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Everyone already knows dissent exists. Polls, social media, elections make that clear. The question is whether street protests add anything to that awareness, and whether the way they're conducted generates curiosity or just irritation. For a lot of people it's the latter, and waving that off doesn't make the problem disappear.
I don't know if it can be proven or whatever, but I do know it has changed me.
There have been many events where I thought "hey, why is everybody whining about X thing?". "things are fine the way they are". Until I read more about it and changed my mind.
If it was purely online, I wouldn't take it so seriously.
So whether it can proven empirically or not, I know it changed me.
> A crowd showing up doesn't automatically translate to minds changed or policy moved.
Strawman much?
> If the tactics alienate more people than they persuade, visibility alone isn't doing much.
What tactics? What evidence is there that people are being alienated by the peaceful protests, rather than by the murders and other violence and lying of administration officials?
From the top of my head I can think of news reporting both "few (tens of) thousands" vs "hundreds of thousands" (different news reporting different numbers/estimates/etc) in 2025 protests in Serbia/Belgrade, as well as those comparisons of Obama vs Trump inauguration news/photos.
Meanwhile to you as an individual there on the spot - both crowds of say 50K-100K and 1M+ look basically the same = "huge amounts of people in every direction that you look".
If crowd sizes become a significant point of contention it'll become increasingly commonplace for multiple parties to take lots of aerial video and photos that serve as independent verification. You could probably get a pretty accurate estimate of how many people show up to an event by sending drones to take photos every 15 minutes.
In any case, I think the problem you highlight is more focused towards the upper-end, while I was thinking about the lower end of the spectrum. Where some people might be very vocal online, but they're unable to gather more than a dozen or two people for any given protest. If a protest is gathering an unknown number of people that ranges between 100k and 1 million that sounds like a really good problem to have.
Your criticism of inconsistent people estimates are valid, I'm not sure if newspapers have published the set of tools and criteria that they use when generating these estimates, so that's an area where it would be great to see increased transparency.
The "publishing the set of tools and criteria used to generate estimates" is happening, and so far it seems that usually doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter because of course those sources/news that report wildly wrong (be it larger or smaller numbers) are usually (not always, but very commonly) controlled by the governments.
So despite students that organized the biggest protests in Belgrade giving their estimates (based on combo of RSVP and how many people accommodated people from other cities). And those being close to independant research (using drone footage, VR/AR crowd simulations, AI) with loads of posts/videos providing detailed explanations ...
Most "ordinary people" saw (and keep seeing) just the "official version".
This is not an accurate or thoughtful characterization of what you're responding to; it's not even in the same ballpark.
> is a convenient way to avoid asking whether the criticism has merit.
Pure projection.
No, they really don’t. Have you never heard someone say that they have never met anyone who is X so it can’t be that popular? My own sister thought 2000 was going to be a landslide for Gore because she “hadn’t met anyone who was going to vote for Bush”.
The point is to demonstrate "we are not alone in this feeling", that's it...
Those TV channels were virtually always (and to this day still are) controlled by "the government".
Meanwhile other TV channels, if there even were any, and if enough people even had chance to watch them (because limited frequency/transmission allocations, artificial limits on cable distribution ..etc) - were and still are labeled as "funded by foreign (state) actors that are trying to destabilize our independance/values/etc".
And it's more of the same online.
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This reminds me of an old website that's an absolute gold mine.
Knock yourself out https://changingminds.org/explanations/theories/minority_inf...
This makes 100%, right. But how many actually care and act, what are the dynamics?
Regarding the end of centralized broadcasting, one could argue that social networks might actually act as amplifiers of "small" events.
Motivating other people to take a stand -- I do not think this is true either. A fraction of the folks who would support the issue regardless may join the protest on the street. But that would be those who support the issue already.
Change comes from the ballot box. Enough people in the street might influence the next election (sometimes for the issue they are advocating; sometimes in the opposite direction). But 6+ months from the next election the effect I suspect is small. My 2c.
you can find dissent to anything and everything at any time on the internet. Dissent exists always. Dissent that causes people to take the streets and risk being murdered, gassed, beaten, arrested, or even just tracked using facial recognition and fake cell phone towers, that's something else entirely.
> Motivating other people to take a stand -- I do not think this is true either.
People in this discussion have already stated that protests have caused them to reevaluate their position on things protesters were demonstrating against.
> Change comes from the ballot box.
If that were true there'd never have been any change in countries that aren't democracies or where voting was a complete sham only to give the appearance of one. Fairly elected or otherwise, politicians can ignore mean facebook posts. They can't as easily ignore thousands of people protesting outside of their home or office.
Where democracy exists at all, protests can change people's minds about their situation, especially when those protests demonstrate and expose horrific abuses by the state. Even if I didn't support whatever was being protested, if I witness things that shouldn't happen in my country and the current administration defends those things and/or threatens worse, I'm going to reconsider my support the current administration and I won't need 7+ months to do it
It seems more of a fetid cesspit. It promotes anger, division and controversy rather than shared ideas, cohesive action and positive social change. I think I need an example of the good social media can do for society and collective action.
No. I only said that spreading information that there is dissent does not require taking to the street.
Obviously this requires the protesters to make a bit of a judgment call. Do I think the typical person leans so strongly towards my side that they'll take it when I force the issue, even if I annoy them? Sometimes the answer is no, and I've definitely seen people do counterproductive protests that way. But sometimes the answer is yes.
That's not the intent.
Protests are one way We the People remind the government who they're supposed to be representing. Who has the real power in a democracy.