A professor from Bengaluru, a Chennai environment activist, an engineer in Gurgaon, a journalist, all last seen in New Delhi on Tuesday morning, have checked in, via their Facebook accounts, at the Standing Rock Indian Reservation in Cannon Ball, North Dakota. These Indians are among 1 million Facebook users standing in solidarity against the North Dakota police department.

The offline protest – a long standoff between the police and Native Americans, environmentalists and civil rights activists – began earlier this year in April 2016. Citizens stood in solidarity with the Standing Rock Sioux Tribe to stop the four-state, $3.8 billion Dakota Access Pipeline, which they claim will harm sacred cultural lands and local water supplies.

Regardless of how many Facebook users were originally aware of the brutal and inspiring protest, a viral message that began to circulate on October 31 caught the attention of online activists everywhere. According to the letter, the police was targeting Facebook check-ins at the Dakota Access Pipeline, to disrupt prayer camps at the site.

In response, Facebook users around the world, including in India, began using the site's check-in service to claim they were at the protest, in an attempt to "overwhelm and confuse" the Morton County Sheriff’s Department’s alleged efforts.

This is the message users shared, once they had checked in at the protest site on Facebook:

"The Morton County Sheriff's Department has been using Facebook check-ins to find out who is at Standing Rock in order to target them in attempts to disrupt the prayer camps. SO Water Protectors are calling on EVERYONE to check-in at Standing Rock, ND to overwhelm and confuse them. This is concrete action that can protect people putting their bodies and well-beings on the line that we can do without leaving our homes. Will you join me in Standing Rock?

If you're sharing your location at Standing Stock:
1) Make it public.
2) Make the clarification post SEPARATE, and limit post visibility to your friends only.
3) Don't clarify on your check-in post; privately message friends who say "stay safe!" to let them know what's up.
4) Copy/paste to share clarification messages (like this one) because making it public blows our cover.
5) Use an alternate name like Randing Stock, in clarification posts so that when they filter out / search those terms, your post is visible to the right people."

— Facebook

The sheriff's department denied the accusation on Monday, calling it "absolutely false". An officer explained that not only were they not using Facebook check-ins for geotargeting protesters, but that the metric presented no intelligence value to them.

The Sacred Stone Camp, when contacted by the fact-checking site Snopes, said that although they appreciated the gesture of solidarity the message did not originate at their camp.

Help for protesters?

The Dakota Access Pipeline plans to transport oil between the US states of North Dakota and Illinois. The pipeline, transporting fracked crude oil, would go under the Missouri River, just upstream of the reservation, potentially putting the Standing Rock Sioux's main water supply in danger.

Technically, a remote check-in might not be the most effective method to throw off law enforcement agencies. A Facebook status update is a far cry from real political action.

Despite the massive social media protest-via-check-in on Facebook, the social network's Trending system reportedly did not register it until Tuesday. Did the virtual chatter really slip through the cracks, or was Facebook suppressing the story, some social media users wondered.

Tech Crunch noted that “Standing Rock,” “Native Americans,” “pipeline,” “Missouri River,” and related terms didn’t show up as Facebook Trends to users, until long after the check-in protest began. The website also pointed out that related terms did not even show up in the “Emerging Trends” pool, from which Facebook internally surfaces trends.

The mass check-in is a new form of online activism on Facebook. On Twitter, where the hashtag #NoDAPL (no Dakota Access Pipeline) has been trending on and off since April, keyboard protests are par for the course.