Tweeting to Freedom: An Encyclopedia of Citizen Protests and Uprisings Around the World. By Jim Willis and Anthony R. Fellow. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO. 367 p. $89.00 (ISBN: 978-1-4408-4004-3). E-book available (978-1-4408-4005-0), call for pricing.

Professors Jim Willis (Azusa Pacific University) and Anthony R. Fellow (California State University at Fullerton) edited the affordable and relevant single-volume Tweeting to Freedom: An Encyclopedia of Citizen Protests and Uprisings Around the World. The extensive teaching and research experience of Willis and Fellow is evident in the instructive and informative writing throughout. A major consideration with a reference work on a topic as quickly evolving as social media is how quickly the text will become outdated. The focus on providing context for social media movements will serve to keep the content in Tweeting to Freedom relevant, especially as the memory of the reasons for protests gets shorter and shorter. The analysis will be useful even when the examples are inevitably no longer current; however, there are many timely examples, such as references to the 2016 US presidential election.

Tweeting to Freedom provides an extensive introductory essay on “Worldwide Internet Activism and Movements,” along with thirty-five country studies, ranging from seven to twenty pages in length, all authored by Willis and Fellow. Country essays provide an overview, subsections on economic or social conditions, media and online activity, and a review of journalistic freedom. Countries selected represent both developed and developing countries, a mix of types of governments, and a variety of regions. The approach to the country studies provides more than just a review of social media and protests, and offers an overarching analysis of media and freedom of expression. Broad issues such as privacy and the problematic nature of an open Internet are mixed with specific individual narratives throughout. References are mostly web content, including news sites, online magazines, and government publications.

There are other recent similar titles on the topic of social media and social movements. The 2011 Encyclopedia of Social Movement Media (Sage) is a quality work, albeit with a scope that goes beyond social media, but the six years since its publication have brought major changes in how social media is used to organize protests. Sage also published the 2014 Encyclopedia of Social Media and Politics, a comprehensive three-volume set that covers several hundred general topics but is focused on the United States and serves as a background source with mostly short single-page articles. The Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics published in 2016 is an excellent work that provides an extensive theoretical overview, covers international perspectives, and includes several specific country studies; however, Tweeting to Freedom is more focused on the use of social media for protest movements in specific countries, offers less theory, and is less academic in its approach. Tweeting to Freedom is perhaps more appropriate for advanced high-school students and undergraduates than the more advanced Routledge Companion to Social Media and Politics. ABC-CLIO also released a related work this year, Social Media: A Reference Handbook that would be a useful general companion to provide the larger context of social media outside of social movements and politics.

The one shortcoming of Tweeting to Freedom is its length (367 pages), which, coupled with the extensive scope, does not leave much room for in-depth analysis. Overall, this volume is a quality addition to the existing body of reference works on social media and international social movements, and it is highly accessible yet well researched and informative. Recommended for high-school libraries and colleges.—Shannon Pritting, Library Director, SUNY Polytechnic Institute, Utica, New York