[BruceIV]

It strikes me that one aspect of the "get 100,000 people on the legislature's front lawn" mode of political speech is that it also proves that each and every one of those 100,000 people cares enough to spend hours arranging transport and then standing around outside. Short-circuiting that process by putting it on a webpage with an upvote button that takes orders of magnitude less time to click blunts the message by a similar factor.

[kandu]

Indeed, the advantage of online political tools is that they reduce significantly the effort required to contribute.

[BruceIV]

That's not always an advantage. I consider one "political social network" I've seen, the comments section on the political articles the CBC puts up - they're dreadful, nearly as bad as YouTube, because it makes it ridiculously easy to sound off anything that comes into your head (mostly terrible puns on parties and leaders names) and have it be "heard". I doubt anyone who doesn't comment on CBC articles takes the comments at all seriously.