Young Brazilians take protests to social media

The protests for better living conditions rocking Brazil's streets have spilled over into social media, with a deluge of tweets, Facebook comments and thousands of pictures posted on Instagram.
For the past two weeks, hundreds of thousands of mainly young people have been marching across the country, a placard in one hand and in the other a smartphone to share their protests with the world.
As with the Arab Spring protests in 2011 and the recent unrest in Turkey, activists have used social media to mobilize supporters and plan events while authorities have monitored the same traffic to try to stay one step ahead.

On Twitter, a young woman exulted as more than 1.2 million people flood the streets in scores of cities Thursday to rail against the billions of dollars spent on the 2014 World Cup, as well as corruption and inadequate transport.
"This is what pride looks like. That was beautiful yesterday," she tweeted, adding the trademark slogan keywords #ogiganteacordou (A giant woke up) and #vemprarua (Come down to the streets).
Yesterday, online networks were abuzz with comments on President Dilma Rousseff's televised address late Friday in which she pledged to listen to the "voices of the streets" and offered a plan to improve public services.

"Let's hope she will follow through. I want deadlines," one person said.

"Listening to President Dilma depresses me. It's a joke. She treats us like idiots on national television," a critic tweeted.
"We want dates and times. Action. Promises are not enough," another said.
The social media chatter is being closely monitored by Brazilian intelligence as security forces scramble to contain the demonstrations, which have often been accompanied by clashes between protesters and police.
"What we are collecting via the Internet are public information such as dates of demonstrations," said Gustavo Weber, a spokesman for the Brazilian intelligence agency Abin.

This week, the daily O Estado de Sao Paulo reported that Brazilian intelligence services were monitoring the protests not just on social media but also through messenger services such as the smartphone application Whatsapp.