The Facebook and Twitter revolutions: Active participation in the 21st century (original) (raw)

The Role of Social Media in Fueling Revolutions

2020

This article aims to build a theoretical structure for understanding the role of social media in fueling revolutions, social dissent, and disorder, considering three different disciplinary perspectives: Organizational Change, Conflict Resolution, and Digital Media Studies. More explicitly, it depends on studies of the 2011 and 2019 Arab Springs respectively, survey, telecommunications empirical data, and social media sites. It also refers to literature that examines the relationship between social media engagement and civic engagement. Building on this foundation, the article analyzes and attempts to evaluate the impact of real and fake social media postings by individuals, state, and non-state actors regarding the Arab Spring. The use of social media, which was originally considered to have a constructive influence on spreading democracy, has been significantly considered in recent years as a tool of behavior modification and a means for 4th generation warfare. It has also been per...

Human and Political Grievances for Mobilization: Different roles of Facebook during the Egyptian Arab Spring

In the field of development, social movements have long been recognized as key actors in the process of social change. Engaging in range of struggles, social movements are contesting traditional centers or power while transforming the nature of political participation and collective action. Despite this recognition, the intersection between social movements, ICTs, and social change still remains an understudied area of inquiry. This paper analyzes the different roles of Facebook during the protests that lead to the resignation of President Mubarak in Egypt and opened a new sociopolitical period in the country. The analysis is based on qualitative coding of two Facebook pages in Arabic developed by some of the most important groups involved in these mobilizations: We Are All Khaled Said and the April 6 th Youth Movement. The study found that these two pages were crucial in 1) building political awareness and mobilizing youth to take the streets; 2) creating bridges between online spaces and the streets; and 3) raising political awareness on the meaning of the revolution and democracy in the country. This study is based on a larger project that mapped the trajectory of the April 6 th Youth Movement in Egypt.

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...

Facebook and Twitter as Platforms for Human Good: A Case of Egypt Uprising, 2011

Shanti Journal

Through wider and rapid dissemination of information, social media sites (Facebook and Twitter in this article) influence the psychology of the users, making them ready for the collective action. This article analyses the role played by Facebook and Twitter in bringing about political change in Egypt during the Egyptian Uprising of 2011. Drawing insights from social media studies and Foucauldian discourse of power, this article exposes the tussle between the autocratic Egyptian government led by the then president Hosni Mubarak and Egyptian citizens and scrutinizes the horizontal connectivity and dissemination of information, citizen journalism, pervasive nature of power, and multiple resistance sites. It concludes that in materializing their aspirations of right, liberation, and justice along with the economic, social, and political revamp, Egyptian civilians took recourse in digital technologies and freed themselves from thirty-years long dictatorship of Mubarak.

More than a Facebook revolution: Social Movements and Social Media in the Egyptian Arab Spring

The International Review of Information Ethics, 2012

Public opinion leaders and activists characterized the Egyptian "Arab Spring" of January 2011 as a "Facebook Revolution". They highlight the intrinsic power of social media as an influencing factor for social change. Undeniably, social media played important roles in that revolution process. However, these roles cannot be disconnected from the socio-political contexts. This paper discusses the use of social media, particularly of Facebook, by the April 6th Youth Movement (A6YM), a decisive actor of the Egyptian protests. It is based on the analysis of two Egyptian newspapers and one American newspaper, between 2008 and 2011. We propose that a) social media provided alternative mechanisms for political expression and organization, b) social media contributed to the genesis and consolidation of the A6YM and to the establishment of youth political identities, and c) the combination of "bits and streets" amplified not just the movement's mobilization but the degree of opposition experienced by the Egyptian regime.

SOCIAL MEDIA FOSTERING THE REVOLUTIONS: CASE STUDY OF THE ARAB SPRING

Globalization converted the world into a global village which is closely interconnected through Social Media. 2010 and 2011, were the years of large scale political uprisings in Middle East. The uprisings were mainly the result of the political mobilization that was generated by the Social Networking sites such as Face book, Twitter and YouTube Social media played an important role in awakening the people and mobilizing them to protest for their rights, and against the authoritarian regimes they were living under The research discusses the role of social media in bringing up the Arab spring.. The aim of research paper is to articulate how the revolution has been fostered by the Social Media and the role social media play in political mobilization. The research is both qualitative and quantitative in methodology in which the primary sources for qualitative data are the newspaper archives and books on empowerment of the social media while the secondary sources are the academic research papers. Quantitative analysis will be based on the survey conducted by the author himself. This paper concludes that social media has made an unequivocal contribution in fostering the revolutions and bringing up the revolution in Middle East during Arab Spring.

Social Media Activism in the Arab Uprising

A version of this paper was presented at the First West Asian Studies National Convention, Centre for West Asian Studies, JNU on 14 November 2014. The goal of this paper is to place the role that new social media has played in achieving collective action using the early events of the Arab uprisings and the experiences of Egypt and Tunisia as particular references. Almost four years since the uprisings began, their disrupted momentum has challenged the oft hypothesized and heavily mediatized season of unified Arab awakening. The political economy of communications differed across the affected region making it evident that these countries were in different stages of social, economic, political and digital development. This informs why different regimes were more or less vulnerable to opposition (including cyberactivism) and why the structure of opposition, in turn, varied. Though resisting techno-optimist narratives, the paper seeks to explain the communicative and connective power of social media in the Arab context as well as its disruptive potential in discourse-shaping. In setting up the stage for street protests, the use of ICT’s by Arab activists most crucially aimed at revealing an accurate picture of their respective societies, not just within but also to a broader international audience. Rather than support the cohesive neoliberal success stories quoted in the international media, the respective online Arab publics cast film onto the reality of everyday economic and political repression. Moreover, Arab cyberactivists created virtual forums for citizen journalism through enabling ordinary citizens to question regime legitimacy and record instances of governmental brutality, corruption and violations of human rights. This allowed for the continued exchange of civic discourse, deliberation and articulation, enhancing the region’s social capital and contributing to the growth of a tentative virtual civil society. The liberating role of cyberspace in overcoming gender, class and geographical barriers is, however, tempered in the final analysis by the contradictory impact of networked technologies – in terms of the quality of content generated and by whom as well as the capacity of regimes and traditional political actors to monitor, control and manipulate online communication (“Tyrants can tweet too”). Further, in the persisting debate between those on the optimist and pessimist sides of networked technology communication, an underlying tension is that while leaderless network structures can mobilize and even unite a disparate coalition of protestors around issue- specific demands such as “The people want the fall of the regime”, they are ineffective at articulating nuanced demands in the subsequent negotiation processes. Cyberactors are also reluctant to participate in the political processes of party building and institutional organization. In other words, digital storytelling supersedes the political communiqué and expressive protest- politics tends to depoliticize the impact of cyberactivism.

Facilitating the Egyptian Uprising: A Case Study of Facebook and Egypt’s April 6th Youth Movement

It has been suggested that social media offers important organizing tools for activists in countries where free expression is curtailed and news outlets are handcuffed by government censorship. The 2011 revolution in Egypt offers an opportunity to examine the extent to which social media fulfills the role that free journalism plays in more democratic societies. By analyzing messages posted in Arabic by activists from one of the largest Egyptian opposition groups, this study attempts to see what role Facebook played in the revolution. This chapter aims to fill a gap in scholarly understanding of the event while simultaneously contributing to the understanding of the importance of social media tools for activists and organizers. The results show that the organizers used Facebook largely to communicate a mixture of expressions of national pride, news events, and calls for mobilization on the ground to support their revolutionary efforts.

New patterns of protest and revolution in the age of social media

2016

The article aims to analyse the role of social media in initiating and organising protest and revolutionary movements. Social media, particularly Facebook and Twitter, are widely believed to have been used by activists involved in the global wave of protests and revolutions after 2009. However, the assessment of their role wavers between technological determinism and minimising the impact of new technologies. Considering the current state of research, the author offers his answers to a number of questions: (1) To what extent and how are social media used in the processes of political communication, mobilisation and organisation of protest and revolutionary movements? (2) What is the relation between the old and the new media? (3) What is the relation between the online and offline dimension of collective action? (4) Why has the occupation of public space become the dominant tactic of protest and revolutionary movements in the age of social media?