A woman checks a Facebook page for the former Nazi death camp of Auschwitz, for the Auschwitz Museum, in Warsaw, Poland in this 2009 photo.
When Michelle Ryan Lauto decided to organize a statewide protest against school budget cuts, she didn't pass out fliers, make phone calls or attend meetings.
She just logged on to Facebook.
Lauto's Facebook page — "Protest NJ Education Cuts — State Wide School Walk Out" — drew nearly 18,000 members within a few weeks and sparked today’s mass budget protest in schools across New Jersey.
"You can use these social networking tools for very positive things — it’s not just about kids putting up photos from their weekend party," said Lauto, 18, a Pace University freshman who went to high school in Bergen County.
With 400 million members and growing, Facebook is becoming the leading forum for mobilizing protests, rallies, boycotts and other social movements. In the last few months, the social networking site has served as the rallying point for everything from pro-Democracy rallies in Egypt to Tea Party protests in the U.S. and efforts to get Betty White to host "Saturday Night Live."
Michelle Ryan Lauto, the 18-year-old college student whose Facebook page stirred thousands of high school students across the state to protest state aid cuts to education said this afternoon she "couldn't be more proud."Today, students across the state used Facebook to urge each other to walk out of school to protest the proposed school funding cuts in Gov. Chris Christie’s budget. They also used Facebook to trade advice on contacting newspapers and television stations to publicize their rallies, while Lauto logged on to urge students to keep their protests peaceful.
Among the current high school generation — who are dubbed Millennials — Facebook is an obvious choice for the mass communication needed to organize a protest, said Richard Sweeney, university librarian at New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark and a scholar who has spent years studying the traits of Millennials.
"They social network almost to the extreme," said Sweeney. "It doesn’t surprise me a bit."
In Newark, students also turned to Twitter and text messaging to coordinate a walkout of thousands of students at schools across the state’s largest city.
Nah-Fee Hinton, an 8th grader at Oliver Street Elementary School, showed a text message he received on his cell phone Monday night. "Walk out 2morrow at 1:15 ... who’s doin it?" the text read.
The Newark walkout was scheduled to start in the early afternoon, but when students at Weequahic High School walked out early, students said word spread quickly to the other schools that the protest had begun.
"Phone calls, texts, Twitter, Facebook, everything," said Malcolm X. Shabazz senior Donald Jackson, 17, who was leading a march of fellow students down Broad Street.
Staff writer David Giambusso and Ryan Hutchins of New Jersey Local News Service contributed to this report.
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