What can we learn from the protest wave of the last years? How does social media impact the capacity for collective action? Does social media contribute to blunting movement impacts by facilitating horizontal, non-institutional and “leaderless” movements? How do these movements compare with their predecessors like the civil-rights or anti-colonial movements? In this talk Zeynep Tufekci — assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, a faculty associate at Berkman Center for Internet & Society, and a fellow at the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University — discusses these questions by drawing from research on a variety of social movements including the “Arab Spring”, European indignados movements, Occupy and Turkey’s Gezi protests. (October 15, 2013, Berkman Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University.)