Social Media during Arab Spring

Social Media during Arab Spring

Introduction

Today Social Media is not just a website; rather it has become the voice of people almost from every nation. It is playing a vital role in speeding up the distribution of news and information and thus making a difference today. The political, intellectual, and social foundations of the Middle East were shook by the events begin in Tunisia in January 2011 and spread to Egypt, Libya, Bahrain, Morocco, Jordan, Syria, and beyond (Pollack, 2012). This political and social upheaval is known as 'Arab Spring', and the social media played an important role in its upheaval.

Discussion

In the 21st century, social media is holding an immense importance in different walks of life. It has played a vital part in the upheaval of 'Arab Spring', as proved by the analysis of thousands of blogs, three million tweets, and gigabytes of YouTube contents. This research has shown that social media held a vital role in shaping the 'Arab Spring' (Donnell, 2011). Social media carried the major stories and conversations regarding the revolution, across the globe.

According to Philip Howard, the project lead and an associate professor in communication at the University of Washington, Evidence that were studied shows that social media played a part of raising the expectations for success of political upheaval, by carrying out the freedom and democracy messages across the Middle East and North Africa. He further said that People built different social networks and organized political actions for democracy protest and used social media as a significant part of the tool kit for democracy (Donnell, 2011).

Different researches were done to know the reasons of Arab Spring occurrence and studies have found out that one of the major reasons was the influence of cyber activism via social media platforms, which gives people the platform to carry the information or news within seconds. The revolution occurred in Egypt and Tunisia was not lead by any particularly identified leader or political party, yet both the uprisings occurred and became successful. Instead of the political leader, Facebook played this role and inspired and driven people to uprise for the democracy. Tunisian revolution was facilitated and accelerated by one of the major social channel 'Facebook', reported in news and by many observers (Markozi and Oullier, 2012). During Egyptian revolution, Twitter played an important role. Thus, without these social media channels, these revolutions may not wave this speedily across the globe and never would have reached the global opinion (Markozi and Oullier, 2012).

Before the resignation of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak, the total tweets regarding the political change in Egypt were raised from four digit figure to six digits. Videos were also post on these channels and the top twenty three videos were viewed by almost 5.5 million people. In Facebook and other social media blogs the amount of content developed by opposition groups increased radically (Taylor, 2011).

According to Howard, “Twitter provides the evidence of the location of individuals engaged in the democratic conversation during ...