A look at the sizes of recent street demonstrations



PEOPLE power is increasingly on display from Cairo’s Tahrir Square to Istanbul’s Taksim Square. In recent days Hong Kong and Ukraine have come alive with public protests of their own. But how do they compare in terms of participants? Answering the question definitively is impossible. The authorities come up with one number, the organisers another, the press perhaps a third. Nevertheless, the disparities among estimates are evocative of the tensions. And the relative sizes are a useful comparison as protests start to blur together in the media din. For instance, many people were stunned by this weekend’s images of Hong Kong awash with tear gas. But the estimated turnout of around 80,000 people was a fraction of the number who participated recently in New York for a climate-change march and for Catalonian independence in Barcelona. Egypt’s throngs in June 2013 are estimated to be around seven times larger than Brazil's earlier that month. Though calculating crowd size is hard, one useful proxy is mobile phones. In future perhaps wireless carriers, not police nor protesters nor press, will release the data.