It takes more than social media to make a social movement

President Trump may have used the power of social media to make his way into the White House, but now social media networks are showing that muscle can work for his opposition, too. The real question, however, is whether this burgeoning new movement can avoid the fate of many so others kick-started by the power of social networks — only to find that it's much harder to make political change than to make a popular hashtag.

The very ability for movements to scale quickly is, in part, why they also can fall apart so quickly compared with traditional grass-roots campaigns. That highlights the crucial difference between old social campaigns and new ones. Scale, even in the form of a huge protest, does not equal success.