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Current Events In Libya, Tunisia And Egypt Have Been Called ‘Twitter Revolutions’ But Can Social Networking Overthrow A Government?
Think of the defining image of the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa the concept combines Egypt with Tunisia, Bahrain and Libya. It hasn’t been, in itself, the parties of Hosni Mubarak’s fall nor the battles in Tahrir Square in Cairo. Nor even the plain fact of Mohammed Bouazizi’s self-immolation in the central Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid, which acted as a trigger for all the events that have unfolded.
Instead , that outlining image is this : a young girl or a young man with a smartphone. She is in the Medina in Tunis with a BlackBerry held aloft, taking a picture of a demonstration outside the prime minister’s house. He’s an annoyed Egyptian doctor in an aid station stooping to capture the image of someone with a head injury from missiles thrown by Mubarak’s fans. Or it’s a Libyan in Benghazi running with his telephone switched to a jerky video mode, surprised when the youth in front of him is shot through the head.
All of them are pictures that have found their way on to the internet through social media sites. And it isn’t just pictures. In Tahrir Square I sat one morning next to a 60-year-old surgeon cheerfully tweeting his participation in the protest. The barricades today don’t bristle with bayonets and rifles, but with telephones.
As commentators have attempted to imagine the nature of the uprisings, they have tried to cast them as many things : as an Arab version of the Eastern EU revolutions of 1989 or something similar to the Iranian revolution that toppled the Shah in 1979. Most often, though, they have tried to conceive them thru the media that informed them as the results of WikiLeaks, as “Twitter revolutions” or provoked by Facebook.
All of which, as American media writer Jay Rosen has written, has generated a similarly controversialist class of article in reply, most often written a long way from the revolutions. These stories aren’t simply distrustful about the contribution of social media, but anxious to deny it has played any part.
Those at the vanguard of this discussion include Malcolm Gladwell in the New Yorker (Does Egypt Need Twitter?), the New Statesman’s Laurie Penny (Revolts Do Not need to be Tweeted) and even David Kravets of Wired.co.uk (What’s Fuelling Mideast protests? It’s More Than Twitter). All have argued one way or another that since there were revolutions before social media, and it is folk who make revolutions, how could it be crucial?
Except social media has performed a part. For those among us who’ve covered these events, it’s been unavoidable.
Precisely how we communicate in these moments of historic crisis and transformation is critical. The medium that carries the message shapes and outlines as well as the message itself. The instantaneous nature of how social media communicate self-broadcast ideas, unlimited by publication cut offs and broadcast stories slots, explains in part the velocity at which these revolutions have unscrambled, their almost viral spread across a region. It explains, as well , the frequently loose and non-hierarchical organisation of the protest movements subconsciously modelled on the networks of the web.
Talking lately to the Huffington Post, Rosen argued that those taking positions at either extraordinary of the dialogue were acting lazy and inaccurate. “Wildly overdrawn statements about social media, regularly made with weaselly question marks (like : ‘Tunisia’s Twitter revolution?’) and the derisive debunking that follows from those claims (‘It’s not that simple!’) only appear to be opposite perspectives. In reality they are two modes in which the same weightless discourse is conducted.
“Revolutionary hype is social change analysis cheaply. Debunking is techno-realism cost effectively. Neither one tells us much about our world.”
Rosen is right. And when I started researching this subject I too began as a sceptic. But what I witnessed on the ground in Tunisia and Egypt challenged my preconceptions, as did the proof which has emerged from both Libya and Bahrain. For neither the concept of the “Twitter Revolutions” or their un-Twitterness, accurately reflects the actuality. Often , the contribution of social networks to the Arab uprisings has been as significant as it has also got been complicated, contradictory and misunderstood.
Instead , the importance and impact of social media on every one of the rebellions we have seen this year has been outlined by explicit local factors (not least how people live their lives online in individual states and what state limits were in place). Its role has been shaped too by how well arranged the groups using social media have been.
When Tarak Mekki, an exiled Tunisian entrepreneur, congressman and Internet activist returned to Tunisia from Canada in the days after the Jasmine Revolution he was welcomed by a group of hundreds. A lot of them know Mekki for One Thousand and One Nights, the Monday-night video he used to post on YouTube ridiculing the regime of the fled President Zine Alabidine Ben Ali.
“It’s wonderful that we took part via the Net in ousting him,” he announced on his arrival. “Via uploading videos. What we probably did online had credibility and that is the reason why it was successful.”
Tunisia was exposed under the Ben Ali regime to the kind of interior and exterior dissent represented by One Thousand and One Nights. In a state where the media were firmly controlled and the opposition cold heartedly daunted, Tunisia not only exercised a tight monopoly on Internet provision but blocked access to most networking websites except Facebook.
“They needed to close Facebook down in the first quarter of 2009,” claims Khaled Koubaa, president of the Net Society in Tunisia, “but it was awfully troublesome. So many folk were using it that it would appear that the regime backed off because they believed banning it may actually cause more Problems (than leaving it).”
Indeed, when the Tunisian government did shut it down momentarily, for sixteen days in August 2008, it was confronted with a threat by cyber activists to shut their Internet accounts. The regime was forced to back down.
As an alternative announces Koubaa, the Tunisian authorities attempted to harass those posting on Facebook. “If they became conscious of you on Facebook they might try to divert your account to a fake login page to steal your password.”
And regardless of the allegations of Tunisia being a Twitter revolution or impressed by WikiLeaks neither played much of a part. On Twitter you can find a lot of interesting twitter trends.In Tunisia, pre-revolution, only around 200 active tweeters existed out of almost two thousand with registered accounts. The WikiLeaks pages on Tunisian corruption, says Koubaa, who with his buddies tried to line up sites where his fellow citizens could view them, were blocked as soon as they appeared and anyhow, the information was barely stories to Tunisians. However , “Facebook was huge,” he asserts. Koubaa disagrees that social media during Ben Ali’s dictatorship existed on 2 levels. A few thousand “geeks” like him communicated via Twitter, while maybe 2,000,000 talked on Facebook. The activism of the first group informed that of the latter.
All of which left a unusual loophole that persisted until December, when the regime ultimately launched a large-scale attack against Facebook. This in in a country that already tortured and imprisoned blog writers, and where the country’s net censors at the Ministry of the Interior were nick-named “Amar 404″ after the 404 error message that appeared when a page was blocked.
“Social media was completely crucial,” asserts Koubaa. “Three months before Mohammed Bouazizi burned himself in Sidi Bouzid we had an identical case in Monastir. But no one knew about it because it wasn’t filmed. What made a difference this time is that the images of Bouazizi were put on Facebook and everybody saw it.”
And with state censorship common in a number of these states, Facebook has worked in the way the media should as a source of information. Around a week after Ben Ali’s fall, I run into Nouridine Bhourri, a 24-year-old call-centre employee, at a demonstration in Tunis against the presence in the govt. of former members of the old regime.
“We still do not accept the news and television,” he is saying, a not amazing fact when plenty of the orginal reporters are still working. “I research what’s occuring on Facebook and the internet.” Like many Bhourri has changed into a foot soldier in the Net campaign against the old Tunisian regime.
“I put up newbie video on Facebook. For instance, a buddy got some pictures of a sniper on Avenue de Carthage. It’s what I’ve been doing, even in the crisis. You share video and photos. It was if you wrote something or made it yourself that there was a genuine problem. ” as reported tagza.com.
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