On Thursday the 27th of december a group of young Libyan girls organised a Twitter meetup and got together in a private women’s only event hosted by Benghazi cafe ( Cafe Casa).
The whole event was organised on twitter with tweets that trace back to 19th of December. The organiser tweeting @Doosejhimz describes the event as a twitter meet up, a sort of networking activity between libyan women.
The next tweet then asks for a Cafe in Benghazi to host the meet up of “Women only tweeps”.
The Meetup received a reply from CasaCafe that agreed to host the meetup to capitalise on the publicity surrounding the hashtag on social media. All of the planning was done on twitter and in front of anyone willing to look. Nothing in any of these tweets suggests that it is something “illegal” or “immoral”
Fast forward to Thursday night when the Ministry of interior in the Temporary government decided to share on their official facebook page that they raided a party filled with gambling and dancing.
It was part of the publicity campaign associated with the “securing Benghazi” safety plan introduced by the ministry the week before. The following post has been deleted from the Ministry page after outrage at the amount of misinformation and lies in the post itself. In 45 minutes it already had 154 comments.
Update 4/1/2019: no apology has been made as of today
ِThe Ministry of Interior forces detained the equipment in the cafe, the group of young men working at the cafe, in addition to the owner’s father and brother .
Update 4/1/2019: all staff have been released but the case is still ongoing.
The young female photographer that was hired to take photos during the event was also questioned after she resisted allowing them to detain her camera.
International and local media outlets relied on the statement of the Ministry of Interior to report on what happened and ended up spreading the defamatory and scandalous narrative even further.
On the morning of Friday 28th, news about the incident started to spread and Libyans started to tweet about the implications of the event on individual freedoms overall. Others shared cartoons mocking the incident in a humorous way.
At 3pm an old hashtag that was aimed at demanding a civil state was reactivated #مدنيةـوإن_طال_النضال to raise awareness about the dangers of what had happened.
In the hours between 3pm and 10pm on 28/12/2018 there were a total of 210 twitter users tweeting on the #مدنيةـوإن_طال_النضال “ Civil state even if the struggle is prolonged” hashtag.
I was able to create a visualisation of this network (low resolution to protect users) and the different communities of twitter users tweeting.
The UN mission in Libya reacted by releasing a statement condemning the raid on the Benghazi cafe this afternoon after being mentioned numerous times by Libyan tweeps to react to the encroachment on freedoms.
After the tweet, the civil state hashtag use increased slightly.
The top 3 hashtags that were used with regards to the cafe incident are
*تجمع_بنات_تويتر#
“Twitter girls meetup”
* مدنيه_وإن_طال_النضال#
“Civil state even if the struggle is prolonged.”
* كلنا_كازا#
“We are all Casa”
The hashtags are important, they show that people are still willing to fight against the erosion of freedom throughout Libya. They are linked to the increasing reliance of certain security groups in Libya on social media and misinformation to continue to clamp down on the rights of Libyan citizens.
Since writing this blog, a snapchat video was stolen from one of the girls attending and posted on several facebook pages on the evening of Saturday 29th December. On one page the video had 60k views with a few hundred hateful comments attacking everyone in the video. Social media incitement and outrage has transformed into the real world with real physical repercussions. It is no longer just words on a screen.
This was just one incident in a history of other equally important incidents that have been happening in the last few years in Libya overall. People aren’t just reacting to a cafe raid, they are reacting to years of oppression and tightening of personal freedoms in exchange for various political and religious slogans used to pacify the masses.
Initially the outrage was not publicised or reported probably because the majority of tweets were written in Arabic. That’s not out of the ordinary, the target audience for the hashtag was the local community and the local authorities. However, this is a common problem shared by similar incidents that happen in the arab world that go unnoticed. The language barrier hides them from the overall twitter community and makes them invisible from the majority of human rights and international media organisations. If it’s not someone blocking an oil pipeline or committing terrorist acts then it doesn’t get attention even though these sort of events are equally as dangerous to the future of Libya.
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