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HIGHLIGHT two passages you might use in your research paper…ONLY TWO!
So, Was Facebook Responsible for
the Arab Spring After All?
REBECCA J. ROSENSEP 3 2011, 8:34 AM ET
Without better information, the debate was largely theoretical. Now, a report out of
both Tunisia and Egypt fills in key details.
The hot and at times vicious debate about whether Facebook (where "Facebook" stood
for all things social on the Internet) unleashed the revolutions in Egypt and Tunisia has
been long on theory and short on reporting. Despite the shouting match, there is one
thing everyone agrees on: activists in these countries used social media. Even Malcolm
Gladwell who has argued repeatedly against Twitter's power wrote, "Surely the least
interesting fact about them is that some of the protesters may (or may not) have at one
point or another employed some of the tools of the new media to communicate with one
another. Please." The debate has pretty much accepted this as a given and has instead
centered around what effect, if any, these tools had.
But while everyone "knows" this at some level -- we've seen the Facebook groups and the
retweets -- the details have been fuzzy. And without better details the debate has been
"dumb," as Jay Rosen of NYU put it. That's no one's fault: In the midst of a revolution, it
was not always easy to suss out the details of who was leading it, what social tools they
were using, and what effects those tools were having. But now that the dust has started
to settle, journalists and academics are beginning to piece together that story. And
unlike the story so often told that begins with a poor vegetable seller lighting himself on
fire in the middle of last December, the story that examines these questions begins more
than a decade ago, when Tunisian activists first started going online.
The details come to life in an essay by John Pollock in Technology Review. Editor-inchief Jason Pontin writes in an introductory note:
How did Tunisians and Egyptians use social media during the uprisings?
We decided to answer that question by reporting what actually happened, and we sent
Pollock, a writer who specializes in Africa, to interview the principals behind the region's
youth movements.
Pollock's piece (and for the love of journalism read the whole thing, not just my
reflection on it) follows the journey of two Tunisians known as "Foetus" and
"Waterman" (their real names are unknown even to Pollock) whose organization,
Takriz, helped incite the mass protests against Tunisia's president Zine El Abidine Ben
Ali. Takriz, Pollock writes, began as a "cyber think tank" in 1998. Early on, its aims were
freedom of speech and affordable Internet access. Pollock writes:
Waterman recalls that the Internet was the only viable option for organizers in 1998,
because other media were controlled by Ben Ali. Foetus, Takriz's chief technology
officer, a skilled hacker who started hacking because he couldn't afford Tunisia's thenexorbitant phone and Internet costs, saw another advantage online: safety. Takriz
meetings "in real life" meant "spies and police and all these Stasi," he says, using the
term for East Germany's secret police. "Online we could be anonymous."
Over the next decade, more and more Tunisians slowly came online. Even in 2008,
when protests broke out in Tunisia's mining region, fewer than 30,000 Tunisians were
on Facebook. Ben Ali's online censorship was so severe that Tunisia ranked below Iran
and China on measures of Internet Freedom. But by the end of 2009, more than
800,000 Tunisians had Facebook accounts and when Ben Ali fled earlier this year, the
number was just shy of two million, nearly a fifth of the country's total population.
Takriz used many other online tools: It created a fake Twitter account and website for
Tunisia's foreign minister. Activists used Skype and Mumble to talk to one another over
the Internet. One activist even used Foursquare to broadcast his location when he was
being held in the Ministry of the Interior. "We were online every day," Foetus told
Pollock, "and on the streets pretty much every day, collecting information, collecting
videos, organizing protests, getting into protests."
In the days following the death of Mohamed Bouazizi, protests erupted in towns across
Tunisia's poor interior. Dozens of protesters were killed. One video emerged filmed
inside a hospital in the town of Kasserine: a young man lay dead with his brains spilling
out.
Posted and reposted hundreds of times on YouTube, Facebook, and elsewhere, [the
video] set off a wave of revulsion across North Africa and the Middle East. Like
thousands of Tunisians, Rim Nour, a business consultant, was "online almost 24 hours a
day," spending a lot of time identifying government stooges on Facebook groups. She
remembers the video vividly: "A friend put it up and wrote something like 'You don't
want to see this, it's horrible, but you must. You hae a moral obligation to look at what is
happening in your country.'"
Even though these other tools played their parts, Facebook was on a plane of its own.
Foetus calls it "the GPS for this revolution" -- quite a helpful analogy. Facebook is what
guided the protests, but the true vehicle for change was the protests themselves.
Pollock's look at Egypt's social movements doesn't go as far back into the history as his
study of Tunisia. He begins that chronicle with the April 6, 2008, textile-worker strike in
the city of Mahalla. Early on, organizers did not use Facebook because so few people
were on it at the time, but when they did start up a page, they gained 3,000 fans a day.
Following the protests, one of the planners was arrested, beaten, and threatened with
rape. When he was released he announced the beginning of the "April 6 movement" and
he and his fellow organizers began to study nonviolent civil disobedience online at an
Arabic site called Academy of Change, inspired by the Serbian youth movement Otpor.
As in Tunisia, one of the key turning points in Egypt came from a display of state
brutality that went viral online: On June 6, 2010, police dragged a computer
programmer named Khaled Said out of a cybercafe and beat him to death in the street.
Police said he had resisted arrest but his family says he had videos showing the police
dealing drugs that police feared he would upload to YouTube or Facebook. Pollock
writes:
Said became a revolutionary icon when ghastly post-mortem photos, taken on his
brother Ahmed's cell phone, were post to Facebook. We Are All Khaled Said emerged as
an enormously influential Facebook group; it now has almost 1.5 million members.
Pollock's portrayal of Egyption activism displays strategies and tools similar to
Tunisia's. Of course, that's no accident: The Egyptian activists were following the events
in Tunisia, learning from them, and even communicating with some of the leaders -over Facebook, of course. When one of the Egyptian movement's leaders heard the news
from Tunisia, he started texting: "Ben Ali gone. Possibility." As Pollock puts it,
"Recipients understood the possibility he had in mind."
In the end, no matter the importance of the online tools, "history happened on the
streets," editor-in-chief Pontin writes. But how those streets became flooded by so
many, well, it wasn't random, and social media's role boils down to two simple but
central accomplishments: First, Facebook and elsewhere online is where people saw and
shared horrifying videos and photographs of state brutality that inspired them to rebel.
Second, these sites are where people found out the basic logistics of the protests -where to go and when to show up.
Pollock's piece still leaves open many unanswered questions, not least of which is how
we will assess the power of these tools if the regimes that rise next are cut from the same
cloth as their predecessors. Moreover, consider the ongoing situation in Syria. Once we
start really looking at this role of social media in political change, we will realize that,
from place to place, its power is not the same.
*FROM THE TWO HIGHLIGHTED QUOTES…write one of them in your own words
below. (Summarize the information.)