Last night marked a historic moment in Hong Kong as peaceful demonstrators fell subject to police aggression. Under the banner of Occupy Central, tens of thousands of locals (organizers say 60,000, media says 30,000) gathered in Hong Kong’s financial district to protests last month’s Beijing-led decision to vet the city’s political candidates through a committee in the People’s Republic of China. Yesterday’s demonstrations began as a continuation of protests that had been going on since the summer. But as crowds swelled in the evening, riot police forces increased, and ultimately fired pepper spray and tear gas at civilians.
Surprisingly, as activists prepared to gather, a mobile app that that first caught the attention of the media last spring resurfaced among participants. FireChat, available for iOS and Android, is a mass chatroom app that lets communicate with one another over wi-fi and cellular networks, along with Bluetooth and Apple’s Multipeer Connectivity Framework. The latter two features means that users can, in theory, chat “off-the-grid.”
In anticipation of poor cellular network connectivity (and perhaps a deliberate network shutdown), student activist leader Joshua Wong posted a message urging people to download FireChat.
His message then spread to others on social media. Downloads snowballed, and suddenly FireChat chatrooms were exploding with activity. Open Garden, the company behind FireChat, tells Tech in Asia that FireChat attracted 100,000 new sign ups from Hong Kong in a 22 hour period. At its peak, 33,000 users from Hong Kong were on the app simultaneously. Open Garden doesn’t have figures revealing how many users communicated with one another off-the-grid using FireChat.
FireChat’s founders originally conceived the app as something that would be useful in densely packed locations with poor internet connectivity – sports stadiums or conference halls, for example.
But since it first hit app stores, FireChat has found itself popular among activists in mass demonstrations on at least two other occasions. In June, Iraqis flocked to the app following an ongoing crackown on social media. Before that, in March, Taiwan activists protesting a trade agreement with mainland China downloaded the app in droves, following an initial prompt by a local Taiwanese tech blogger.
FireChat: Fireworks or flash-in-the-pan?
There’s no doubt that the FireChat’s core mesh network technology, while still rudimentary, holds potential as a powerful communication tool – both for mob activists and football fans. But at the moment, it isn’t quite ready for prime time.
For one thing, as one might expect from a massive chatroom, rumors abound. Activists told Tech in Asia that for every message with directions to the protest site, there were texts spreading false information. “Many people kept posting all kinds of scary rumors,” says Kevin Chan, an activist who claims to have been an early proponent of FireChat. “[People would write] ‘Police have started to shoot’ or ‘a soldier from China is coming.’ I think that scared some people.”
Despite the chaos in FireChat, another activist told Tech in Asia that activity on the app remained robust as connectivity on other social networks sputtered. “I was able to access WhatsApp and Facebook with acceptable speed, but there were moments when they got slow. Twitter… not really. FireChat always had strong coverage,” says Timothy Choi, a local developer. “The noise to signal ratio is rather high… However if you take everything with a grain of salt it is a decent tool.”
From this writer’s perspective, watching FireChat’s Hong Kong chatroom (I observed the ‘Everyone’ room remotely from Taipei, and could only watch on-the-grid discussions), it was a thrill to see users report tear gas explosions and air rallying cries. With so many people in one room, it felt even more “live” than Twitter. But trying to extract useful, timely information from the chaos was near impossible. One Twitter user said it best in a Chinese-language tweet, writing, “FireChat is too flooded. I wish there was a ‘mesh Twitter.’”
FireChat’s lack of encryption also inhibits its potential as a tool for serious political organization. As Citizen Lab noted, users can sign on to FireChat under pseudonymous usernames. But network operators can still access users’ message content and IP addresses. Open Garden CEO Micha Benoliel tells Tech in Asia that the team will implement encryption when it introduces private messaging to the app. “All the conversations on FireChat right now are public,” says Benoliel. “As long as all conversations are public, there is no need for encryption.”
Editing by Steven Millward; top image via Flickr user anselma
Mobile messaging app FireChat flares up in Hong Kong amid Occupy Central protests
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