Hong Kong Protest: popular will or conspiracy

If you are considering what is the hottest topic recently on social media, probably on all media, that will be the protest happening right now in Hong Kong. The origin of the protest is because protesters are angry at China's plans to let election candidates in 2017. Protesters are demanding that the central government in Beijing allows Hong Kong to hold fully free elections in the next vote for the territory's leader.

What is happening 

Most of the protesters in the protest are students from Hong Kong local universities and colleges. And most of the students guided by student federation in Hong Kong, meanwhile the protest also get supported by Tai Wan student federation. Depending to the interview made by New York Times, most of the students who join the protest have no election rights.
The whole protest organised and launched mainly based on social media like Facebook and Twitter.  The public page on Facebook of Hong Kong Student Federation is the main public page of this protest.
Right now, people start to use the hashtag #HongKongProtests , #Hongkongdemocracy and #hongkongprotests #occupycentral to tweet protests related articles, status and discussions online. Also many media use social media platforms to express their own attitude on this protest. Youtube becomes an information rendezvous point on visual reports and many people from all around the world post their attitudes there.

How about mainland China

This protest started around the national day of China. The Chinese Central Government use information blackout to control the information gets into mainland. If you type in the keywords of the protest, all you can see is just few articles and most of the articles are done by the government controlled media.

Outside China

Most of the mainstream media around the world put Hong Kong's protest on the their front page and use a lot of articles to describe this event. Basically the mainstream media keep the neutral attitude, but some of them have some their own attitude.

Social Media Campaign

Most people around the world showed their concern about this protest in Hong Kong. But most of them can only read the news and watch live online. So Social Media becomes a very important platform for everybody.

1. Facebook updates. Most of public pages and personal pages keep updating the news from Hong Kong.

2. Twitter updates. People use special hashtags to identify themselves as a witness.

But from the Facebook comments, it is not hard to find that, some of the users leave very contentious comments with fake accounts. People pretend to be someone else make conflicts through social media and some of the social media accounts started to publish false information. These behaviours really hard to identify and can cause a lot of potential problems like aggravate between police and citizens, protestors and government officers.

Some media started to mislead people. If you carefully check this picture above and you understand Chinese, you will find these people in the picture actually are anti-protestors. But look at the topic below. It's ridiculous. Some of the media probably have some political goals or any other reasons try to distortion of fact. Once this kind of news report spread on social media, it will cause a lot of arguments.

Social Media is a double edged sword. It can help good things become better but also can lead to a truth to a disaster. Because groundswell can be utilised by anyone, people really need to be careful when reading some sensitive issues on social media.

Personal Attitude

As a Chinese, personally speaking, I think the student protest is really overdo. 

1. Most of the students who joined the protest have no political attitudes. Peer pressure drives them go to the street and protest. There are many political systems around the world why students have to insist on the so called "democracy"in their mind. This is something wired.

2. Citizen does not support them. Most citizens' daily lives are stopped by the protest and many of them even to fight against the protest. Only a few of people who have the right to vote to participate in the protest. Instead, the fired up students who have no idea what they want to express to the government become "cannon fodder". Until now, students cannot give a conclusion what they really want. And a lot of local citizens started to organise themselves to fight against this protest.

3. Other organisations and governments' interfering. According to some media's investigation, some of the so called student and people's leaders were trained by foreign countries' agents and people before the protest started. If you look carefully at the video of reporting of news, you will see some anti-PRC slogan and evil organisations with the pretext within the protest people. This is definitely making  this protest go bad.

4. Mainland China offers too much "democracy" in Hong Kong. Though some mainland people feel sympathy for the Hong Kong students, many of them feel angry. Hong Kong people take advantage of the central government's privilege to Hong Kong, they have better business policy, better social security, better freedom anywhere compare to Chinese on the mainland. We are all Chinese no matter in Hong Kong or in mainland. We should be treated equally.