By giving dissidents the ability to share this kind of information quickly, social tools such as Facebook (which was much more widely used in Egypt than Twitter) made it easy to connect groups of protesters and plan events.

Once a protest event receives media attention, however, protesters often charge that the media fail to portray their causes as they would like.

Organizational models see the institutional logics guiding mass media operations as influential in the selection and portrayal of news.

Ideological models of the media explain the choices made in the selection and interpretation of the news in terms of the cultural reproduction of broader power relationships.

The typical political targets of protests are insulated from direct contact with protesters, and the target's "reference publics" are generally groups with routine and direct access to political influence. Thus, social movements -- or politically marginalized groups that lack direct access to polity members -- must find indirect means of communicating with these targets. Usually this happens through the mass media. By organizing protest events, activists hope to attract the attention of and intervention by these third parties with the policy formulators and decision makers. But third party assistance is contingent upon whether and how the protest event is represented by the mass media

Social movements often seek to draw attention to issues they deem important by organizing public demonstrations with the aim of attracting mass media coverage. But only a small proportion of all public demonstrations receives any media attention.

Her surprising conclusion is that the success of social movements has more to do with their political tactics than with the ideas associated with their ideologies.