Online Promotion Can Make a Difference

Using text messages, Facebook groups, and YouTube videos, student activists in Venezuela organized protest marches against the increasingly autocratic rule of president Hugo Chávez. One protest march featured more than 200,000 union laborers, students, housewives, and business executives. The marches helped to defeat a reform package that would have enabled Chávez to be president indefinitely. As the leader of the movement noted, “Youths in any nation, I believe, can do the same. They can make history.”