Interactive Effects of Networked Publics and Social Media on Transforming the Public Sphere: A Survey of Iran's Leaderless 'Social Media Revolution (original) (raw)

Protest leadership in the age of social media

This article challenges the idea that social media protest mobilization and communication are primarily propelled by the self-motivated sharing of ideas, plans, images, and resources. It shows that leadership plays a vital role in steering popular contention on key social platforms. This argument is developed through a detailed case study on the interaction between the administrators and users of the Kullena Khaled Said Facebook page, the most popular online platform during the Egyptian revolution of early 2011. The analysis specifically focuses on the period from 1 January until 15 February 2011. It draws from 1629 admin posts and 1,465,696 user comments, extracted via a customized version of Netvizz. For each day during this period, the three most engaged with posts, as well as the 10 most engaged with comments, have been translated and coded, making it possible to systematically examine how the administrators tried to shape the communication on the page, and how users responded to these efforts. This analysis is pursued from a sociotechnical perspective. It traces how the exchanges on the page are simultaneously shaped by the admins’ marketing strategies and the technological architecture of the Facebook page. On the basis of this exploration, we argue that the page administrators should be understood as ‘connective leaders’. Rather than directing protest activity through formal organizations and collective identity frames, as social movement leaders have traditionally done, connective leaders invite and steer user participation by employing sophisticated marketing strategies to connect users in online communication streams and networks.

The Facebook and Twitter revolutions: Active participation in the 21st century

In the past few years, a wave of protest has spread across the world. The particularity of these uprisings lies in the way the Internet is used to support them. Scholars have analyzed these movements as being closely related to a generation that relies on the Internet as a means of organizing themselves as a force of social change. That is, the Internet is seen as a way of promoting the active participation of young people in political issues. Public opinion and the mass media hail the Arab Spring revolutions as movements beneficial to the democratization of oppressive regimes. By contrast, when disobedient movements emerge in democratic countries, they are generally more cautious in evaluating these movements as enriching democracy. This cautious opinion also concerns the use of social media. In this article, the so-called Twitter revolutions are discussed in light of the theories of social psychology that analyze the relationship between disobedience and democracy.

Social Networking Media and the Revolution That Wasn't: A Realistic Assessment of the Revolutionary Situation in Iran

Media, Power, and Politics in the Digital Age: the 2009 …, 2010

Scholars of the effects of social media often overstate the causal role such media play in social revolutions. Although various media from pamphlets to Twitter have been constitutive of various historically configured social movements, media do not in and of themselves cause revolutions. I examine the Iranian Presidential election protests of 2009, the so called "Twitter Revolution." I find that while social networking media dramatically reduced the costs of organizing and had a constitutive effect on who participated and how, the election protests had much deeper causes involving the usual suspects in revolutions: culture and identity, economic interests, and demography.

Social Media as a Tool for Political Change: The Uprising in Iran (2009) and Egypt (2011)

2017

The 2009 Iranian uprising and the 2011 Egyptian uprising were widely publicized and closely followed by the global community. Social media became central to the way each uprising was experienced, and social media made a major contribution to the way the revolutions were explained to the outside world. Scholars and journalists have praised the role of social media in these two situations; Evgeny Morozov referred to it as a “liberator of authoritarian regimes,” and arguing that “democracy is just a tweet away.” The uprisings were the result of a decade of social and political unrest and discontent among populations that were dissatisfied with their current regimes. In both cases, the effects of social media were undeniable catalyzing anger into protest over an authoritarian regime. Although it cannot be said that social media were the sole cause of these uprisings, social media did play a major role in bringing to the forefront a revolution that had been festering in the background fo...

Social media and social change

Editorial Universidad del Norte eBooks, 2021

The growing impact of new media around the world has been the subject of study by scores of scientists in multidisciplinary fields. Satellite TV and the Internet have been viewed as instruments of social and political change-connecting communities, educating the youth, and creating social networks previously unaccounted for, like virtual groups. However, in the Arab World and the Middle East, such technological developments have been hailed as tools for the empowerment of marginalized communities such as women and the youth, also brought new opportunities that have resulted in the breaking of the communication monopoly by those in power and the creation of a new communication environment. Such environment has-as part of its manifestations-the current social transformations that the region is witnessing. Drawing on examples from social media networks used in Tunisia and Egypt, this article analyzes the extent to which new technologies have changed the rules of the game regarding public opinion construction and the communication flow traditionally monopolized by the hegemonic power structures in Arab society. This study not only reveals the decisiveness of platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube in the Arab Spring countries' revolutions, but also the extent to which their availability served in a complex manner the democratic transition that Tunisia have been undergoing and the political turmoil that Egypt is witnessing. Furthermore this study argues that such online spheres of communication mark the emergence of the virtual yet vibrant space of political campaigning and social empowerment, especially for the youth and marginalized communities.

Launching Revolution: Social Media and the Egyptian Uprising's First Movers

British Journal of Political Science, 2018

Drawing on evidence from the 2011 Egyptian uprising, this article demonstrates how the use of two social media platforms – Facebook and Twitter – contributed to a discrete mobilizational outcome: the staging of a successful first protest in a revolutionary cascade, referred to here as 'first-mover mobilization'. Specifically, it argues that these two platforms facilitated the staging of a large, nationwide and seemingly leaderless protest on 25 January 2011, which signaled to hesitant but sympathetic Egyptians that a revolution might be in the making. It draws on qualitative and quantitative evidence, including interviews, social media data and surveys, to analyze three mechanisms that linked these platforms to the success of the January 25 protest: (1) protester recruitment, (2) protest planning and coordination, and (3) live updating about protest logistics. The article not only contributes to debates about the role of the Internet in the Arab Spring and other recent waves of mobilization, but also demonstrates how scholarship on the Internet in politics might move toward making more discrete, empirically grounded causal claims.