information, facilitating communication between experts, promoting grassroots efforts, discrediting political figures, and setting policy agendas. Al-Rodhan concludes, governments must increase surveillance of blogs and develop legal, administrative, and technological tools to dissuade bloggers from posting potentially harmful information, such as calls to incite terrorism. On a more positive note, blogs have also the potential to prevent governments from adopting hasty and misjudged decisions. Building on this work, Wallsten empirically assessed the impact of political bloggers as a "fifth estate" during the 2004 US presidential campaign. Specifically, he used time-series analysis to determine the extent to which political bloggers followed the mainstream media's agenda or set the mainstream media's agenda. He found that there was a complex, bidirectional relationship between mainstream media coverage and blog discussion rather than a unidirectional media or blog agenda setting effect. In a speech at Georgetown University on October 17, 2019, Mark Zuckerberg gave a description of social media and the power it gives to people:"People having the power to express themselves at scale is a new kind of force in the world — a 'Fifth Estate' alongside the other power structures of society. People no longer have to rely on traditional gatekeepers in politics or media to make their voices heard, and that has important consequences. I understand the concerns about how tech platforms have centralized power, but I actually believe the much bigger story is how much these platforms have decentralized power by putting it directly into people’s hands." See also Fourth branch of government Fifth power Gossip References Social media Social influence Information society Influence of mass media Journalism