Social media in a new world

In the previous months we saw what many called the revolution in the Middle East, governments were toppled while some stood strong. We along with the rest of the western world were afforded a view we never had before; we were able to watch this revolution through the technological invention of social media. Tools like Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube provided us with a front row view of what was going on in these countries and what the average citizen in these countries was feeling. Now this technology didn't affect all the countries in the Middle East in the same way and I want to discuss these differences using information from several sources.

The first place I would like to discuss is Egypt and to start I would like to add a quote from Amir Hatem Ali's article in the "Harvard Human Rights Journal Vol. 24":

"Prior to the first day of protest, 85,000 Egyptians pledged on Facebook to attend  “Revolution Day.” Similarly, April 6 Movement had over 90,000 members during the protests, and We Are Khaled Said had over 40,000 Facebook fans. In the two weeks leading up to and including the first few days of the protest, Egyptians created 32,000 Facebook groups and 14,000 Facebook pages."

This excerpt alone shows how social media impacted the revolution in Egypt; we can see that these tools played a huge tool in how the word was spread about demonstrations and other gatherings. This huge success of using social media to organize led to the governments order to shut off the internet in Egypt. As you can imagine this isn't a simple flip of a switch, this shut off cost the country nearly $90 million dollars and only served to anger the public more.

Now to turn attention to Iran, in the country of Iran the government is considered to be one of the most repressive regimes to date in the world. This would lead to that it is no surprise that in Iran the internet is very controlled and censored unlike in places like Egypt, this led to an entirely different impact on the Arab spring in Iran. Follows is a quote from Mark Hill's article "5 Reasons Twitter Isn't Actually Overthrowing Governments" on Cracked.com, where he discusses the number of Twitter users from Iran.

"At the height of the 2009 "Twitter Revolution" in Iran, the number of Twitter users reportedly based in Iran was around 20,000. Consider that Iran has a population of 77 million, and that number looks a lot less impressive -- it's minuscule 0.03 percent; less a revolution than a bake sale."

 He goes on discuss how even those numbers are highly exaggerated due to a scheme used by people around the world who changed their locations on Twitter to Iran, in order to confuse the local authorities from cracking down on those who are providing the world with details of what’s going on. He states that the true number may be somewhere around 1,000 people. Now this is a huge difference from what was said was occurring in Egypt at the time and I like to bring this to the reason being the internet in Iran is not as accessible nor is it as free as it is in Egypt, it's that simple. On the other hand after discussing this topic I was presented with the fact that those 1,000 people may have had more of an impact than the many thousands in Egypt for the simple fact that their voices being rarer made them more profound. Without those 1,000 people, the western world may never have known what exactly was going on in Iran, so we must acknowledge and be thankful for them in that regard.

To wrap this blog post up I want to end with one last thought on how social media affected the Arab spring, social media was praised as helping bring about democratic change and promoting change but on the other hand it also helped empower the governments they were being used against. This is a quote from an article on the NPR.org website that discusses the work of Evgeny Morozov, "The Net Delusion".

"Authoritarian governments can harness the Internet's power to serve their purposes as well. Some use it for surveillance, Morozov says, "tracking down what's happening on social networks, trying to identify who are all of those people tweeting.""

Main point of his book being that the people of these countries may feel like they are free but they are being watched and in many cases being tracked down in real life for their online activities, but the government’s involvement online doesn't stop there. The average citizen or protester isn't the only one with access to the internet the governments were empowered by this and were able to post their own blogs and propaganda online in order to fight back. In the end social media in the Arab spring wasn't really a one sided thing, it helped in some cases the protesters and in others it helped the government.