Today Canadian officials dropped motorist legislation that would “have barred motorists 19 and younger from driving with more than one teenage friend” after more than 150,000 members joined a protest group according to the Associated Press. None of the activities resulted in a public protest but the Facebook group was sufficient for helping turn down the bill.
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More than 14,000 people have become members of a Facebook group calling for Dimitrij Rupel, “perennial foreign minister” of Slovenia, to step down according to Reuters. Last week we reported on the Croatian protests which were organized on Facebook and attracted over 3,000 people to the country’s capital on Friday.

Facebook is rapidly becoming a center for political dissent throughout Eastern Europe and the protest trend appears to be spreading. Currently the group has not organized any formal protest event but a rapidly growing Facebook group can now be considered an early warning sign. There were a few catalysts of last week’s protests in Croatia but one of the most significant was when Niksa Klecak was arrested for creating the group “I bet I can find 5,000 people that hate the Prime Minister”.
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Jon Favreau, Barack Obama’s speechwriter, was tagged in a photo of himself groping a cutout of Hillary Clinton on Facebook. The Washington Post was first to report the news Thursday about the future White House speechwriter. When asked for comment on the story, Clinton’s senior advisor said jokingly, “Senator Clinton is pleased to learn of Jon’s obvious interest in the State Department, and is currently reviewing his application.”
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Yesterday we wrote about the Croatian Facebook protest which was set to take place and today we have the photos. There were questions about whether or not a protest would actually materialize but it appears that a peaceful protest did take place. Over 2,500 people attended the protest while 60,000 registered online.
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Facebook is rapidly becoming a platform for organizing protests around the world, Croatia being the latest country to do so. According to the Canadian Press, “thousands of members of an anti-government Facebook group are set to leave cyberspace and take their protests to the streets” today. The group has over 60,000 members but there is no news yet about whether or not the protests have actually materialized.

Last week I wrote about a Croatian Facebook user who was jailed after creating a group called “I bet I can find 5,000 people that hate the Prime Minister.” The group now has over 15,000 members and the creator of the group was ultimately released. I also read this week that the Prime Minister called for an investigation into the jailing as they were inappropriate.
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Following the actions of U.S. Facebook users isn’t a good idea in other countries, especially Croatia. Niksa Klecak, a Croatian Facebook user decided to create a group protesting the country’s Prime Minister, Ivo Sanader, after seeing the group, “I bet I can find 1,000,000 people who dislike George Bush!” surpass 1 million users.

Klecak’s group, “I bet I can find 5,000 people that hate the Prime minister” has already surpassed its target size. I doubt Klecak will be updating the title of the group anytime soon though as Svetlana Gladkova reports that he has since been arrested. Prime Minister Sanader has been under extreme pressure as a direct result of the global financial crisis. According to Gladkova, he has even stated “publicly that he would not allow the wages in the country to grow.”
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According to The Media Line, Iran has decided to block a number of websites “perceived as immoral and anti-social”, with YouTube and Facebook being among the blocked sites. Facebook has been the source of uprisings including Colombia where they protested against the FARC as I wrote about earlier this week.

Apparently Iran is looking to protect themselves from internet uprisings and is acting fast to ban five million websites. This appears to only be a delay of the inevitable as “30 percent of the population have access to satellite TV”. As such citizens in the country still have access to unfiltered information but without Facebook and many of the social media sites, it will be a bit harder to spread ideas.
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This morning Jared Cohen, a member of the U.S. Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff, posted an article on Facebook’s blog. In it he covers something which I covered back in March, the creation of a group on Facebook to protest the FARC. This movement, that was created on Facebook, has been used as a case study for how social technology can impact the world. It also highlights the destruction of bureaucratic barriers between governments and citizens. As Cohen writes, “This really was a new wave of civil society in which there were no offices, government grants, or forms that needed to be filled out and filed for the establishment.”

This morning I had the privilege to sit in on a panel for the Washington, D.C. Economic Partnership, in which everybody in the room was excited about two things: the new administration’s full embrace of technology, and how social technology is transforming the political realm. It is no longer required for a group of people to get together in a room and make change happen.
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While speaking at Web 2.0 Summit last week, Mark Zuckerberg briefly commented on Facebook being used to overthrow aggressive regimes. The audience chuckled at his comment but the reality is that Facebook has been the source of many protests around the world. Egypt is one place where protests are being staged and as the following documentary shows, Facebook is the center of these protests.

I highly recommend taking 24 minutes to watch the following documentary. It’s insightful and extremely powerful and it show how powerful Facebook has become for some. Ultimately, Facebook is effective at spreading freedom and democracy. The government has even gone so far as to publish propaganda in which individuals that were temporarily detained saying that they’ll never use Facebook again.

The video below includes interviews with the creators of the pages calling for protests against the government. It’s extremely powerful so check it out!

ClickZ published a report today which suggests Facebook received a whopping $467,000 from the Obama campaign, “$370,000 of which was spent in September alone.” That’s a more than impressive statistic considering that the campaign spent $8 million in total online. Perhaps it has something to do with Chris Hughes who was a co-Founder of Facebook and left to join the Obama campaign?

There’s no way to determine why so much was spent on Facebook but in comparison, only $11,500 was spent on MySpace before it disappeared from their budget. I’ve posted numerous times about the merging of politics and social networks, and the new reports are a testament to how much influence social networks really have from a monetary standpoint.

While search continues to attract the lion’s share of online ad spend, social networks are obviously becoming a large component of online ad expenditures. It’s debatable as to whether or not social networks will become as large as search but Mark Zuckerberg did at least imply that there is the potential for Facebook’s ads to be extended to the general web.

If Facebook Connect is successful, the extension of Facebook ads to the general web could have significant implications. Anyways, back to politics. When it comes to social networks, Facebook was clearly one of the clear winners for the Presidential campaign. While we don’t know how much was allocated by the McCain campaign, we’re guessing that social network ad expenditures overall were much lower than Obama’s.

This is great news for Facebook as they work to integrate politics and connecting.