Did social media play a helpful role in the Arab Spring?

Interview

The Arab Spring movements towards democratization in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya were driven by the Arab youth that was actively using social media for communications and providing their vision of the unfolding events. How significant was the role of social media? And would the gains of the Arab Spring be even possible without social media? Deen Freelon dispels some common misconceptions around the way people have seen the role of social media in the Arab Spring.

Interviewee: Deen Freelon, Assistant Professor of Public Communication in the School of Communication at American University

Interviewer: Maria Prosviryakova, RIAC

Photo: Freelon, Assistant Professor of Public
Communication in the School of Communication
at American University

Last year you were in the research team that analyzed more than three million tweets, gigabytes of YouTube content and thousands of blog to produce the study, titled “Opening Closed Regimes: What Was the Role of Social Media During the Arab Spring?” Could you tell us about how the research was conducted?

That report included a number of empirical analyses within it. We looked at YouTube videos, blogs, and tweets. My portion of it was the Tweeter portion. So, this is what I will speak to.

There used to be a service called “TwapperKeeper” that would archive tweets for given hashtag (key word). Right before the service ceased its operations in March 2011 I downloaded archives of tweets from Libya, Bahrain, Egypt, Tunisia and few other countries.

So, I gathered all the data – 3 million of tweets. First of all, I tried to figure out where people said they were when they were tweeting. So, I looked at the location field: Twitter has a place where you can put your location – this is a text field and you can put whatever you want.

Then I created a basic text filter that would allow me to identify each person within those archives who twittered from the country that the hashtag was focused on. For example, the “Jan 25” hashtag was for Egypt. The filter helped to identify:

• Tweets from those who were in Egypt (based on the “location” field);
• Tweets from those who were within the larger Arabic region (the operation defined it as a specific set of countries);
• Tweets from those who were anywhere else that is neither the country of hashtag origin nor the broader Arabic region.

So, if you say you are in Egypt – then we assume you are in Egypt. If you say you are in the top five cities in Egypt by population – that also puts you in the “Egypt” category. We also filtered for the word “Egypt” and those cities’ names in Arabic as well as for Egypt’s longitude and latitude coordinates provided by GPS enabled devices such as phones.

We did that for all the countries that we studied. Thus, we were able to have an idea of where all of these users tweeted from. Of course, there might be some discrepancy between where users said they were and where they actually were. But we applied the standards that are typically applied to survey data, where one have to rely on self-reported data – assumption that you are not lying. Even though there may have been a few users who were deceptive or inaccurate, we assume that the majority of them claimed where the actual location.

So, once you filtered the tweets, what did you discover? What were the main findings of the research?

The findings were pretty interesting. We found that a majority of individuals that used the hashtags associated with the Arab Spring events in fact were outside of both: of the region and the hashtag country. But there still was a substantial number of users that were tweeting supposedly from that event’s location.

There were differences between countries, of course. In Egypt we found a much higher proportion of people that were twitting, whereas in Libya and Yemen – which have very low Internet penetration rates - there were very small proportions of twitting people.

Another finding is that when there were some incidents that the international media was focused on and produced lots of stories about, such as “stepping down of Mubarak” or “increase of tensions in Libya” – coincided with when people from outside tended to tweet to the hashtag to a much greater extent. So, we found that external attention was driven by the media. This is not super surprising, but still interesting because it has not been demonstrated before.

When the media turned its attention away from those events, then proportions of people twitting to those hashtags changed– the proportion of people in the region and in the country increased dramatically.

Were there any negative effects that the use of social media had on the events during the Arab Spring?

I haven’t seen too much systematic evidence on this. Partly because such evidence is difficult to collect as a lot of the negative effects are the things like secret services coming to track people down based on social media post they made, or people being tortured to get their social media password to delete the content that seemed to be damaging to the regime. For obvious reasons there is no data on that.

Another negative impact that we saw in Egypt right before Mubarak was ousted at the end of January 2011 was the fact that the Internet was shut down, which was seen as a response to the use of social media for revolutionary purposes.

Recently was saw the Internet being shut down in Syria. It came back on pretty quickly after that. So, that is another hazard that the use of social media may pose. There is always a possibility that whoever is in charge will say: “Oh, well, you are going to use this to try to depose me, then I will try to turn it off completely, so that nobody has access to it”.

You mentioned that Syria and Libya went offline. And this looks like a very extreme measure. Do the Arab dictators actually have social media strategy to constrain social movements?

Photo: Flickr / AlphaDesigner's Political Design
Buro
The Arab Spring, Hitchhiker's Guide to
The Near and Middle East

Yes, they definitely do. The most obvious ham-handed strategy – the so-called Gordian solution – is that they can to turn the Internet off completely.

But there is a number of other tactics as well. One is censorship technology. There was a report in October 2011that the U.S. Blue Coat System was providing the Syrian regime with censorship technologies. Such technologies were used to censor content that was seeing to be damaging to the regime. And that is something that you can see in a number of countries including China and Iran.

The third tactic is when people who are either directly associated with the regime or are supporters of the regime use the Internet to flood the spaces, that are used to discuss revolutionary activities, with pro-regime content. We saw this in Bahrain in 201, in Syria before the war started. That is kind of more of a traditional PR battle. This tactic presents an impression that there is a lot of dissent and disagreement about whether the regime is good or bad. And that deludes the appearance of the unified front that the rebels really want to present.

Would the Arab Spring and the resonance it caused all over the world be possible without the social media? Could the dictators in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya be toppled without the role that social media played in the uprisings?

Well, I think this is a difficult question to answer. I would like to reframe this question a little. The way that you framed it can be discussed in philosophical terms as to whether the social media is a necessary cause to kick dictators out of their positions. I think that if you state it so strongly, the answer is probably “no”. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a very influential piece in 2011 in which he pointed out quite correctly that revolutions have been happening for many millennia prior to the development of social media.

Probably a better question would be: “What role does the social media play? Does it play a helpful role?” And here you should consider the ways in which it can help revolutionary rebels and the ways in which it may hurt them (when it is used by dictators and others who are not in favor of revolution). You should conduct the cost-benefit analysis: is it a net positive or net negative for revolutionaries? But I think that the jury is still out on that question, partly because of what I mentioned earlier – which is the lack of hard evidence on the cases in which it is actually used against people who are trying to promote revolutions. We need more research on this; we need to collect as much systematic evidence as we can. Nevertheless, at this point we can certainly say that social media does not prevent revolutions from happening and that there are some very tantalizing clues and evidence that suggest that it is even helpful in a number of ways.

How do you see the future of the social media in revolutions, conflicts, civil wars?

I think that you can really look at the controversy over the role of social media in revolutions and protest activity as at an arms race between the powers that be and the rebels. The powers that be are always going to find ways to hack into accounts and to flood the information sphere with pro-regime activity to make it seem like everybody supports them.

At the same time the rebels are going to be looking for ways to get their messages across without being intercepted by people who wish to do them harm, who wish to shut their activities down.

One major factor here is going to be the extent to which revolutionaries will be able to find tools to communicate without being surveiled by the authorities. A lot of criticism about the social media revolutions is focused on the fact that the main social media tools are very public: Twitter, Facebook are public. It is very easy to access this content. The tools that would allow for encryption to be placed on communications are needed so that the powers that be couldn’t reach them.

At the same time there is an advantage in using Facebook and Twitter - because everybody is on those systems – as opposed to more secure systems that make it harder for people to get access to them. So, the role of encryption should be looked at more closely.