declined to indict the officer who shot Brown, and another twelve-year-old boy Tamir Rice was shot dead by a Cleveland police officer, the movement began to roar on social media. Daily mentions of #BlackLivesMatter spiked drastically to 172,77 on Twitter at the peak, according to Pew.

The Black Lives Matter hashtag, and Ferguson protests, eventually helped spark a nationwide conversation on racism and police brutality.

And some of these movements went global. The consequences of #MeToo prompted waves of change across the world that are still reverberating through society today.

Social media helped push two detailed exposés published by the New York Times and New Yorker, about Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein's sexual misconduct, into a global conversation on pervasive sexual harassment in the workplace.

The hashtag #MeToo began spreading through Facebook and Twitter in October 2017, as women shared their experiences. Within 24 hours, the hashtag had been used by more than 4.7 million people in 12 million posts on Facebook, the company told INSIDER.

#MeToo spurred change in the US and UK, as women began to speak up. It also encouraged women to speak up in countries like China and India.

At the same time, though, this decade saw the rise of "slacktivism," where movements would begin and end with viral hashtags and fail to bring about real, meaningful change. Remember "Kony 2012?"

"Slacktivism," a derisive term for low-effort online activism, remained a major concern for charities and organizations like UNICEF.

Social media could help bring visibility to issues that might otherwise never cross Americans' radar — like the matter of Ugandan warlord Joseph Kony — but it didn't necessarily bring about change. It also served to oversimplify complex issues and silence local voices actually experiencing on-the-ground issues, critics have charged.

For instance, the Invisible Children's viral Kony 2012 campaign was criticized for oversimplifications that could actually do harm to the people it aims to help. It also raised concerns about inaccuracies, such as the threat Kony actually presented to Ugandans at the time of the campaign.

And many years later, the Arab Spring is seen as having somewhat of a mixed legacy. While it helped topple dictators, many of the changes in those countries were short-lived.

The five-year anniversary of the Arab Spring spurred a series of op-eds, lectures and studies in 2016, reflecting on the misguided optimism they felt about the so-called Facebook and Twitter revolutions. Social media was no substitute for institutional change, they said.

After all, Libya, Yemen and Syria had all collapsed into civil wars. Egypt, after a brief stint with the Muslim Brotherhood, was under yet another military dictatorship. The Syrian conflict had created the largest refugee crisis of the 21st century, Amnesty International said at the time. And the Yemen civil war helped create the conditions for what is now the worst humanitarian crisis in the world.

"The reality is more war and violence, and a crackdown on people who dare to speak out for a fairer, more open society," Amnesty International said at the time. And a study at Transparency International found that 61% of people living in the Middle East and North Africa believed the level of corruption in their countries had only risen since the year before, CNN reported.

Tunisia alone remained the country that many looked to as the successful model into a democratic transition.

Our relationship with social media was forever altered in the 2010s, as NSA contractor Edward Snowden leaked a series of documents in 2013 that revealed the extent to which the US government was surveilling its own citizens and its allies.

NSA contractor Edward Snowden, then 30 years old, leaked hundreds of classified documents to the Washington Post and the Guardian in 2013 — documents that revealed the massive American and British surveillance networks overseeing both its citizens and allies, set up after the 9/11 attacks.

His revelations placed political pressure on the NSA and the US government, but it also forever changed the relationship that Americans held with technology, according to a study carried out by the Pew Research Center. 34% of Americans that had learned about the government surveillance programs said they had taken at least one step to hide or shield their information on social media, and 25% said they had changed the extent to which they used technology entirely.

It also had international consequences, as cyberattacks became a new form of warfare. Snowden has been living as a fugitive in Russia since the leaks.

And social media, once hailed for bringing transparency to the US presidency, started to be denounced for providing leaders with an unchecked megaphone.

"Senator Barack Obama exploited the power of social media activism to win the US presidential election, in of the first instances in which technology had a decisive impact on representative politics." Karatzogianni said.

And Obama's use of social networks back in the 2008 presidential election and during his two terms in office was hailed as a victory for transparency — it gave the White House a direct line to the people it served, said enthusiasts.

More recently, however, Trump's use of social media showed the potential to abuse that platform. Twitter unlocked a new megaphone for Trump, who has seemingly little time for press conferences, but who is an active user of the social network.

Over the years, Trump's retweeting of unverified Twitter accounts has lent weight to the otherwise-obscure accounts of white nationalists, anti-Muslim bigots, conspiracy theorists and foreign bots, an investigation by the New York Times found in November 2019.

And the Twitter megaphone has enabled him to heighten international tensions and crash markets.

Most recently, Trump teased the assassination of a high-ranking Iranian general by tweeting a picture of the American flag a day before the State Department made its announcement.

Former Twitter executives have since denounced the president's use of the platform for foreign policy.

"When I worked at Twitter, we thought it was a good idea for world leaders to have a platform to speak directly to constituents. The use case of announcing and/or threatening war is an outrageous abuse of the platform and most importantly, the Constitution," Twitter's former president of Global Media Katie Jacobs Stanton tweeted recently.

Militant and terrorist groups had meanwhile learned to leverage social media, recruiting followers and coordinating attacks to 'unbelievable' effect.

The Islamic terrorist group ISIS used social media to recruit, spread grisly propaganda, and coordinate attacks, to deadly effect. Lone wolf attacks in Paris, Nice, London and New York were all linked to the caliphate.

"They've become so good at it, it's unbelievable," New York Times reporter Rukmini Callamachi told Wired in 2016.

Twitter began reacting to the use of its platform in 2015 and 2016, announcing that it was aggressively suspending accounts that threatened terrorist action.

But even as Facebook and Twitter began to clamp down on the accounts of overt supporters, they began to migrate to Telegram and WhatsApp, the New York Times reported.

And the two platforms still faced criticism for not doing enough to shut down access to the platform." Twitter really needs to take them seriously because they're not just talking to each other, to people who are already radicalized, they're also fishing for people who are maybe interested and maybe not," Callimachi told Wired.

However, some studies have suggested that social media platforms and their algorithms aren't entirely to blame for helping radicalization. A Penn State research paper from October 2019 said that YouTube's algorithm did not necessarily trap viewers into a viewership bubble that helped radicalize them. Instead, the videos influenced its viewers just like any other media.

It turned out that social media could even help bring about genocides.

A military crackdown and widespread ethnic violence against the Rohingya Muslims community in Myanmar prompted a UN investigation into whether a modern-day genocide had taken place.

And the UN investigator found that Facebook was key to help incite violence and hatred against the Muslim minority group. She said the platform had "turned into a beast," Reuters reported in March 2018.

And Facebook had lacked the Burmese-speaking manpower to shut down accounts, helping create the conditions for over 700,000 Rohingya Muslims to flee the country. More than 1,000 examples of posts, comments and pornographic images attacking the Rohingya and other Muslims existed on Facebook, a Reuters investigation found in August 2018, well after Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg had pledged to remedy the situation.

Facebook continued to work on shutting down pages, groups and accounts well into 2019, to thwart efforts to "manipulate or corrupt public debate," Reuters reported.

And blindly-accepted misinformation flooding social media became a global problem, with often-deadly consequences: One of the deadliest consequences of misinformation occurred in India, in the summer of 2018.

A host of edited videos and messages, distributed on the popular messaging app WhatsApp, warned villages in India about gangs of purported kidnappers on the prowl. WhatsApp's design made it easy to forward messages, and gave no hint of the source. False information spread like wildfire.

And millions of Indians, often new to WhatsApp and the internet, believed them.

The results were sometimes horrific, as mobs of Indians chased "suspects" — often completely innocent — and beat them to death. Police forces over the country tried curbing these attacks and warning people.

WhatsApp even began taking out newspaper ads to warn the public about misinformation.

And India's Supreme Court urged the government to use "an iron hand" against mob violence, the New York Times reported.

Despite its pitfalls, social media is still vital to protests raging around the world today — with no signs of slowing down.

Despite its drawbacks, protests raging around the world still rely on social media to broadcast their concerns and get organized.

But even as they protest regional issues, like pension reform in France, corruption in Lebanon, inequality and shabby social services in Chile, and Chinese state control in Hong Kong, protesters have leveraged catchy hashtags and viral images on social media to promote a kind of global solidarity against the state.

One image in particular has been shared by angry demonstrators around the world: the mask of the Joker. After the film starring Joaquin Phoenix was released in theaters, masks of the Batman villain were adopted by protesters in Lebanon, Iraq, Chile, Bolivia, France, and Hong Kong, Wired and CNN reported.

Helen Sullivan, a journalist for the New Yorker, even tweeted a picture of a Joker face paint station in Lebanon. The Joker mask has been especially popular in Lebanon, after a Lebanese street artist spray painted the star character onto the city's walls,

But this time, protesters seem more aware of the new challenges brought by social media, such as surveillance, and misinformation.

Protests have been raging in Hong Kong for over six months, leaving the island vulnerable to issues like government surveillance and misinformation.

As civil unrest over Beijing's creeping influence goes on, challenges like surveillance have been met by encrypted messaging apps and masks.

And even as fears of censorship over local news have prompted protesters to turn to social media for information, causing misinformation to run rampant, protesters have started to come up with ways to try dodge the challenge.

Rumors posted on Facebook and Twitter, privately shared through WhatsApp and Telegram, or even AirDropped onto commuters phones in subway stations have spread fake news, CNN reported in August. But Hong Kongers are aware of the threat, saying they cross-check claims with foreign and local media coverage, try to locate the source, and spread the word if they need to fact-check the news.

The leaders of the Big Tech companies behind the leading social media platforms have begun to accept responsibility for the power they wield — but it's not always clear where we go from here.

Company executives at Facebook and Twitter have grappled with moderating the platform, and gradually vowed to do better. But that's just the first step in the many challenges that lie ahead.

Back in 2018, both Facebook and Twitter made a key shift in policy as their leaders announced that the platforms had failed the public.

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg made fixing issues with the platform his resolution for 2018, writing that the company has "a lot of work to do — whether it's protecting our community from abuse and hate, defending against interference by nation states..."

Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey did the same thing, tweeting, "We have witnessed abuse, harassment, troll armies, manipulation through bots and human-coordination, misinformation campaigns, and increasingly divisive echo chambers. We aren't proud of how people have taken advantage of our service, or our inability to address it fast enough."

But problems with social media platforms continue to persist. Most recently, Facebook and Twitter took down a global network of fake accounts based in Vietnam, used to pump pro-Trump political messages onto the platforms, the Wall Street Journal reported in December 2019.