In 2001, successful street protests against president Joseph Estrada were organised by cell phone text messages. In 1998 in Jakarta, protesters who forced Indonesian dictator Suharto from office organised only by word of mouth and e-mail lists because few could even afford cell phones at that time.

That's not to say these Southeast Asian countries are not tech savvy. Far from it. Indonesia now has the second most Facebook users in the world, with 38.5 million, while the Philippines is seventh. Indonesia also has the highest penetration rate of Twitter in the world.

'Social media in its most primitive sense, we used it to overthrow Suharto,' said Andreas Harsono, an Indonesian who is a representative of the United States-based Human Rights Watch. 'And today, according to Google, there are 225 million cell phones in Indonesia - 80 per cent of them have internet connections. Most of these Facebook and Twitter users don't use a laptop or PC. They are using a mobile phone.'

Indeed, while opposition groups in the Arab world are using social media to plot the removal of authoritarian regimes and usher in change, Indonesians 13 years on from Suharto's downfall are using Facebook and Twitter to monitor official abuse of power, fight social injustice and venture daily criticisms about the government, economy, and society.

In 2009, more than a million Indonesians joined a Facebook group to support two senior members of the country's anti-corruption commission after they were allegedly framed for graft by National Police officials stemming from a personal feud between the departments. Last year, online activists collected the final donations that reached US$75,000 to pay the court fine of a Jakarta housewife who was thrown in jail for writing a complaint e-mail about the service at a local hospital.

And this month, an Indonesian Twitter group named @cikeusiktrial is posting updates on the site as well as videos on YouTube about the continuing trials of radical Muslims for inciting a lynch mob to kill three members of the minority Ahmadiyah Islamic sect in Cikeusik, West Java.

But that doesn't mean social media doesn't have detractors. Police officials have blamed Facebook for prostitution in Indonesia after a site was found to be selling women for sex, while a group of conservative Muslim clerics in East Java declared Facebook haram, or forbidden, saying it encouraged flirting.

Then there was the YouTube video that went viral in April, showing an Indonesian police officer lip-syncing and dancing to Chaiyya-Chaiyya by Indian film star Sahrukh Khan while sitting at his post.

'We must turn our obsession with Twitter and Facebook into economically productive time or we will be wasting valuable time and energy,' barked an editorial last week in the Jakarta Globe, a leading English-language daily newspaper. 'Research is showing that many young people are addicted to Facebook to the detriment of their studies.'

However, social media activists say the pros far outweigh the cons.

Social media certainly helped First Brigadier Norman Kamaru, the lip-syncing Indonesian policeman. His red-faced supervisors were going to punish him over the YouTube video, but backtracked after online activists rallied to his support. Norman has since performed live concerts and now has a record contract.