Social Media as ‘safe place’ during Political Unrest
A recent study published in the Chinese Journal of Communication examines whether social media played an anti-establishment role in creating an insurgent public sphere for the protesters in the Umbrella Movement in Hong Kong in 2014. Unlike the Baby Boomer generation who consume news from traditional television and newspaper entities, “Digital Natives” (the young generation typically born after 1990 who used social networking sites for their news consumption) show greater sympathies towards the Umbrella Movement and express