Tufekci stresses throughout that online spaces and social media are an important public sphere and not simply virtual extensions of people's lives.

The capacity is its ability to (for example) command a narrative, to disrupt the status quo, or to effect legislative or structural change.

The Civil rights movement built such capacities and achieved significant change, while protests such as Occupy Wall Street gathered large crowds but fizzled.

Governments may also employ methods of censorship like manipulating attention by flooding social media with irrelevant or misleading information, as with China's 50 Cent Army, or pushing activists towards self-censorship through online harassment.

[1] A review from the newspaper praised the book for its transformative view of the role of digital technology in activist causes.