The Arab Spring: How social media helped enact political transformation
In 2010, Mohammad Bouazizi set up his stand in front of the Central Mosque of Sidi Bouzid, Tunisia. This 26-year old produce vender was used to pay backhanders, as most ambulant sellers, to corrupt local police officers who would then let him perform his commercial activity and support his large family. But that day Bouazizi did not have any money to pay the bribes, and subsequently, he did not have the permissions to be there.
A policewoman arrived and took everything off him and encouraged other policemen to brutally hit him. People gathered as the tension aroused and Mohammad, full of anger and tears, head to the townhall to lodge a complaint, but he was ignored. He went to a store nearby and bought a bottle of fuel, returned to the streets and set himself alight in front of the townhall.
In the little town news travelled fast; but Bouazizi’s death set a chord in the large Arab world. His act of frustration over injustice, unemployment and corruption was a maximized expression of the feelings of a part of the population that were not being listened. The crowd gathered in the place where the man burned himself increasing the tension. Despite the rarity of the events, mainstream media reported nothing of what was going on.
Demonstrations were almost unheard of in Tunisia, but protestors had something in their pockets to tell the world what was happening: their mobile phones. These events inspired a series of upheavals in the north of Africa and West Asia that were later known as the Arab Spring. Thousands of people demonstrated in the subsequent years against totalitarian regimes of the region through the internet. The way these revolutions began, caught the world off guard and the analysis on the influence of social media on Arab political transitions lingers to this day.
From a country as small as Tunisia to one as large in population as Egypt, activists used new media tools to tell their side of the story. On one hand, Facebook was especially important to broadcast live human rights violations during the protests as well as to disseminate key dates and locations to demonstrate. On the other, Twitter was massively used to warn the population on police presence in certain streets.
While small cities in the interior of Tunisia were striking, the capital Tunis remained stubbornly quiet. The Revolution needed the help of working women and men in the capital that were not hit by the poverty of the south, but they knew that the main worker’s union was a government ally. Activist Slim Amamou talks about their strategies to gather more and more people in the demonstrations by talking by phone with a friend inside a cab just so the taxi driver could hear the conversation that contained the date and place of the demonstration. Soon after, people started to talk about it.
Path to democratic States
Tunisia had over 2 million facebook profiles, that means 1 in 5 of the entire population. While Ben Ali, president for over 30 years, would constantly block political sites, he barely interfered with Facebook. Ali was just one of the cluster of leaders that managed to perpetuate themselves in the power by changing the rules of the game: Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Muammar Gadaffi in Libya and Bashar Al Assad in Syria
The Revolution was powered by dissatisfaction among educated youth because of unequal distribution of wealth, unemployment, monarchy and corruption. Moreover, youngsters saw Turkey’s model as an ideal of democracy (liberal economy, secular contitution, but Islamist government) for the Arab countries. The only country of them all that achieved a democratic transition was Tunisia.
Sahar Khamis is an expert on Arab and Muslim media at UMD (University of Maryland, College Park) and former head of the Communication Department in Qatar. She thinks that although many Internet websites and blogs are used to defy and resist dictatorial regimes in the Arab world, a number of these governments took steps to encourage Internet proliferation and accessibility, in order to boost economic development. This provides evidence of the ambivalent and complex relationship between media and governments in the Arab world.
ISIS Aftermath
Sectarianism might be one of the most expensive long-term aftermaths of the Arab Spring. Especially in Syria, Iraq, Libya and Yemen a strong feeling of “State failure” resulted of the events of 2010–2011. Islamists found easier to try to fill that void through foreign funding in a milicia-based governance. People did not feel that they could be part of a political representation in the new governments.
Organizations like ISIS started to use the same machinary as the youth during the Revolution. Social media and the Internet became part, alongside weaponry and fighters, of the tools used to fulfill their interests and spread the Islamist identity.
Social Media Debate
Social media and digital technologies have been praised for allowing citizens to circumvent media channels controlled by the State in the Arab uprisings. The truth is that the role and impact of social media in these upheavals have been much debated.
One of the most intrinsic characteristics of the Arab transitions’ mobilizations was their loose structure. Egyptian activist Nawara Negm believes that the lack of a pyramidal structure online made regimes think that the Revolution was very unlikely to succeed which allowed the ideals to disseminate without being censored. This was a double edge sword. They were horizontal movements with a bottom-up, rather than top-down, structure with a lack of identifiable leaders.
What is true is that a unique filmed record now exists thanks to the new generation of people that were able to overcome censorship through online media, and even in some cases, the Internet revolution tipped the balance of power in their favor.
