Hundreds of thousands of people poured into Montreal’s streets last night to show their displeasure at the provincial government’s draconian anti-protest law, Loi #78. Watching the action on Twitter last night, it was fascinating (and disturbing) to see the hashtag #casseroles start trending after people, many of them middle-aged and older, came “armed” with pots and pans to make noise. Twitter was obviously censoring the feed last night, because the more conventional hashtags for the protests, #manifencours,#ggi, and #loi78, were not trending at all. For those of you not familiar with Twitter, the most popular “categories” of discussion are highlighted according to cities and countries, to make it easier for twitter users to see what other users are talking about, or what is “trending”. What Twitter did was remove the categories related to the Montreal protests from the trending list, so that it was harder for twitter users to see how many other people were talking about the protests. So much for free speech!
Here are some more discussions of the protests:
Peaceful Day March, Heated Night Demos
Massive Montreal Rally Ends With Police Clashes
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zIO4FgXN1CY]