Much has been written about the so called “Facebook revolution” in the Middle East. In fact, the technological impact of new media is not reduced to larger uprisings in these countries. Social media are also used in protests in democratic societies. In this chapter I will examine the case of “Stuttgart 21,” also known as “S21,” a controversial train station project in Germany and the use of social media. In contradiction to protests in many authoritarian countries, the use of social media services in Germany by social movements is legal. However, research should focus on the factual use of these digital instruments by protest movements to discover similarities and differences between the practice in liberal-democratic and authoritarian systems.
The research question is: How were social media tools used in the organization and communication of the protesters? I will first describe the project and the protests against it before I present the legal situation in the Federal Republic of Germany. The last part of the work deals with the use of social media in the train station protests. I will demonstrate how Facebook and Twitter were used to reach certain goals by using my own data and by summarizing a recent study (Jungherr & Jürgens, 2013) on the subject.