Facebook is not just a website anymore. Somewhere in Egypt, there is a little girl who shares the website’s moniker. According to a report published in Egypt’s Al-Ahram newspaper last month, 20-something year-old Jamal Ibrahim named his firstborn Facebook Jamal Ibrahim – after Mark Zuckerberg’s electronic baby. According to a translation of the Al-Ahram report provided by the website TechCrunch, the father did so to “express his gratitude about the victories the youth of 25th of January have achieved,” and to pay tribute to the role the social networking website played in organising the demonstrations that helped oust president Hosni Mubarak from power, ending his 30-year old rule. Though, it is not unusual to name children after heroes, this particular incident is unique in many aspects. For starters, this could very well be the first (recorded and public) instance of a person being named after a social network, instead of it being the other way around (remember Orkut?). More importantly, it reverberates the elevated status attributed to the all-pervasive social media during the recent regime-ousting political campaigns erupting in North Africa and Middle East.
Since December last year, social media websites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube have been extensively used to coordinate demonstrations and update the global audience about the situation on the ground through tweets, videos and images of the protests in the region. In January 2011, Tunisians took to the streets to protest widespread unemployment, government corruption and the lack of opportunities. These demonstrations came in the wake of the self-immolation of 26-year old Mohamed Bouazizi on December 17, 2010, after his informal vegetable stall and sole means of livelihood was shuttered by the police in the southern Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid. An unemployed college graduate, Bouazizi did not die a quick death; he suffered from his extensive burns till January 4, 2011.
According to Al Jazeera, Bouazizi was not the first Tunisian to set himself alight as an act of public protest. However, what set the incident apart was the determination of the people of Sidi Bouzid to reach out and get noticed. On December 17, two relatives of Bouazizi posted a video of a peaceful protest led by the young man’s mother outside the municipality building. The video was aired on Al Jazeera after its New Media team picked up the footage via Facebook. In contrast, apart from a solid core of activists, most Tunisians did not dare to repost the videos on Facebook, or even “like” them – at least not until president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali’s final hours as the head of the state.
As Al Jazeera reported, although a muted majority did not actively share news of the protests online until mid-January, Tunisia’s 3.6 million internet users – a third of the population, with one of the highest penetration rates in the African continent (according to Internet World Stats) – were able to follow news of the uprising on social media due to a solid core of activists. Throughout the uprising, Tunisian protesters relied on Facebook to communicate with each other, which incidentally had not been blocked by the government. Tunisia’s oppressive online censorship tactics were known to weed out anti-state content, using DNS tampering, IP address filtering and selectively blocking websites. Offline, reports from the state-controlled media portrayed the demonstrations in Tunisia as malicious mischief. As unrest spread from Sidi Bouzid to the rest of the country, Tunisians posted visual documentation on YouTube and Dailymotion to communicate the situation to the rest of the world, and motivate more locals to join the protests. The hashtags on Twitter tell the tale of how the uprising went from being local to national in scope: #bouazizi became #sidibouzid, then #tunisia.
The role of social media in mobilising the people (and subsequently falling victim to internet censorship) was once again brought into focus during the mass protests in Egypt, in January 2011. Motivated by Tunisia’s success in driving president Ben Ali from power, a protest against poverty, unemployment, government corruption and the rule of president Hosni Mubarak was planned on January 25, 2011. The message was put out on Facebook pages such as the ‘April 6 Youth Movement’ and ‘We are all Khaled Said’, as well as circulated through tweets under the hashtag #Jan25. As the anti-government protests gained momentum in the country, the authorities stepped up to stem the flow of information. On January 27, 2011, Egypt earned the dubious honour of being the first country to shut off its internet this year, thus cutting off access to about 20 million people – a quarter of the nation’s population. Egypt did so by ordering the country’s internet service providers (ISPs) to disconnect the country from the rest of the world. All internet communications to and from Egypt were silenced. One sole ISP called Noor continued to provide limited access to essential services for Egypt’s government and major businesses. It too eventually petered out. Nevertheless, Egypt’s political revolution grew and persisted. Eventually, amidst massive international pressure and widespread protests in the country, president Mubarak announced his resignation on February 11, 2011– marking the end of his three decades in power and the culmination of the 18 days of public demonstrations in the country.
As protests spread from Tunisia and Egypt to Bahrain, Yemen, Algeria and Libya, information and communications technologies (ICTs) helping protesters aggregate, and disseminate news and updates, have turned into a source of contention for media analysts and Web 2.0 advocates. Attributing full credit for the recent political revolutions to the technologies used to propagate the message, many social media enthusiasts are eager to classify these people-led mass protests against authoritarian regimes as “Twitter Revolution” or “Facebook Revolution” and even “Revolution 2.0”. Opposing these beliefs are those who acknowledge social media tools in helping spread message, yet maintain that tools are only as effective as the way people use them. For them, revolutions happen when the bulk of the population propelled by grievances, ideology, outrage and courage, rises up against a government.
As the proponents of the two opposing viewpoints blog and tweet their arguments and counter-arguments in cyberspace, it is quite easy to lose track of one vital fact. Facebook may have been used to rally people to revolt, YouTube to broadcast the gritty reality of protests and Twitter to echo the message across the globe via tweets; but at the end of the day, these tools are vulnerable to disruption and to the inherent weaknesses of the corporate and state-controlled architecture of the internet. The internet blackouts in Egypt and later in Libya have demonstrated how corporate choke points buckle under government pressure or the pretext of national security. If anything, these recent instances of blanket censorship should be a rallying point for people to collaborate, innovate and build decentralised networks, which can resist the fear of power, and circumvent censorship and the whims of governments and corporations. It is said that ‘technology alone doesn’t make revolutions; the will of the people is the most vital ingredient’. In this case, the collective will and effort of the people is needed to revolutionise the network and make it resilient to state censorship and outages, and to ensure that the conversations continue unhindered online.
<em>First published in Spider Magazine – March 2011, as part of the Cover story Political Revolutions and Web 2.0</em>
Reba Shahid 