Update on the "Twitter Revolution"

Three weeks after a mass public uprising in Moldova that threatened the country's newly-elected Communist government, the BBC scored an interview with the woman who it's believed was the mastermind behind the 'Twitter Revolution'.

The Beeb spoke with Natalia Morar, freshly released from house arrest about the uprising earlier this month on the streets of Chisinau, Moldova's capital. According to Morar, she never planned to spark a revolution, but only to hold a peaceful protest against what she and her friends thought was an election rigged in favor of the ruling Communist party (observers from the OSCE, while suspicious, found little evidence of voter fraud). They expected a few hundred Moldovans to turn out, instead 15,000 did.

But like a tweet, the Moldovan revolution proved to be short, with government forces quickly tossing protesters out of an occupied building and clearing the streets of the capital. Three weeks later, everyone is still trying to figure out just what happened, with the role of Twitter itself as the driving force of the revolution now being called into question.

The Twitter community in Moldova is tiny - estimated at only 100 to 200 users, and an analysis of Moldova-related traffic on Twitter just before the protests doesn't show the kind of jump in traffic you'd expect if people were organizing a massive event. Ms. Morar tacitly admits that Twitter was only one of a number of new media technologies being used to organize the protests, along with blogs, websites and SMS text messages - so perhaps in this case its best to think of "Twitter" as a catchall for a whole stew of new media techniques.

The unexpected size of the turnout has also led to speculation that there were larger forces behind the protests that were trying to use what looked like a spontaneous public uprising as a front for a more organized coup d'etat. Moldova’s President Vladimir Voronin almost immediately accused Romania of trying to oust him from power in a bid to annex Moldova (Romania and Moldova have deep cultural ties and for part of the 20th Century Moldova was part of Romania, before being carved out and turned into one of the republics of the Soviet Union).

Russia has also been accused of being behind the coup attempt either to 1) solidify the control of Moldova's Communist government and pull the country into Russia's orbit; or 2) to cause such a level of chaos in Moldova that it boosts the independence claims of the separatist-minded, pro-Moscow Transdnestr region in eastern Moldova, which has been struggling for independence from Moldova since the early 1990s. The CIA, the go-to suspects anytime there is a coup attempt anywhere in the world, also has gotten their share of suspicion, though its hard to gather what US foreign policy gain there is to be had by overthrowing the government in Europe's poorest country.

That last fact probably comes closest to explaining why what should have been a fairly benign protest grew so wildly. It's estimated that more than 500,000 of Moldova's four million citizens live and work abroad, supporting families back in Moldova through remittances. At least that's how things worked until the recent economic crisis. Many of those Moldovans working across Europe though lost their jobs and were forced to return home, causing a spike in Moldova's already high unemployment, as well as a spike in anger among these newly unemployed Moldovans.

Even though the Twitter Revolution may have failed to materialize, the tensions still remain, so to then does the potential for another mass uprising.