Can Social Media Overthrow A Government?
Imagine living in a world where you had no freedom of what you posted online- a world where you were completely censored off. Sounds absurd, right? With the overturning of net neutrality in discussion right now, a world of corporate censorship does not sound so far away. However, in some countries, online censorship can go as far as to have you arrested for posting on Facebook. Now, does that sound too absurd? Well, it’s not for Arabic governments who were doing exactly that to their citizens.
Last week, we focused on Kony 2012, a movement that took the internet by a storm with a Youtube video that attracted millions. Certainly, it was largely influenced by social media and quite possibly would not have reached the audience it had if it wasn’t for its following on the internet. This week, however, I’ll be diving into a movement that used social media as a tool to educate and influence a larger, international audience- Arab Spring.
The Arab Spring uprisings used social media as a means to cover critical events such as protests and a platform to provide their commentary on such events. Using the hashtags #egypt, #libya and #Jan25, the movement was able to “mediate a wide range of practices of political participation among a diverse group of social media users” (Bruns et al).
Facebook played the largest role in the movement. The government was not pleased and they went so far as to cause a full-scale attack against the social media platform in order to limit the information that was being released to the public. Blogging was also a method of educating the public and increasing coverage on the uprisings, which would not be featured in the traditional media. As a punishment, officials would torture and imprison bloggers. Social media was a critical tool at a time when users were censored for spreading the truth of their country’s status.
I think it’s safe to say that social media and social networking sites provided a platform for people to raise awareness of the country’s status, ultimately posing a threat to the government because of the release of its corruption. However, was social media the reason for the movement’s outcome? That is still debatable, because although social media seems like it promotes nothing less than positivity, it can actually hold encrypted information and negatively impact the movement.
Ultimately, the Arab Spring movement was undeniably influenced by social media. Living in the United States, I can’t understand what it must be like to have my government censor what I can see and post online. The fact that it reached the point where the government attempted to attack social networking sites such as Facebook only goes to show the role social media played on the movement.
Sources:
Bruns, Axel, Tim Highfield, and Jean Burgess. “The Arab Spring and Social Media Audiences: English and Arabic Twitter Users and Their Networks.” American Behavioral Scientist 57, no. 7 (July 1, 2013): 871–98. http://abs.sagepub.com/content/57/7/871.short
Schwartz, Lowell H., Dalia Dassa Kaye, and Jeffrey Martini. “Artists and the Arab Uprisings.” RAND Corporation, 2013. http://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RR271.html