Over the last week I’ve read a number of blogs and tweets from people, many of whom are based in the West, asking whether and when the wave of social-media inspired democracy protests will arrive in Asia.

Most of those asking the question are looking towards China, with its rigid internet laws, lack of free expression and inward looking perspective… but have they forgotten the events in Bangkok that started almost a year ago to date? Social media has already played a big role in Asian protests.

While the Bangkok protests of 2010 are themselves unique and do not mirror the political environment and build-up of that in the North African/Middle Eastern states that have hit the news lately, social media essentially performed the same role, albeit on a different level in Thailand.

Saving the political discussion for my fellow Asian Correspondent bloggers who specialise in the subject, I’d like to look at exactly how social media affected the protest in 2010? And the Thai example compares to what we’ve witnessed across the world this year?

News consumption

Arguably the single most visible role of social media in both this year’s protests and the Bangkok 2010 protest was breaking and distributing news and events as they unfolded.

In the same way that certain political correspondents and locals ‘on the ground’ found their message broadcast across Twitter, so did – in a lesser way – many of the journalists and correspondents that braved the dangerous conditions in Bangkok, particularly during the army crackdown period. They passed on valuable insights to the world before traditional media could.

As many expats and Thais will testify, during the protests – when Bangkok ground to a halt – Twitter, and to a lesser extent Facebook, were the most effective ways to stay in touch with the latest developments for  a snapshot of what was happening at any given time.

Again, with both the protests in 2011 and Thailand last year, traditional media lagged behind social media, to the point that tweets and Facebook updates were often used as the central hook to provide the basis for media stories.

The need to stay connected on Facebook and Twitter led to a huge surge in membership numbers in Thailand, while a number of Twitter users based in Thailand found their audience of followers growing by hundreds on a daily basis. While this doesn’t represent the same level growth as Egypt – given the growth Twitter had made in the last 12 months which have seen it make considerable growth internationally – this was impressive at the time.

Journalists, bloggers or just members of the public?

Alongside the changing consumption of news, so too did social media change the sources of news. Florian Witulski (@vaitor), then a little-known journalism student, broadcasted his efforts to report and stay alive during the government crackdown – during which many of the protest’s total of 90 plus deaths occurred. He became a much-followed figure and is now an established freelance journalist a year later.

Alongside Witulski many of Bangkok’s ‘Twitteratti’ found themselves acquiring large numbers of fans who relied on updates and retweets of Twitter messages to stay in the loop, regardless of whether the source was a member of the media or not.

Such was the balance of power that many western media outlets reached out to ordinary, non-journalist citizens in Thailand for interviews using Twitter as a guide to finding those in the known in Bangkok.

Enjoying comparatively greater freedom than traditional media online, blogs also become popular sources for updates, news and – often – objective analysis of events. Although, as I will move on to discuss, these benefits came with the added danger that they may be discovered and shut-down by the government.

Organisation

A key factor in Egypt and other uprising this year to date, social media has been heralded as the key to bringing like minded protesters together in a new and more accessible method than ever before.

Although most of the reported 17 million internet users in Thailand are most likely not supporters of the UDD political party widely responsible for the protests (as those in urban areas tend, generally speaking, to be less likely to support the party) nonetheless key influencers within the movement did exchange information and, with the help of other established communication forms, social media was an important part of the organisation.

Equally, on the other side of the spectrum, the anti-protester protests (yes, no typo here there were anti-protest protests) used Facebook, and to a lesser extent Twitter, to help mobilise support and arrange rallies to show their opposition to the UDD’s actions in Bangkok.

There is no doubt that the 2011 protests have made greater use of social media to organise, but to say that it wasn’t used to organise the protests in Bangkok in 2010 is simply not true…it was used albeit to a lesser extent, primarily amongst influencers and in conjunction with more traditional means of communication too.

Censorship

While Egypt and now Libya shut down the internet altogether to combat protests their respective countries, Thailand did not go to that extreme but there are similarities.

The government made use of emergency laws (the state of emergency, SoE) to allow the Ministry of Information and Communication Technology to bypass the legal system and processing to censor unsuitable websites in the interest of national security.

Thailand does, of course, have its own very specific laws on the posting of content relating to its royal family, however the use of SoE was not unlike the basic principle behind the ‘internet kill’ in Egypt and Libya. The SoE used questionable motives to essentially neutralise the potential certain websites and services had for the protests.

Though the Thai government has argued that information – such as how to make bombs – was the primary target of such censorship, a number of pro-UDD websites and even non-partisan site which reported events in such a way that looked unflattering for the government, found themselves blocked.

So while there is a difference between stopping all internet and censoring websites, both ideas look to block out potential ‘fuel for the fire’ published on the internet.

Despite the temporary nature of the SoE-based censorship, members of the MICT – speaking at a recent FCCT function – admitted that many of the sites blocked during the protest are yet to be unblocked even though the SoE has been lifted and the blocking is therefore no longer legal.

Conclusion

While there are no doubt differences between this year’s protests and those in Thailand last year, social media is a common key elements which has affected each protest in similar ways.

In the (almost) one year since the Thai protests, Thailand’s digital and technology scene has matured significantly.

More people own smartphones, more people browse the internet on their device, social networks are considerably more popular (with Facebook usage more than tripling) and – in general – people are more technology savvy.

With that in mind, there is no doubt that had the events of 2010 happened this year instead, the role of social media would be far more pronounced and involved than it was in 2010, and that is without even factoring in the momentum and increased awareness from protests happening elsewhere in the world.

Though Egypt, Bahrain, Libya and others are likely to become text book example studies of the effect of social media on society, it should not be forgotten that Thailand, like Iran, India’s Kashmir protests and others, is another case worth reflecting on.

Is the role social media is playing in protests in 2011 something new?

Looking at Thailand the answer is no, however the levels of social media engagement and technology – both in the west and developing areas of the world – have increased to the level that social media is capable of playing a greater part than ever before.

For more on social media during the Bangkok protests in 2010, see this blog post I wrote for Director Thailand last year.