The Foreign Service Journal, April 2011

A P R I L 2 0 1 1 / F O R E I G N S E R V I C E J O U R N A L 9 Social Media as a Revolutionary Force The future of the uprisings that re- cently overthrew the leaders of Tunisia and Egypt, and threaten to do the same in Libya, is still uncertain as we go to press in mid-March. But one thing is already clear: they have already demonstrated the power of social media to shape revolutions. On Feb. 22, the Carnegie Endow- ment’s Michele Dunne spoke to the Women’s Foreign Policy Group on the topic of “Egypt: How a Virtual Revo- lution Became Actual.” In her analysis, Tunisian President Ben Ali’s Jan. 14 overthrow inspired many different ele- ments of Egyptian society to join forces against President Hosni Mubarak. This transformed “virtual” activism, which had been slowly gathering force there since 2008, into mass protests. To counter this, state-owned Tele- com Egypt, which owns most of the fiber-optic cables that transmit infor- mation, flipped the “off” switch on Jan. 28. This severely inhibited the opposi- tion’s ability to use Facebook, Twitter and other social media to organize gatherings. As James Glanz and John Markoff report in a Feb. 15 New York Times article, similar telecommunica- tions monopolies exist across the Mid- dle East and North Africa, making it relatively easy for governments to halt the flow of information, at least tem- porarily. Even so, the shutdown in Egypt lasted barely a week. Meanwhile, as Tina Rosenberg ex- plains in a Feb. 16 Foreign Policy com- mentary titled “Revolution U,” the Egyptian youth movement had already learned an important lesson from the botched protests of April 6, 2008: No group can succeed without a strategy and a clear message, regardless of the number of fans it has on Facebook. That said, the sheer popularity of the Facebook pages for the April 6 Youth Movement and We Are All Khaled Said (named for an Alexandria businessman who was dragged from an Internet café by police and beaten to death in the street last summer) helped break the barrier of fear in Egypt. That support, in turn, gave revolution- ary groups the confidence to mount in- creasingly effective protests. Shashank Joshi of the Royal United Services Institute, a British defense think-tank, notes that social media pro- vided a conduit for young people who stand outside formal institutions. As the region’s large youth population searches for ways to participate in so- ciety, social media are a useful, highly visible tool. Joshi also credits the role of social networks in accelerating the circulation of imagery and testimony to fuel international support and draw in the uncommitted. On the Feb. 14 edition of “PBS NewsHour,” Al-Jazeera’s Abderrahim Foukara explained how the marriage of television with new media makes it possible to spread messages and gather information from citizens on the ground. Appearing on the same pro- gram, Washington State University’s Lawrence Pintak hailed the Egyptian opposition’s communications strategy as a “one-two punch.” Social media helped the youth groups coordinate their protests, while television dealt the knockout blow by broadcasting their protests around the country. During the second week of protests in Egypt, meanwhile, a Feb. 5 Wash- ington Post editorial sharply criticized the State Department for not using the $30 million that Congress allocated for support of global Internet freedom in the Fiscal Year 2010 budget. In fact, over the past three years, the State De- C YBERNOTES A potential human rights catastrophe is unfolding in Libya as protesters brave live gunfire and death for a third day running. Libya is trying to impose an information blackout, but it can’t hide a massacre. — Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch, speaking on Feb. 20, www.afronline.org .