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REVOLUTION: SHARE!

The Role of Social Media in Pro-Democratic Movements


Author Moran Barkai
Edited by Wilfried Rtten
Photographs by Lucas Danils
Design cover by Deletec
Lay out and print by printing office Grafico
First edition: 2012
Published under a Non-Commercial Creative Commons License
ISBN: 978-90-819305-0-5

ABOUT EJC MISSION STATEMENT


The European Journalism Centre is team of professionals dedicated to running a
European training and media development centre. Our goal is to enable journalists,
students and citizens to better participate in media landscapes around Europe and its
neighbourhood.
To this end, we are in close contact with all actors in the communication ecosystem:
journalists, public and governmental institutions, the business sector, academia, NGOs
and other civil society organisations.
Our various activities may be seen as interconnected platforms each combining
seminars, conferences and workshops with web projects, newsletters, research
and networking platforms. Fostering the future of pluralistic media is the common
denominator of all of our work.

Acknowledgements
This book would have never come to life were it not for the involvement of the
European Journalism Centre (EJC) in the European Neighbourhood Journalism
Network (ENJN). Therefore, my first thanks go to the EJC team who made all this
possible, beginning with Biba Klomp, who managed the project masterfully from
its very inception, and breathed intelligence and enthusiasm into it. Secondly, I
want to thank Diana Lungu, who joined in later, bringing with her, her light and
energy.
I am grateful to Eric Karstens and Sueli Brodin who shared their wise advice with
me and never tired at the face of my interminable questions. Im also indebted to
Lisa Bushart, Hanna McLean, Remko Nijsten, Ivan Picart, and Lucas Danils who
covered the ENJN conference, and whose work made mine possible. I would
like to give particular thanks to Remko who bore without flinching the weight of
all my requests, and Hanna who hunted down my mistakes, some blatant, some
hidden.
Special kudos also go to Richard Tynen and David Quinn from the Thomson
Foundation, for running the overall project, and for being our guys on location.
I owe sincere thanks to Bianca Lemmens and Wilfried Rtten, who showed their
belief in me, first by welcoming me to the EJC, and later by entrusting me with this
wonderful project. I hope Ive earned your trust.
I am also grateful to the professors of Media Culture at the University of Maastricht, in particular Rene van de Vall, who tried to beat some sense into me. Certain excerpts of this book are taken from papers written under her supervision.
Also thanks to Ron, my partner in life, for walking down this road by my side, and
for making it so much more joyful and thrilling.
And finally, my sincere appreciation to the Dutch Ministry of Education, Culture,
and Science (OCW), which extended essential financial support for this book.
Without it, this book might have never have come into existence.
Moran Barkai

Preface
The European Neighbourhood Journalism Network (ENJN), supported by the European Neighbourhood Policy (ENP) framework of the European UnionI, was a
four-year project dedicated to media development among the European Unions
neighbouring partner countries. Created by the European Journalism Centre, together with its partners, the network united journalists and editors from the MENA
(Middle East and North Africa) region, Eastern Europe and the southern Caucasus countries. These groups of media professionals, from various backgrounds
and diverse nationalities and cultures, visited the ENP participant countries,
shared experience and analysed different approaches to the problems, shared
or unique, that they faced in their line of work.
To mark the end of the project, the European Journalism Centre and BBJ, who
participated in its implementation, alongside the Thomson Foundation and the
International Federation of Journalists, organised the closing ENJN Conference
Media Futures Policy, Politics, and PowerII. The conference, which took place
in Brussels on October 10 and 11, 2011, addressed issues such as media policy,
democratic legitimacy and press freedom. It also focused largely on the recent
Arab Uprisings and the implication of social media in the contestation movements that took place in the EUs eastern European partner States. This conference, its proceedings, and interviews with its participants and speakers, are the
basis of this study, often appearing as edited transcripts.

Content
Acknowledgements
Preface
Content
Introduction ............................................................................................................. 11
Democracy - at Home and Away ............................................................................ 13
The Conspicuous Surprise...................................................................................... 14
Technologies of Freedom........................................................................................ 16
Our Objective .......................................................................................................... 20
Chapter 1. .................................................................................................................... 23
Sowing the Democratic Seed ................................................................................. 23
The Politicising Media ............................................................................................. 25
The Digital Divide .................................................................................................... 28
Wael Ghonim or the Plummer and the Housewife? ................................................ 29
The Ideology Locker ............................................................................................... 31
Social Media Are Corporations Too ........................................................................ 33
Chapter 2. .................................................................................................................... 35
Mobilising the Troops .............................................................................................. 35
Digitally Mediated Insurgency ................................................................................ 36
Trending the Way Out.............................................................................................. 40
The Demography of Social Media .......................................................................... 44
Blows and Counterblows ........................................................................................ 46
Watch Thy Enemy ................................................................................................... 49
Flying Under the Radar ........................................................................................... 52
The Honourable Intention Paradigm ....................................................................... 53
Chapter 3. .................................................................................................................... 55
Mediating the Struggle............................................................................................ 55
Ideals and Ideologies ............................................................................................. 56
Negotiating Compromise ........................................................................................ 57
The Unholy Alliance ................................................................................................ 58
Blogs of Dissent and Hope ..................................................................................... 62

Photographs by Lucas Danils ................................................................................. 64


Citizen journalists .................................................................................................... 84
Remediation and Media Synergy............................................................................ 88
The Revolutionary Cathode..................................................................................... 91
The Hidden Divide .................................................................................................. 93
Smoke Screen Formations ...................................................................................... 95
Hush, tag! ............................................................................................................... 97
Activist Harassment is the Continuation of Censorship by Other Means ............. 103
The Attention Seekers ........................................................................................... 104
Chapter 4. .................................................................................................................. 109
The International Appeal ....................................................................................... 109
We Are the World .................................................................................................. 110
Ill Send an SOS to the World ................................................................................ 112
Politics Through and the Real Diplomacy ............................................................. 114
Tidying up Your Backyard ..................................................................................... 117
The Double-Edged Endorsement of Online Activism ........................................... 119
On Fickleness ....................................................................................................... 121
Conclusion. ............................................................................................................... 123
The Future of Social Media as a Democratic Tool ................................................ 123
A Final, Cautious, Optimistic Note ........................................................................ 129
Bibliography.............................................................................................................. 131

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Introduction
Revolutionary movements have always used the best communication tools available to them. All over Africa, the use of underground newspapers brought down
the anti-colonial uprisings. In South Africa, the Apartheid regime was brought to
its knees not by using media, but by putting the inhabitants of the townships on
buses and bringing them into towns, where they would say:
Our lives arent good enough.
In the Middle East it was the tape recorder and now its DVDs. Wherever they are,
people will use any kind of opportunity to communicate their hopes and aspirations, their dissatisfaction with life. It is a natural state of human beings, and they
will continue to use whatever is available to them.
(Picard, R., 2011, ENJN Conference).
The fundamental issue is freedom of expression. [...] The principals of freedom of
expression are technology neutral. They are equally valid, irrespective of the
channel of communication in use. What matters is the content that is transmitted
via these channels.
[...] The main objective is to ensure that the public is well informed, so that it can
participate fully in democratic processes. Such a journalism, that provides such
information, I call democratically relevant journalism. This, of course, does not
need to be journalism in the traditional sense. It can apply to a blogger, it can
apply to tweeting, it can apply to anything.
We must ensure the existence of such a democratically relevant journalism, and
for that I would suggest that we concentrate on guaranteeing freedom of expression. We do not need to reinvent our shared values and our fundamental human
rights as new technologies of communication appear all the time.
(Nikoltchev, I., 2011, ENJN Conference).

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Democracy - at Home and Away


When Europe rose bruised and battered from the Second World War, it had at least one
determination - to banish from its future the horrors of its past. A work-in-progress since
the 1950s, the European Union was intended to dissolve any dispute in the common
political and social entity through dialogue and cooperation. But as the Union grew and
consolidated, its distance and separateness from its surroundings became more pronounced. It is, in part, in order to overcome this gap that the European Neighbourhood
Policy (ENP) was devised and subsequently put into action. Reaching out to Europes
17 neighbouring countries ten in the south (Algeria, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon,
Morocco, Occupied Palestinian Territory, Syria, and Tunisia) and seven in the east (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine, and Russia) - the partnership
provides a frame of close collaboration and privileged relations.
The ENP addresses different issues, such as economic reform, anti-terrorism measures,
and visa regulations. An important place is also given to the rule of law, good governance, the respect for human rights, including minority rightsIII. These latter topics make
the two regions concerned highly interesting when it comes to social media and its impact on democratic movements, particularly in light of the wave of revolts in North Africa
and the Middle East, as well as the political upheavals of 2012, contesting in Russia
Putins long reign.
Among all of the EUs ENP partners, only Israel was considered free by Freedom House
in 2011, although its standing might be somewhat mitigated if its status as an occupying
nation was to be taken into account. Out of the other MENA countries, only Morocco and
Lebanon are considered partly free and the seven remaining countries are defined as
not freeIV. The eastern partners dont fare betterV. Out of the seven, Armenia, Moldova,
and Ukraine are deemed partly free, while Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, and Russia
are not free1.
These findings are consistent with the World Banks assessments - the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI), which are reassessed and published annuallyVI. Aggregating
data from sources such as think-tanks, survey institutes, and NGOs, the World Bank
measures six dimensions of governance, among them Voice and Accountability, defined as, perceptions of the extent to which a countrys citizens are able to participate
in selecting their government, as well as freedom of expression, freedom of association,
and a free media (World Bank, n.d.).

1) According to Freedom House, A Free Country is one where there is broad scope for open political competition, a climate of respect for civil liberties, significant independent civic life, and independent media. Partly Free countries are characterized by some restrictions on political rights and civil
liberties, often in a context of corruption, weak rule of law, ethnic strife, or civil war. A Not Free country is one where basic political rights are absent,
and basic civil liberties are widely and systematically denied. (Freedom House, n.d., 2011).

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The WGI calculates for each country its percentile rank among all other countries, ranging from 0 (lowest) to 100 (highest). For the year 2010, in the Voice and Accountability
category, Israel is the only country to pass the 50-point bar, with its percentile ranking
standing at 67. Moldova and Ukraine come after, ranking at 47 and 44, respectively,
followed by Georgia, at 42 and Lebanon at 35. Morocco is ranked at 28, while both
Armenia and Jordan come in at 26. The ranking of the remaining countries ranges from
20 (Russia) to 7 (Belarus). The Palestinian Authority is not estimated in this indicator.
When comparing the evolution of these countries rankings since 1996, it appears that
Armenia, Georgia, and Ukraine are the only ones to have improved. Moldova stagnated,
while all the other ENP partners retrograded. The sharpest drops were recorded for Tunisia (23 points) and Russia (19 points).
All in all, the data provided by both organisations reflect the existence of problems
surrounding issues such as democracy, freedom of speech, and political freedom in
practically all of Europes ENP partners, even if the gravity and the magnitude of these
problems may differ from one country to the other.
The ENP came into the world in 2004VII, and has been implemented continuously ever
since. And yet, notwithstanding the grim political and social circumstances of its partners and its close knowledge of the problems plaguing their societies, the EU never
expected the events that were to rattle and shake its closest geographical allies at the
end of 2010 and throughout the course of 2011.

The Conspicuous Surprise


The uprisings erupted in Sidi Bouzid in December 2010, in the aftermath of Mohamed
Bouazizis self-immolation. They spread like wildfire along the Mediterranean southern
coast, extending east, all the way to Israel and Syria, Jordan, Bahrain, and Saudi Arabia, and south - putting an end to Salehs 22 year stretch as Yemens President. They
brought down the existing political systems in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya, and forced
other regimes into change either through an escalation of repression, as in Syria, or by
promises of reform, as in Jordan and Morocco.
The EU was slow in realising the political and social extent of the events, but then again,
so was the rest of the international community, failing to interpret their meaning for the
region and for the entire world. This failure may be explained, in part, by the belief in
the Arab Exception, which is the notion that the peoples of the region are impermeable
to political and social change. It is also possible that the Wests reaction stemmed from
its own democratic crisis. The established democracies are suffering from citizen disaffection, dwindling numbers of voters, and youth indifference. With the Western media,
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academia, and political class decrying an erosion of values and the general commercialisation of society, it was difficult to comprehend how a group of leaderless youths in
a small Maghreb town rose to challenge the existing political order, risking life and limb
to transform the face of the region.
It is therefore only after the fall of Ben Ali and the rapid crumbling of Mubaraks reign
that the so-called Arab Spring caught everyones attention. It gave rise not only to bewilderment at the sudden, unexpected democratic activism and to fear at the prospect
of rising oil prices, but also to hope. In a world thats been dominated since 2008 by an
economic crisis and the moral depression that soon ensued, the images of passionate,
pro-democratic, and mostly peaceful protesters, produced a glimmer of hope for a better future, or at least of the possibility of its existence.
There was a long period of confused muttering before the American and European political class began to cheer along. When they finally did join the crowds in praising the
Arab revolutions, they stuck to the narrative already promoted by mainstream media,
celebrating the role played by the new whiz kid in the democratic block - social media.
This perspective was consistent with the stand adopted years before by these same
actors:
Since the year 2007, the American State Department, very much like Western
mainstream media, focused exclusively on the importance of Internet freedom
and the role of social media in facilitating these revolutions [...]
In June 2009, activists [in Iran] took to the streets following a controversial election there. Many appeared to have used social media to foment their uprising,
and in Washington, among academics and journalists around the American
State Department, the excitement was palpable. The journalist, Andrew Sullivan, for instance, labelled Twitter as a critical tool for organising the resistance
in Iran. He even threw in a kind of electronic agitprop, The revolution will be
twittered.
(Harkin, J., 2011a, ENJN Conference).
Hillary Clinton, U.S. Secretary of State, made a declaration following the same vein in
January 2010, vowing to promote Internet freedom as part of the Administrations foreign
policy (Foreign Policy, 2010). She announced that the United States has vouched for
diplomatic, economic, and technological resources to advance these freedoms(ibid),
thereby helping democratic movements to overcome restrictions to Internet use.
Clintons announcement and the flurry of similar statements made by politicians and
pundits alike concerning the Internets liberating properties were backed by academic
work that, although more subdued in its Utopian proclamations, arrived to similar conclusions (Christensen, 2011).
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Technologies of Freedom
The inclination to view the latest communication technology as inherently democratic is
not new. Echoing previous declarations about the democratising powers of the printing
press and the telegraph, the dominating tendency, nowadays, is to regard the Internet
and social media as a tool that could enable the creation of a freer, more democratic
society. Theories surrounding social medias liberating potential outline certain characteristics that hold great promise for democratic processes.
As this assertion is quickly adopted by commentators of all sorts and broadly distributed
by the media, it also finds its way to the political arena. Hilary Clinton was not the only
one to make Internet freedom a foundation of foreign policy. In January of 2011 Swedish Minister for International Development, Gunilla Carlsson, pledged to support social
media in the effort to promote democracy, making it an essential element in the definition of Swedens international aid (Christensen, 2011, p. 234). Carlsson announced that
her government had earmarked 15 million Euros for this purpose, even though critics
say not enough evidence backs the assumption that such action will support Swedens
foreign-aid goals of promoting freedom and the universal respect of human rights.
In short, the liberation technology view is one in which there is a causal relation posited among specific forms of technology, the expansion of rights, and
other forms of economic and social development. From a critical standpoint, the
liberation technology argument leans heavily upon techno-deterministic (and
some would say techno-utopian) lines of reasoning.
(Christensen, p. 237).
The idea of communication technologies as a tool of liberation is also embraced by
academics. In their article The Role of Digital Media, Howard and Hussain assert that:
Digital media became the tool that allowed social movements to reach onceunachievable goals.
(Howard & Hussain, 2011, p. 36).
The two authors make the claim that social media proved to be the sine qua non of the
Arab insurrections. Admittedly, it would be foolish to discard the role played by social
media. Nevertheless, it is probably too early to be making such sweeping remarks about
the primacy of their contribution. Declarations such as theirs seem rather too broad,
bypassing the questions they themselves raise in turn. Were social media the secret
ingredient that lacked, up until now, in the Arab World for an insurrection to take place?
Did they become such a powerful tool since they were already widely used by the so16

cial and demographic group that is often central in contesting the powers that be, i.e.
the educated youth? Or, could it be, perhaps that the arrival of social media added the
magical communication ingredients to an already explosive social and political mix?
Furthermore, little is said about the response of the standing regime. Does it merely sit
back and watch, waiting for the storm to pass, or does it seek to also extend its domination to the Internet realm?
Undoubtedly, a sweeping revolutionary wave such as North Africa and the Middle East
have witnessed, would have seemed impossible a few years ago. But political struggles for civil rights and democratic change have taken place before the appearance
of social media, and some of them have even been successful. In fact, a revolution did
bring down the Shahs regime in Iran in 1979, banking on the exasperation most Iranians
were feeling towards his brutal reign. The leaders of that revolution had no access to
social media as we know it, but they did have other means of communication namely
cassettes (Sreberni-Mohammadi & Mohammadi, 1994) - which seemed to have worked
just as well for them. In the former Eastern Bloc in Europe, it was the printing press and
fax machines that served as the backbone of the underground Samizdat (Gebert, 2011,
ENJN Conference).
This is not to say that social medias contribution is negligible. As social media become
ubiquitous, accessible to most, and the primary means for instant communication, it is
only natural that all social and political players would adopt them. In fact, social media
have become a digitalised extension of life, and as such, they were bound to touch
upon the political. And that they did, bringing social and political conflict online, as the
Anonymous hacker group and its cyber attacks against national administrations and
corporations exemplifies. Still, the more traditional battlefields have not disappeared.
The images sneaked out of the Syrian town Homs attest to that, as do the videos of the
2011 post election demonstrations in Moscow, rife as they are with offline protest and
anger. When it comes down to it, a revolution is pretty much what it has always been a
mass of people in the streets, risking it all as they defy the ruling power.
It appears, therefore, that political struggles simultaneously occupy two distinct spaces
where they evolve and play out - the off- and the on-line spaces. While the occurrences
in each space follow their own rationale and evolve according to their particular properties, they are also influenced by one another and feed, in synergy, the development process of the struggle in its entirety. Given this interdependence, it might be more useful
to view social media in political conflicts as an added dimension. In this way, they, like
other communication technologies, do not replace previous modes of contestation, but
rather, add on to them, like an extra layer or a new extension in the power struggle. And
although a victory in this dimension can influence the course of events, it cannot, on its
own, determine the outcome of the confrontation.

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Additionally, the interaction between technology and society is always a highly complex
one, making it impossible to determine its consequences with certainty and accuracy.
In Blogistan, Sreberny and Khiabany warn against overestimating the contribution of
technology (Internet, in their case) to social and political change, while disregarding the
local specific background in which it operates.
Communication technologies by themselves cannot solve political, social, cultural, and economic discrepancies within societies, nor can they be regarded
as the engines of history. They do not teach literacy, are not education in themselves and cannot resolve the lack of clean water or electricity, or food. Technologies are developed in historical societies and as such carry all the marks of
their historical moment in their shapes, design, functions and the very fact that
they are sold in the marketplace as commodities.
(Sreberny & Khiabany, 2010, p. 7).
Every culture, every society, have their customs, their history, and their practices that
shape the way social media is used, how it affects individuals, how it interacts with
other media, and the consequences that arise thereof. These cannot be generalised
and taken outside of their context. And yet this is precisely what happened in Iran,
when the Green protest movement took to the streets, following the disputed elections
of June 2009. The uprising was crowned as Twitters finest hour and the excitement over
the media-enabled revolution soared. This same reaction was later repeated when the
Western world finally turned its gaze towards the events unfolding in the Maghreb and
the Middle East. This time, Twitter was not the only star Facebook joined its rank as the
liberating hero. In both cases, Twitter and Facebook were regarded as external forces
amplifying, in an identical manner, processes of internal conflict that occurred in several
countries, that apart from a shared Muslim identity, differed in their economic models,
social problems, religious currents, and political regimes. The diversity of literacy levels
or Internet penetration among countries were not considered, even though such elements are essential in determining the influence of ICT technologies.
More importantly, certain societal characteristics, political forces, and cultural practices
that come into play with technology may not only limit its positive effects, but can even
reverse them. As Ronfeldt and Varda very aptly remark:
The printing press was a key technology enabling the Renaissance, the Protestant Reformation, the end of Feudalism, the rise of modern science and capitalism, and the colonial expansion of the European empires to the New World and
Asia.

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Yet the printing press, and later technologies, like the telephone and radio, did
not prevent new and ever worse forms of autocracy from arising. Early on, these
technologies contributed to the demise of the old monarchies and the broadening of popular participation in politics. But later, these same technologies were
turned into tools of propaganda, surveillance and subjugation that enabled dictators to seize power and develop totalitarian regimes.
(Ronfeldt & Varda, 2008, p. 30).
It is the complex interaction between technology and society, and the capacity of regimes to manipulate it according to their needs that prompted Internet sceptics like
writer and academic Evgeny Morozov (2011) to see Internet and social media as a
double-edged sword at best and as a repressive instrument at worst. Rulers have as
much access to technologies as their dissidents, if not more. It is hard to imagine they
would give up their technological edge. Rather, they would apply these same technologies, as ferociously as the activists would, if not more, to retain their power.
This leads to a kind of cat and mouse game, between the hacktivists on the
one hand, and the regime on the other. This is a fun game, which also stimulates
technological innovation, but its not obvious that the right side is going to win.
(Harkin, 2011a).
Social media, as all technologies, are a tool in the hand of society. But as Clay Shirky
remarked, the usefulness of a tool is judged by how well it performs the tasks to which
it is destined:
There is no such thing as a generically good tool; there are only tools good for
particular jobs. [...] A good social tool is like a good woodworking tool it must
be designed to fit the job being done, and it must help people do something
they actually want to do.
(Shirky, 2008, p. 265).
But the usefulness of a tool is also measured by how well it is adapted to the user and
his needs, and to what an extent it allows for users constraints and possibilities in employing it. Understanding these complex interplays improves the capacity and quality of
the tool. Understanding how social media interact with society, what are the limitations
of their use, and its complex consequences are essential if they are to contribute to
political processes. As Morozov insists, this is all the more important if they are to play
a part in pro-democratic effort in non-democratic countries, where the price of a failed
insurrection is often paid in blood.
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Our Objective
In both the regions participating in the ENP project, the sheer number and diversity of
countries to have seen protests, with varying degrees of mobilisation, violence, and success, will no doubt prove to be an invaluable source for future research.
This study aims to explore the different ways social media are involved in the struggle
for democracy and their implications. A number of observers analysed these various
contributions - Howard and Hussain (2011), Simon Cottle in his valuable research notes
(2011a), and Dean Freelon, on his blog (2011). Cottle is one of the rare researchers who
do not oppose social medias democratic potential to their pitfalls and shortcomings, but
rather sees them as different parts of the whole, creating a complex system of interactions, with consequences that are at times stark, and at other times elusive.
I tend to adopt his approach, insisting that any contribution of social media to prodemocratic struggles is accompanied by limits and counter effects that diminish these
same contributions or even reverse them. This is not to say that the contribution is nil
or negative, but merely that the effect of social media on the democratic scene is in
constant evolution and mutation, each transformation reacting and building on previous
ones and on new input in technology and user ingenuity, be it democratic in nature or
authoritarian.
Cottle (ibid), as well as Howard and Hussain, identify a number of aspects to social
medias contribution to political struggles. This book is dedicated to four of them, discussing each aspect in a separate chapter. The chapters address in broad terms the
democratic potential of social media in specific domains, how it is manifested in political and social movements among the EUs ENP partners and how it can also be limited
and even reversed by other political and social factors or by social medias structural
properties.
The first chapter, entitled Sowing the Democratic Seed, focuses on social media as a
platform for political debate, a public sphere of sorts, striving to open up the political
sphere to others beyond the usual power holders in authoritarian regimes. The capacity of social media to allow individuals to communicate their views and opinions both to
restricted and to mass distributed networks endows citizens with the ability to propose
alternative narratives and frames to the existing state propaganda, thus challenging
the existing order. This is perhaps the most basic level of political contestation, and it
is apparent under all regimes. Remarkable examples existed in Tunisia and Egypt prior
to the uprisings, but also in Russia and Belarus, to name but a few. Nevertheless, the
digital divide, particularly stark in developing countries, puts the threshold of political
participation through social media high. Additionally, social media tend to concentrate
like-minded people in formal networks, threatening to transform the possibility of an
alternative public sphere to a mere illusion.
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The second chapter, entitled Mobilising the Troops, examines social medias contribution to organised anti-governmental activity. Beyond the realm of debate and the exchange of opinions, social media contribute to the coordination of collective dissent.
Social media are situated at the crux of the political evolution, where the mounting anger
and frustration erupt in an attempt of change. But, while they facilitate the logistics of
the uprising, they also contain the threat of slacktivism, an easy way to vent political
steam without real political engagement. Moreover, social medias inherent resources
that make it such a remarkable tool for mobilisation also simplify surveillance and the
promotion of non-democratic ideas.
Chapter three, entitled Mediating the Struggle, discusses the contribution of social media to the media landscape and more specifically - to journalism. The challenge they
pose to the Fourth Estate is by and large a result of the latters growing incapacity to fulfil
its role and its inability to fully play a democratising role in authoritarian regimes. Social
media allow citizens to fill the gap left by legacy medias inefficiency and challenge the
narratives elaborated by the powers that be, pushing for greater transparency and accountability of state apparatus. But social media do not only serve to challenge the existing alliance between media and state authority, particularly powerful in non-democratic
regimes. In certain constellations, social and other media come to interact, creating a
powerful synergy that can effectively crush the states hitherto control of the communication field. However, the question remains whether social media play a leading role in this
respect or whether other media, such as mobile phones or cable networks, actually lead
this trend. In the case of the Arab uprisings, for example, Al Jazeera played a prominent
role, which may in hindsight overshadow the one performed by social media. Additionally, experience has shown that authorities will always strive to maintain their hold on the
national narrative and undermine any proposed alternative. In the case of autocratic
rulers, this includes aggressive censorship and relentless propaganda that can subvert
any attempt made by their opponents.
Chapter four examines how social media are used to appeal for support from the international community, comprised of international institutions, foreign civil societies, and
Diasporas. The transnational aspect of social media makes this move a natural one for
groups seeking assistance in overthrowing a regime deemed unjust. Given that these
groups cannot have their voices heard at home, assistance from abroad is essential,
and social media can be important in securing help for their cause. Moreover, social
and mainstream media are the major actors of the globalisation of ideas and values.
Subsequently, the grievances of one people can be easily understood by others, or
even shared by them, reinforcing the processes of identification and the willingness to
play an active part in changing the regime, even from afar. And yet, recent events have
shown that even social media cannot really challenge realpolitik, at least not at this
stage of their development. Images of repression, horrific as they may be, have swayed
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the international community only when the interests of all the powers involved were
aligned with those of the opposition. In other cases, the world has continued to look on
with no real capacity, or will, to interfere. Finally, while the Western democracies like to
proclaim their attachment to ideas such as human liberties, freedom and democracy,
and link them somehow to new technologies, their own record on this front is mitigated,
leaving much to be desired. Practically all have implemented policies limiting Internet
access for certain groups or censoring specific publications, at times going as far as
targeting particular individuals (Howard, P. N., Agarwal, S. D., and Hussain M. M, 2011).
This, in turn, undercuts their calls to a more open and free Internet and plays into the
hands of repressive regimes, which use this as a validation of their policies in their own
propaganda campaign.

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Chapter 1.
Sowing the Democratic Seed
The Internet, the brainchild of scientists working for the American Defense Department, fed
and bred by additions and contributions made by a handful of European scientists, started
trickling down into public consciousness in the early 1990s. Before anyone had time to pause
and notice, the trickle became a torrent that swept high and wide (Flew, 2008, pp. 5-7).
The Internets arrival was accompanied by the development of software and hardware,
new services, and growing interconnections between IT, telecommunications, and media industries. With all these elements in place, most individuals had the capacity to
digitally mass-distribute content within their reach. And due to the relatively affordable
price of the technologies and hardware involved many individuals did (Schfer, 2009,
p. 150). Thus, the posting of comments, pictures, videos, and links available to all has
become custom currency a phenomenon unheard-off and unimaginable before, at
least not in this magnitude (Manovich, 2008, p. 25-26).
Social media, if anything, reinforced this trend. These characteristics of affordability
and the capacity to mass-communicate on an individual level appeared to endow the
technology with unforeseen democratic potential, enabling citizens to publish and share
information, organise activities and protests, and dispute the conventional narrative
handed down by state authorities and legacy media.
The scholar, Adel Iskandar, has said, Government media and alternative media have different agendas. Government media and alternative media alike
pose an inherent problem for advocates of objectivity. Because youve got on
the one hand the state narrative, which is what it is, and on the other hand
you have this alternative narrative, which has to push back, a kind of counternarrative [to that of the state]. And so, really, citizen content, to me, adds a new
dimension, with a broader range or perspectives, to get a better grasp of what is
happening.Take, for instance, what happened in Egypt [the Maspero protests,
which led to the killing of 25 Copt protesters by the military on October 9, 2011].
Watching Twitter and following the people that I know, and comparing that to
the mainstream media, I saw two very different narratives. On the one hand I
saw Egyptian state media and the American media claiming this was a sectarian conflict. And then I saw on Twitter people claiming that it was the military
instigating, encouraging, and inciting riot.
This is a prime example of why social media and citizen content is so necessary,
not in replacing media, but in providing an alternative.
(York, J., 2011, ENJN Conference).
23

This alternative frame of reality provided by social media is an essential part of its democratic potential. As Lynch correctly remarks, the telling of events is never neutral:
Events do not speak for themselves. For them to have political meaning, they
need to be interpreted, placed into a particular context and imbued with significance.
(Lynch, 2011).
The standing regime and other power-holders will always strive to discredit those that
challenge their legitimacy, by framing the events in a light that favours them. To gain
popular support, anti-governmental activists need to counter this by offering their own
frame, which will present their cause and even give a more personal, likable image
of them. This is particularly important for protesters and dissidents, who tend to be
demonised in the public eye, often portrayed as extremists and a threat to the public
peace (Aday et al., 1010). The media, which are themselves affiliated to the centres of
power, are naturally inclined to support their outlook and disseminate it widely, generally
without questioning its validity. This stance is also at the basis of the medias tendency
to disregard the views expressed by social, political, and ethnic minorities (Terry Flew,
2008, pp. 164-165; Gorman & McLean, pp. 179-181; Kumar, 2006, p. 49).
Todays social media appear to challenge this nexus of power, by providing each individual with the capacity to confront the dominant narrative through the formulation and
publication of her own analysis of political and social developments, thereby democratising the framing process.
Moreover, by their very nature, social media allow users to go beyond the mere posting
of opinion, towards a mass debate in the electronic public space, which for many commentators, is a rejuvenated version of Habermas public sphere.
Mediating between the State and society, the idea of a truly public sphere provides the
citizen with data and analysis necessary for him to forge an informed opinion concerning the state of affairs. It is also a space where all citizens can engage in discussion on
matters pertaining to the general interest, free of coercion of discrimination. Thus, information, analysis, and reason play a primordial role in the very existence of the public
sphere (Habermas 2007, p. 103).
Media was essential for the public sphere:
[t]he press remained an institution of the public itself, effective in the manner of
a mediator and intensifier of public discussion, no longer a mere organ for the
spreading of news but not yet the medium of a consumer culture.
(Habermas, 2001, p. 105).

24

Habermas believed that medias role as a public service was short-lived. Once newspapers were transformed into consumer goods, private interests and privileges took over
the public sphere, effectively disintegrating its foundations. Information became biased
and the egalitarian nature of the public sphere evaporated.
In that sense, new media technologies seemed to provide society with an answer to the
democratic crisis. For the price of a PC and an Internet connection, citizens can engage
with one another, raise issues of concern, and inform each other and the rest of cyber
space, effectively bypassing legacy media. Indeed, the ICT revolution enabled many
citizens, for the first time, to publish their opinion with little cost, irrespective of race, sex
or religion.

The Politicising Media


The Arab Spring had many causes. One of these sources was social media
and its power to put a human face on political oppression.
(Howard et al., 2011, p. 2)
Howard and Hussain view the primary engagement through social media as the first,
necessary step that lays the foundation for future collective action. It is, in effect, a
preparation phase, involving:
Activists using digital media in creative ways to find each other, build solidarity
around shared grievances, and identify collective political goals.
(Howard & Hussain, p. 42).
When the uprisings erupted in Tunisia and Egypt, the West was clearly caught by surprise. Yet it seems that in these countries, activists have been preparing the ground for
an uprising already for a long while, using social media quite naturally as one of the
many tools available to them.
How is it that the Internet came to be of such help for the Tunisian revolution?
It is the result of a decade old work of politicising the Internet. In Tunisia, it
started already in 1997 or 1998. [For instance,] in 2005, we gathered 40 to 50
activists and we launched a campaign Ben Ali, enough is enough! (Ben Ali,
yezzi fock in Tunisian dialect), at the occasion of the world summit on information and society, that took place in Tunis.

25

At that time, it was the first network to gather Tunisian activists online. I think
they were aware of the potential of social media as they were theorising that
social media and the Internet would create the next revolution that would come
to Tunisia.
[...] The work behind the scenes of the Arab bloggers meeting in Beirut in 2008
and 2009 allowed activists, who knew each other first through the Internet, to
meet face to face later, in trainings, where they taught each other, sharing strategies, tools and tactics.
(Ben Gharbia, 2011, ENJN Conference).
It is not entirely surprising that the political protest took to the Net or to social media in
particular. Social media have become ubiquitous, encompassing almost all aspects of
modern life and to such an extent that social media can no longer be considered as a
mere pastime. What happens offline will ultimately find its way to the online sphere and
to social media, where individual expression takes primacy. In this way, a constant flow
of ideas and movements between the off- and the on-line dimensions is created, one
that is naturally used for actions requiring mass interaction.
The Egyptian April 6 movement or the Kefaya (Enough) campaign, that began following
the 2005 presidential elections (and which served as blue print for the Tunisian yezzi
fock campaign) also belonged to this preparation phase. In effect, they represented an
attempt to re-appropriate the media field and to use an electronic space to raise public
issues, when other public spaces were hard to access. They would prove essential, later, when conditions would be ripe for the next revolutionary phase to take hold in Egypt.
Shirky also believes in the importance of social media networks in preparing political
change (2010). He refutes the idea of social media as instrumental to bringing about
revolutionary action, but sees it as a necessary phase for the development of an environment that can be receptive of democratic ideas. Such an environment has to be
literate and densely connected, so as to allow for a profusion of political debates. The
building of such societal foundations is long, but essential, for democratic processes.
The more promising way to think about social media is as long-term tools that
can strengthen civil society and the public sphere. In contrast to the instrumental view of Internet freedom, this can be called the environmental view.
According to this conception, positive changes in the life of a country, including
pro-democratic regime change, follow, rather than precede, the development of
a strong public sphere.
(Shirky, 2010, p. 32).

26

Russian blogs and social media also carried out such preparation work in the past decade. One of the countrys most important opposition leaders, Alexey Navalny, started
his political activity precisely in this way by creating a blog (RosPil, or The Plunder of
Russia), dedicated to the investigation and mass publication of state corruption and
wrongdoings of all kinds2. He soon became a highly trusted and respected critic of the
Russian government, a position that naturally made him a key figure in the protests that
took place in the aftermath of the contested December 2011 elections (Leroyer, 2011).
Martina Litvinovich, another important opposition blogger in Russia, also uses social
media extensively, attempting to propose an alternative narrative and to change the
countrys political and social priorities.
But the appeal to citizens public consciousness is not only done through blogging.
Posting pictures and videos by otherwise unengaged individuals could also prove valuable. For example, Alexey Dymovsky, a Russian police officer, used YouTube to expose
the problem of corruption in the force (Machleder & Asmolov, 2011, p. 7).
In a similar vein, opposition bloggers in Tunisia worked for years to expose governmental
corruption. One of their most famed actions was the broadcasting of videos portraying
the presidential plane flying frequently to shopping destinations, at times where no presidential meetings were scheduled, allegedly for the convenience of the Tunisian First Lady.
Apart from raising awareness and proposing an alternative framing of the political reality, the pre-uprising Internet activity is also considered valuable due to the role it plays
in diminishing the fear factor that paralyses attempts at pro-democratic action under
repressive regimes.
According to my experience in Egypt, a lot of what has happened in the country was a re-imagination of the field of possibilities. What brought people out in
the streets has been the overcoming of a psychological fear barrier. In the past
decades, Egyptians had every reason to revolt. The legitimacy of the Mubarak
regime was dissolving, step by step, [while] the last remaining social contract
of subsidies and an economic baseline of financial stability has been ebbing
away. People were just left with economic repression, security repression, and
corruption. But they were held in place by the thought that the costs of revolting
were too high, and that the prospects of success were simply unimaginable. It
didnt seem like it could ever really happen. The Egyptians had to get past this
psychological point and say, you know what, that can actually happen, we can
beat the police off the streets. And this is what we saw on January 25, and to a
much greater extent on January 28.
2) Navalny is the one to have coined the nickname Party of Swindlers and Thieves for the governmental party United Russia, which has since become
widespread in the country.

27

Is social media responsible for that? No, not least because it was shut off
for most of January 28. As a matter of fact, all internal communications
were largely shut off that day. Still, the contacts made prior to that between
certain activists and certain groups online helped produce this re-imagination and provoke this re-conceptualisation of what could be achieved.
(Shenker, 2011a, ENJN Conference).
It is not only a question of overcoming a fear, it is also a matter or opening up the field
of possibilities to a new eventuality that was deemed up until then as remote or unlikely.
Either way, it is something that is done communally, touching several members of a community simultaneously. Shirky prefers to speak of a moment of shared awareness, a term
he borrows from the military. Not only do all the members understand a certain situation,
they also know that they share this understanding with their comrades. Social media is
essential to this, accelerating the propagation of the message, making it at once more
clear and precise (2011, pp. 35-36).

The Digital Divide


One societal problem that may seriously constrain social medias democratising potential is the digital divide. As van Dijk explains (2005), inequality and social injustice
affect how online resources are accessed, and therefore also the capacity of members
of society to use them for political ends. Those who suffer from limited access to offline
resources would also find it difficult to acquire and use online resources, which in turn
would limit their participation in an increasingly digitalised and networked society. The
result would be a reinforced exclusion of these individuals and an even greater inequality in the distribution of resources.
The digital divide runs, accordingly, along the fault lines of the social divide, namely
gender, class, ethnic origin, education level, and geographic distribution. It is also a
divide that touches mostly, on the macro level, the developing countries, leaving the
Western world, still today, well ahead.
Thus, in this sense, Internet, and by extension social media, can only be considered
a democratising tool for a certain segment in society. Philip Howard, quoted in Patrick
Meier (2011), doesnt view this as a fundamental problem in democratising processes,
since a change doesnt require an equal degree of participations from all citizens in a
society. Ultimately,

28

It does not matter that the number of bloggers, twitterers, or Internet users may
seem small, because in a networked social moment only a few brokers need to
be using these tools to keep everyone up to date.
These are the communication tools for the wealthy, urban, educated elites whose
loyalties or defection will make or break authoritarian rule. Indeed, it is probably
more useful to evaluate applications such as Twitter through the communities
they support, rather than through tool features. [] Social movement scholars
write that elite defection usually marks the end of an authoritarian regime.
(Howard, 2010).
Without a doubt, a pro-democratic movement fighting to overthrow a repressive regime
does not need to mobilise all citizens in front of their screens. As a matter of fact, an
absolute concentration of protest activity in cyber-space would put an end to any hope
of change. Nevertheless, the fact that certain members of society are socially prohibited
from using a tool that is deemed democratising clearly undermines its effectiveness and
validity. If the original premise contends that social media is democratic as it gives an
equal voice to all, including the voiceless and disenfranchised, the digital divide puts
it under a heavy strain. At the very least, it points to the possibility that the Internet, or
social media, like all media, end up facilitating the political participation of those who are
already in the advantage while excluding whole segments of society. In Azerbaijan, for
instance, only 30% of Internet users are female. Any political action carried through the
Internet would only serve to further exacerbate womens exclusion of public life.

Wael Ghonim or the Plummer and the Housewife?


If the digital divide inhibits social media from becoming truly inclusive, depriving many
of the capacity to participate in and influence the political debate, the strong entertainment propensity of the media signifies that also for those who have the means to be politically engaged, it is difficult to find open venues for such action. Social media are often
rigged towards consumerism and distraction, relegating politics to the background. As
Hindman shows in The Myth of Digital Democracy, only a small fraction of Internet use
is dedicated to politics. As a result, it is extremely difficult for those who express themselves on the Internet to get their voices heard. Or in his words:
[...] putting up a political Web site is usually equivalent to hosting a talk show
on public access television at 3:30 in the morning.
(Hindman, 2009, p. 57).

29

Hindmans research reveals a rather sobering picture of Internet use:


Overall, about 10.5 percent of Web traffic goes to adult or pornographic Web
sites. A slightly smaller portion (9.6 percent) goes to Webmail services such as
Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail, 7.2 percent of traffic goes to search engines, while only
2.9 percent of Web traffic goes to news and media sites.
(Ibid, p. 60).
In Political Power of Social Media (2010), Clay Shirky dismisses this problem. Online
distraction cannot really be considered a new threat to political debate, on or offline,
since entertainment, of any kind, has always been part of any media:
Far more people in the 1500s were reading erotic novels then Martin Luthers
Ninety-Five Theses, and far more people before the American Revolution were
reading Poor Richards Almanack than the work of the Committees of Correspondence.
(Shirky, 2010, p. 32).
Ethan Zuckerman addresses this same issue with the Cute Cat Theory of Digital Activism. In short,
Web 1.0 was invented to allow physicists to share research papers. Web 2.0
was created to allow people to share pictures of cute cats (2008a).
Zuckerman explains that modern Internet may indeed be developed, used, and commercialised primarily for the sharing of cute cat photos and videos of scantily-clad ladies
and their gentlemen suitors, but ultimately, if Internet is good enough for these activities,
it will also be good enough for democratic action. Dissidents will find ways to adopt
and adapt these tools to their goals, taking the fight to another dimension the online
dimension. Governments who would then try to block the Internet in order to counter
cyber-activism will end up enraging also those who were not, up to that point, politically
engaged, simply because they can no longer access their favourite LOL-cat website.

30

The Ideology Locker


Consumer-oriented social media offers many distractions that may in fact take most
peoples minds off of a more political use of the Net. Still, this does not mean that politically oriented engagement through social media is null. But just how productive is it,
looking at it through the prism of the public sphere?
One answer to this question points to a structural limitation of social media for political
debates - the so-called echo-chamber. Habermas alluded to it when he discussed Internets weakness as a public-sphere agent:
The Internet has certainly reactivated the grassroots of an egalitarian public of
writers and readers [... But] the rise of millions of fragmented chat rooms across
the world tend[s] instead to lead to the fragmentation of large but politically focused mass audiences into a huge number of isolated issue publics.
(Habermas, 2006, p. 423, quoted in Neuman, Bimber & Hindman, 2010).
Cass Sunstein (2001) was one of the first to address the issue of electronic political discussion platforms becoming echo-chambers, as people holding certain political views
will increasingly gravitate towards Internet sources that reflect ideas identical to their own,
while shunning those that challenge their beliefs. More than anything, this promotes the
creation of what Sunstein calls the Daily Me. Thus, instead of encouraging an exchange
of ideas, online political discussion may actually lead to a polarisation of opinion.
Taking the Tea-Party as an example, Dana Radcliff (2011) reaches the same conclusion.
Social media cements like-minded individuals in online organisations that can easily
grow, mobilising adherents and funds relatively quickly and acquiring a powerful influence over politicians, beyond election periods. While this may seem a positive development at the onset, it can quickly turn into a political straightjacket. Members can follow
every act and gesture of their elected leaders, holding them accountable for any move
that challenges their political line, chaining, in this manner, the politician to their own,
group-restricted agenda. This is precisely what has happened with the Tea-Party and
the congressmen and women associated with the movement, making any concession
or compromise a near impossibility.
A similar phenomenon is also taking over the Likud party in Israel, the current coalition
leader of the right majority. Israeli daily Haaretz described a take-over of the party by an
extreme-right fringe, aided in great part by new media and digital networks, including
social media (2011a). According to the newspaper, the activists use blogs and chainemails to enforce their agenda upon the politicians, mainly the protection of the colonial
project in the Occupied Territories. This is often done at the expense of other issues,
which tend to be bypassed, as the activists manage to hijack government and parlia31

ment meetings, through Knesset members, who are vulnerable to their pressure.
The echo-chamber phenomenon is rendered even worse by the fact that it is not merely
a question of choice. Unbeknownst to them, users of Internet and social media are increasingly relegated to such echo-chambers by their service providers. For commercial
purposes (a better advertisement targeting of the consumer), Internet technologies tailor
research results according to what algorithms judge to be your earlier preferences. Since
2009, Google is customising search results for every user, providing not the most pertinent
results, but those the user will be the most likely to click on. This personalisation creates
separate electronic universes, which feed the users only what they are familiar and comfortable with, leaving their beliefs intact and the political debate barren (Pariser, 2011).
Algorithms have the tendency to [...] work like funnels that progressively narrow
our view on reality, constantly offering us what we already know, like and desire. In this way, existing stereotypes and prejudices are being reinforced and
amplified. If I once like the Facebook page Islam is dangerous, I will receive
ever more information with a similar political orientation and attitude.
(Meckel, 2011).
Meckel points to another interesting problem arising from the personalisation of searches on the Internet. The very process, by which this personalisation is made, is based on
choices made in the past. In such a way, the search algorithms base every future search
on what has already occurred, cementing it electronically and making change unlikely,
or at least much more difficult to access (ibid). This is hardly encouraging when addressing issues such as political evolution and democratic processes, which are based
on change and development.
It is also important to bear in mind that discussions on Facebook do not necessarily
follow patterns that bode well for democratisation, and these echo chambers can ultimately transform a simple opinion into a subversive act. Haaretz reported that a group
called Israel Arzenu (Israel our country) in December 2011 posted on its Facebook
page a picture of a dead man, presumably Palestinian, killed in an Israeli air attack. The
graphic picture got over a thousand likes and hundreds of comments, most of which
were favourable (Haaretz, 2011b). Many comments had an inflamed, nationalistic tone
and those that expressed doubt at the usefulness of such an act were vehemently silenced and their writers requested to leave the electronic space. The picture, posted on
December 7, 2011, has since then been blocked, possibly by Facebook.
The question also arises whether a social media that aggregates a users family and
friends is the right platform to encourage the expression of ideas and opinions, which
might not be considered as right. It is possible that the peer pressure exerted by these
various circles of contacts, ranging from the very close to the very loose, might dis32

courage users from conducting a free, open and un-coerced discussion. Experience
shows that the heated tone of some debates can lead, in time, to censorship or selfcensorship. Some users can then decide to discuss political matters in more precisely
defined circles that exclude other users for fear of retribution, thus exacerbating the
echo-chamber effect and drying up the exchange of ideas.

Social Media Are Corporations Too


Finally, when considering the structural limits of social media as liberating technologies,
it is important to keep in mind that social media are products, their owners are corporations and their users clients3. These distinctions are not merely a linguistic squabble
they define the very essence of social medias characteristics, uses, and limitations.
Corporations that develop social media have corporate concerns. Their primary aim is
to have a profitable product that sells. To ensure this, they devise business plans and
terms of use, which constrict the media within certain limits. The users can seldom
transgress these limits since the owning company has almost complete control of the
product, and any alteration to the rules of the game requires a long negotiation (or advanced hacking skills).
A lot of us think of social media as the public sphere online, the place where
we gather, our new town square, but in reality, its not public. Social media are
the product of Western technology, American technology mostly, for better or
worse, which means that they come with their own set of rules. It also means
that they are privately owned, making them not a public sphere, but a quasipublic sphere. These characteristics make them vulnerable to censorship and
propaganda.
One example from Tunisia: a couple of years ago, Nawaat, a blog collective
founded by Sami Ben Gharbia, filmed young children sniffing glue, later posting
this film on YouTube. But YouTube took it down, claiming it was inappropriate
content, since it showed children using drugs. Similarly, earlier this year, there
were a number of videos from Syria, showing violent content, showing dead
bodies, and showing horrible, horrible things. YouTube took those down as well.
Ultimately, YouTube has shifted its position, I give them credit for that, but what
theyve said is: OK, were going to make a different rule. Rather than saying
you cant show violent content, or you cant show children using drugs, they
3) Alternatively, one can say that social media are free because they are not products. It is the user of the medium who is the product and the data he
submits about himself a very valuable good that corporations are willing to pay great amounts of money to access (Andrejevic, 2002).

33

are now saying that you can actually show this for documentary or educational
purposes. That makes it a call they have to make. Often, it requires the person
who uploaded the video to make the appeal, which remains problematic. Still,
that is one platform that has basically adapted to these new uses of social tools.
Facebook, on the other hand, has not adapted. Facebook seems reluctant to
appear as a revolutionary or an activist platform, continuing to take down content on a regular basis. One example is a recent page, discussing the possibility
of a third intifada in Palestine (at that point not even calling for one). As a result,
this page was taken down.
(York, 2011).
Indeed, Facebook insists that users sign-in to the social medium with their real name.
Those who sign in with a pseudonym may find that their account has been shut down.
The problem is that by forcing members living under repressive regimes to use their true
identity when using Facebook forces them to choose between peaceful self-censorship
and between very risky free speech.
This is an aspect of social media thats often neglected by commentators, leading certain stakeholders to recommend Facebook or Twitter as candidates for the Nobel Prize
ever since the protests of the Iranian Green movement erupted in June 2009 (Pfeifle,
2009). The Arab uprisings renewed the trend in 2011.
As the Net gains importance in all aspects of life, it becomes an essential space of interaction for corporate and financial organisations that vie to invest in and capitalise on
its use. These actors are likely to influence the Nets use in ways that are not necessarily
conductive to democratic change, by excluding certain groups or rejecting members
that do not convey the right message or image, according to commercial criterion.
Social Media is Corporate: so far, the interests of Google etc. have generally
coincided with an open Internet, but not always and not necessarily forever
(remember the withdrawal of corporate services to WikiLeaks in the US?) But
without those companies you wont have those platforms.
(Beckett, 2011a).
States are highly aware of this weakness and do not shy away from exploiting it. Many
governments pressure Internet corporations into censoring content or users who are
not to their liking, thus washing their hands from exercising censorship measures themselves and saving the costs of searching for the culprits and shutting them down. This
had been the basis of the relationship between Google and China ever since the company set up shop in the country, and has remained an issue, until the company finally
decided to pull out, exasperated by the regimes demands.
34

Chapter 2.
Mobilising the Troops
Pro-democratic action goes beyond debating. Social media nowadays also play an essential role in mobilisation getting the activists to dedicate their time and energy to the
service of the cause. Social media is, on the face of it, ideal for coordinating mobilisation
and action, permitting instant, mass distribution of information at a very low cost. Messages are exchanged on Twitter, concerning the last protest and the directives for the
following action. Points of friction and escape routes are marked on Google Maps, and
then shared on Facebook. Testimonies are gathered on YouTube.
Network ICTs, including social media, are no longer a mere debate tool. Some commentators see them as an extension of the movement, the place where the battle is raging.
It is a democratisation of the media, through the media (Lievrouw, p. 159).
Moreover, the rapidity and the ease of engagement through Internet and social media,
as an integral part of daily life and even leisure, makes political action less foreboding
and time consuming. At times, a click is all that is required to make ones opinion heard.
What is more, the networked character of social media amplifies that click and infuses it
with power, by spreading the reality of that single action to a host of connected members.
And indeed, the Internet in general and social media in particular are increasingly used
by associations, social movements, and activists in their struggles to attain their goals.
As a matter of fact, it is hard to imagine any political action today thats wholly conducted
outside the online realm.
Finally, social media offer the possibility of political participation to those who would normally shy away from such action, either because they fear retribution or because they
feel that the normative debate does not accommodate their views. This is particularly
true for minorities and women. In Egypt, for instance, where public space is not always
open to female voices, blogs and social media serve as a platform from which they can
express their views and even initiate action. In March 2008, Esraa Abdel Fattah started
a Facebook page, calling Egyptians to participate in a strike as a show of sympathy
for the textile workers of Mahalla, who were planning to go on strike themselves on the
6th of April. Two weeks after the groups formation, Fattahs Facebook page had around
70,000 members, an astonishing figure, considering that less than 800,000 Egyptians
had Facebook accounts at the time (Faris, 2008).
The action led to the creation of the 6th of April movement, headed by Fattah and Ahmed
Maher, which played a central part in the strikes that broke that day in Egypt. Cairo was
almost completely shut down, as businesses, schools, and shops preferred to keep
out of trouble and the local elections that took place in the city two days later saw an
unprecedented low in voter numbers. Fattah was subsequently arrested and jailed for
35

two weeks. At the time of her release, she renounced pursuing any political action. Still,
in his article, Faris remarks how deeply Fattah and her movement affected the Egyptian
collective memory. Interestingly, his article was written in 2008. Little did Faris know that
in 2011, this same movement would hold such a prominent place in the Egyptian uprising against Mubarak. Considering the prevailing gender discrimination in Egypt, it is
almost unimaginable for a woman to create such a social movement merely with off-line
tools.
In this chapter, we will review social medias contribution to political mobilisation, building on the previous work made to politicise society and develop a critical stance towards the regime, and moving in the direction of a more concrete revolutionary action.
We will also address factors undermining the mobilisation potential. Paradoxically, such
factors stem from the very ease that characterises social media politics, putting online
engagement at risk of becoming a quick and shallow involvement that replaces a deep
and demanding commitment for the democratic change.
Additionally, when organising street action, social media again favour those classes or
segments of the population that are already close to the centres of powers, making the
powerless ever more dependent on external forces. Finally, pro-democratic elements
are not the only ones to add social media to their arsenal. Other movements that challenge the regimes, be they Islamist or Fascist, can also benefit from social medias potential to win over society with regards to their cause. The state authorities themselves
are not blind to social medias advantages and do not hesitate to provide a counterstrike to their challengers. They also take advantage of the medias openness to follow
the actions of their dissidents and crush them at the most opportune moment.

Digitally Mediated Insurgency


In their analysis of the Arab springs, Howard and Hussain see the second phase, or
aspect, of social media activism as the ignition moment, when the media are instrumental in transforming the built-up political anger online into an insurgency. It is the tipping
point, so to speak, that takes society from political debate to revolutionary activity. This
phase is closely followed by what Howard and Hussain identify as social medias third
contribution to pro-democratic movements the mobilised street protests.
In Tunisia, the ignition moment can very easily be identified as the self-immolation act
of Mohamed Bouazizi, the young street vendor, and the protests following his act. But
Bouazizis act served as an ignition point not only for the uprising in Tunisia, but also for
the waves of revolution that washed over the whole region. It is probably for this reason
that the event carries so much symbolism for so many peoples all over the world.
36

In Egypt, Bouazizis desperate act joined with other societal elements to bring the
streets to a boiling point. Among them, the We Are all Khaled Said campaign holds a
particular status. It may have started six months before the Egyptian uprising, but it was
also particularly important in escalating the conflict in the country and taking it to the
next level. The campaign came into being through a We Are all Khaled Said Facebook
page, created by Wael Ghonim (who would later become one of the leading figures of
the Egyptian revolution), following the death of the young man in the hands of the police,
in June 2010. Said, a 28 year old man, was dragged out of a cyber-cafe by a couple of
policemen and beaten to death, after posting on the Net pictures showing law enforcers engaged in dubious practices. The police claimed he died choking on the drugs
he tried to ingest when he saw the police coming, but the bruises on his body and the
witnesses who saw his arrest told a different story.
The family of the young man published photos of his bruised body, which soon became
viral. The Facebook page dedicated to his death quickly gained followers and became
the strongest platform of dissent in Egypt and a major symbol of the anti-torture movement in the country. Building on the groundwork that the anti-torture campaign had
already accomplished, it won astonishing popularity.
They [the web activists] pressured mainstream media in Egypt, both newspapers and television, to address the topic of torture in Egypt. Without that, without
building that campaign for a decade against torture in Egypt, the We are all
Khaled Said page could not have galvanised and gathered all that support
within the Internet sphere.
(Ben Gharbia, 2011)
When tensions in the country began to rise in January, this symbol became the rallying
cry of the anti-Mubarak contestation, representing the political and social practices the
protesters were trying to bring down. The fall of the Tunisian regime acted as an additional accelerator, pushing the Egyptian street towards the ignition phase.
Beyond the ignition of political consciousness, social media is also instrumental in mobilising street protests. At this stage, social media assist in transmitting messages about
upcoming actions, mobilising protesters, and coordinating meetings. It also continues
to educate society on the protesters demands and grievances. As the demonstrations
gain momentum, so grows their media coverage and their visibility. The activists can
take advantage of this sudden surge of interest to increase the exposure of their ideas.
The first platform available to them at that point is social media. And this exposure can
be highly profitable for them. As it turns out, peaks in online political conversations in
both Tunisia and Egypt preceded street protests (Howard et al., p. 23). As Howard and
37

his colleagues point out, it is not possible, at this point, to clearly establish a relation of
cause and effect between the increase in online activity and the success of the mobilisation. Nonetheless, it is apparent that social media is involved in the societal and political
tempest.
The use of social media to organise street action was not a prerogative of the Arab uprisings. The phenomenon is a global one, established also, for instance, in Belarus.
Young people [in Belarus, who] are under no delusion as to their countrys attitude to free expression or freedom of association, have found inspiring and
creative ways to protest, ignoring the risks. Throughout the summer, people
have gathered in cities all over the country to take part in non-violent, silent antigovernment protests. Two groups played a key role: Movement of the future
(200,000 members), and Revolution through social networks [both based on
social media networks]. On Wednesdays, groups of men and women gathered
in a designated place and simply clapped or set on their phone alarms.
(Butselaar, 2011, ENJN Conference).
Social medias role in mobilising protesters can be more complex than it appears at first
glance. By the sheer virtue of social medias networked function, a post concerning an
individuals intention to participate in a demonstration, is simultaneously an open call for
others to join and a symbol of solidarity for those who have already expressed a similar
intention (Beckett, C., 2011b).
Furthermore, this mobilisation, of time and resources, does not have to be translated
necessarily into mass street demonstrations. Action organised and carried online can
be valuable in and of itself. Josh Machleder and Gregory Asmolov have broadly studied
crowdsourcing platforms in Russia that originated in opposition blogs and social networks, and which have had palpable effects in the country (Machleder and Asmolov,
2011).
In the State, there are certain actors, such as government, parliament, police,
and so forth, that have many different functions. There are certain services they
need to provide the citizens with, whether its security, welfare, or law enforcement. But in reality, as we see in Russia, these institutions are not necessarily
transparent, nor are they fully accountable, incapable at times of answering the
needs of the people.
The mainstream media, the so-called Forth Estate, have many outlets - television, radio, newspapers, or online media. In general, the role of media is to
increase transparency, to investigate and to hold the government accountable.
But the problem in Russia is that some of the media, especially television, exer38

cise self-censorship and are subject to government control.


And then there are online media - bloggers and social media, networks, and
websites. William Dutton of the Oxford Internet Institute calls these the Fifth
Estate, linking it ideally to the Fourth Estate. In effect, this means that social
media do what legacy media fail to do, i.e. holding the State accountable and
increasing transparency in the state system. At times, social media can also
fulfil some governance roles, making use of their inherent lack of hierarchy and
organised structure an aspect that allows them to remain relatively uncontrolled. Transparency, for instance, is increased through crowdsourcing platforms and blogs that cover issues ignored by traditional media, especially in
regions where traditional media cannot operate.
Blogs and social media also attempt, through their coverage, to increase the
pressure exercised on government, forcing it, in certain cases, to react. Similarly, the Fifth Estate can also play a role in making the State accountable for its
actions or lack thereof.
But when achieving transparency or accountability is not enough, Internet allows users to take destiny into their own hands and to do what the State or
mainstream media failed to do.
One such example is the Help Map crowdsourcing platform, created in the
summer of 2010, during the wildfires crisis that saw the deaths of about 60
people and the destruction of many villages. The Russian government had a
problem in providing an appropriate response while traditional media, particularly television, insisted the situation was under control. Bloggers, on the other
hand, presented a very different picture. They increased transparency by describing the real scale of the disaster on their blogs. Beyond that, they also
enabled collective citizen action by creating a crowdsourcing platform called
Help-map. The platform collected reports from different citizens on the events
on the ground and displayed them on the map according to different categories
of information.This pressured journalists of mainstream media to follow-up on
events, thus also increasing accountability.
But in Russia, this was not enough. Therefore, the major role of the platform was
not only mapping the events, but also creating a system to coordinate the assistance online, filling in this manner the gap left by state institutions.
(Asmolov, 2011, ENJN Conference).
Although the crowdsourcing efforts described here by Asmolov dont answer the traditional definition of pro-democratic mobilisation, they represent, nonetheless, an effort
of civil society to re-appropriate the social and political arenas, holding the regime accountable and pushing for appropriate government practices.
39

Trending the Way Out


Where activists were once defined by their causes, they are now defined by
their tools.
(Gladwell, 2010).
When weak ties become some kind of ideology of their own, through this idea
that movements can self organise through weak electronic ties, they become
useless, and potentially disastrous.
(Harkin,2011a).
In view of all thats been said about social medias capacity to act as both a catalyst and
an accelerator to pro-democratic processes, one might think that human societies as a
whole are simply one social media step away from open, liberal, and just democracies.
Yet, the United Arab Emirates, the Middle Eastern champion when it comes to the percentage of its citizens registered as Facebook usersVIII, has known little, if any, protests
in recent times. Yemen, on the other hand, with only 9.7% on its inhabitants on the Internet and 1.3% on Facebook, successfully ousted its long-standing dictator. If anything,
the discrepancy in Internet and Facebook use among the countries involved in the Arab
uprisings begs the question of their usefulness in political movements.
Another people to miss the insurrection train were the Palestinians. With all their hardearned experience in protest, militant and underground activism, they stayed at the
sidelines. And it is not for lack of motive. Struggling for decades to shake off the Israeli
occupation, Palestinian civil society, both in the West Bank and in Gaza, also faces what
many see as corrupt and repressive administrations.
The apparent passivity cannot be ascribed to lack of social media, with 53% of the West
Bank population on the Internet and 27% on FacebookIX. As a matter of fact, new media, and social media among them, are widely used by Palestinians to contest both the
Israeli occupation and the Palestinian Authority (Najjar, 2007).
Living conditions in the Occupied Territories made communication particularly difficult
for Palestinians, whether it is with their acquaintances in their vicinity or abroad. The
problem has been made particularly acute after Israel imposed a blockade on the Gaza
Strip, enforced in full since 2007, making contact with those inhabiting the enclave particularly difficult.
Thus, the use of Internet is less of a luxury and more of a necessity for most Palestinians,
providing them with a more stable means of communication, but also allowing them to
broadcast their opposition to the occupation, and at times, to the Palestinian Authority.
Internet is also essential in maintaining ties with the Palestinian Diaspora, who plays a
major role in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict (Najjar, p. 197).
40

Subsequently, social media in the Palestinian Territories are in a kind of perpetual preparation phase, to use Howard and Hussains term, providing a Palestinian narrative to the
propaganda war with Israel. Every once in a while, social media may even go through
ignition phases of sorts, but to this day, every ignition phase has died down, returning
the media back to an eternal build-up for a mobilisation that never really matures, at
least not since the advent of social media.
There may be several explanations to the incapacity of social media to play a mobilising role in the case of the Palestinian opposition movements. Some of them point to the
particularities of the Israeli-Palestinian context. Others put the blame specifically on
social media.
[Social media] distract Palestinians themselves from building a stronger movement at home. If you look at the distinction between the Palestinian revolution
in the 1970s and the Palestinian movement now, well, which one was stronger?
What I see now is an incredibly weak movement, which almost becomes a kind
of echo-chamber. Wearing a badge for Palestine in the West is very different
from offering any real practical support which might help the Palestinian people, and I think in contemporary time, the real danger of us all migrating to
these electronic echo chambers is that we might hinder, rather than support that
movement in the long term.
(Harkin, 2011a).
Later, in an interview, Harkin explained more in detail the reasons he feels cause social
media to hinder rather than aid political and social movements:
Media is an important pillar for any political transition. But if we want to think
more generally on what we need in place to ensure a transition to a proper democracy with very strong roots, then the real danger is that we work with very
shallow tools with social media, because social media is something that you can
do from your room, with no true involvement. It can, on occasion, take the place
of real political engagement; it can become a kind of slacktivism. I think theres
a real danger that we fetishise these current movements in North Africa and the
Middle East and imagine them wholly led by social media. And if we go down
that road, we might well find that democracy turns out to be a flash in the pan.
I mean, political scientists for years have talked about the kind of institutions
you need in place [for a democracy] and there are all sorts of arguments as to
which ones. But social media is not enough. Freedom of the press, for instance,
is hugely important.

41

Social media fills a gap when people arent allowed to say what they think; it fills
a gap when mainstream media is not doing what it should. On its own, I dont
think it can achieve very much. If social media are used less as a tool, in other
words flaring people up to go on the streets, but more as a dopamine, as a way
of letting people express themselves, almost as a kind of a cathartic political release, theres a real danger that they will become a kind of self-reinforcing loop,
in which people who already agree with one another talk to other people who
already think the same thing.
Im not quite sure what a movement around social media would do. What I do
know is that theres a lot of easy talk around empowerment, and really, its not
terribly empowering to spend all of your time typing things into the Internet.
Its much more empowering to go out into the streets, or perhaps down to the
mosque and try to convince someone of your perspective. And when we talk of
ethnic minorities, they really need to take their arguments outside.
(Harkin, 2011b, ENJN conference).
Konstanty Gebert joins Harkin on this point, insisting that social media can turn out to be
counter-productive, if other means of resistance are neglected:
Social media do not build institutions the way that Samizdat [the dissident print
apparatus in the former USSR] did. What social media do is create a moment
of emotional catharsis, which tends to replace the long-term need for building
institutions. Lenin, who knew a thing or two about overthrowing regimes, once
said that newspapers are a powerful collective organiser. Which is exactly what
newspapers did. In Poland, under the martial law, all the structures of the underground were based on structures of underground newspaper distribution,
which were built on trust, verified trust. This is one thing that social media cannot
produce.
That is extremely important, when we come up to elections, where there would
be groups that are built on trust [and which are] truly able to organise. We might
then realise just how feeble are the kind of social bonds that social media produce in reality.
(Gebert, 2011a, ENJN conference).

42

In an interview with the author, Gebert also alluded to the Belarusian experience of social media activism:
Belarus is a case in point. In Belarus they have a very developed system of
communication through social media, yet they are unable to produce a systematic, structured movement that will oppose the regime, and they do not have
underground print media, although next door, in Poland, they have an entire
country, full of people who know how to get it done. And if it remains at this level,
Lukashenka can sleep safely.
So ultimately, sitting at your keyboard and happily clicking away is an autistic
activity. It may give you catharsis, it may be fun, it may be informative, but it
does not make you a part of a movement. And when you feel that way, that
because you clicked on something, you become part of a movement, you got
it wrong. It is like cybersex. People say its great. Possibly. But it kind of misses
the point.
(Gebert, 2011b).
The criticism raised by Gebert and Harkin echoes one of the most heated debates surrounding social media, comparing present day digital weak ties created by the media to
the strong ties characteristic of resistance movements active offline.
Weak ties are the bonds created on social networks among members who are merely
acquainted, or perhaps do not know each other at all, loosely connected by the exchange of messages, pictures and the like. Through blogs, forums, and social media,
they form networks, and networks of networks, an immense interconnection of contacts
and information that is almost infinite. This bridging capital, as Shirky dubs it, allows
for an effortless and rapid spread of data and ideas, making the world simultaneously
smaller and bigger. Smaller because the distance among the members of the networks diminishes, and bigger because the networks can become ever so large and
reach even the remotest spot on the planet (Faris, 2008).
Gladwell, one of the biggest objectors to the reliance on weak ties in political movements, insists that the important component that drives people to act together at the
risk of their lives for the promotion of a common cause is the ties they share, strong ties
that bind them together (2010). These ties are family ties, friendships, or the extraordinary bonds that can be formed between political prisoners who share a prison cell
and similar experiences of torture. Weak ties, the ones that are created off-hand among
members of social media that are barely related to one another, if at all, cannot stand
the pressures that are exerted when fighting for freedom in an authoritarian State. These
ties, according to Gladwell, are only effective when the members of the network are not
asked much.
43

This criticism views social media activism as an easy, clickable participation that only
brings a self-centred sense of fulfilment and an illusion of engagement. Aday and his
co-authors cite the example of a Facebook page Save the Children of Africa uniting
1.3 million members, who raised, collectively, only 6,000 dollars. Similarly, the Egyptian
May 4th protest, supposed to be the follow up for the April 6th strike, failed to live up
to expectations. Facebook made it possible for millions to join the movement, which
they did. But easy come, easy go the cheaply acquired sympathy did not translate to
commitment, and only a handful of protesters arrived to the demonstration (Aday et al.,
2010, p. 29).
Social media provide, therefore, a convenient outlet to political frustration, so effortless
in fact that paradoxically, it hallows out the meaningfulness of political engagement. But
this leisurely act of dissidence is hardly the privilege of the masses. A large segment of
the populations among the ENP partner countries cant even have access to this simple
act of political expression. How does this limited accessibility influence mobilisation
through social media? In other words, what is the effect of the social divide in the context
of collective action?

The Demography of Social Media


[Under the communist regime,] literally hundreds of thousands of people in Poland, living under martial law, started producing underground media because
they would otherwise have nothing to read. Those same people [the dissidents
in Belarus] are happy clicking-off at their keyboards but only 18% of Belarusians
have access to the Internet. The remaining 82% are already out of the game.
And of those 18%, most are satisfied enough to insult President Lukashenka in
comments on Facebook that they would not go out and organise.
A friend of mine with whom I worked in the underground in the 80s, and who,
as opposed to me, is a huge fan of social media, returned from Tunisia recently,
where she tried to interest people in producing printed media as a way of furthering democratic discussion, and for the first time she admitted to me, you
know what, you might have a point. Everybody there is on Facebook, so theres
nobody left to print a leaflet that will explain to the guy on the donkey what the
whole story is about.
(Gebert, 2011a).

44

The Iranian Green Revolution of 2009, the first revolution to win the pet name of the
Twitter Revolution, took place with less than 100 Iranians as active tweeters. Apart
from the fact that this raises serious doubts about the relevance of the nickname, it also
begs the question of how democratic a movement channelled by a medium reserved
for the elite truly is. Even with a higher percentage of networked activists, compared to
the one displayed by Iran at the time of the revolution, the digital divide hampers democratic movements centred on social media networks from reaching out to all of societys
strata. This problem is particularly acute in countries with repressive regimes, where the
digital threshold is relatively high and where, coincidently, pro-democratic movements
are most needed.
Social media may be the preserve, in Egypt at least, of educated, urbanised,
and in some cases, English speaking and westernised elites, but it still brings
a whole new range of voices to the table. People can take to Twitter; they can
take to Facebook, and other platforms of social media, thereby challenging the
inaccurate [state] narratives.
The problem is that [social media] can also reinforce misleading narratives. One
of the things we are seeing at the moment is a focus on Egypts revolution being
the product of a certain subset of youth activists. This takes out of the equation
other elements, like the trade union movements; working class organisations;
other social forces, like the Bedouins in Egypt; or certain groups like the Coptic
Christian or the Nubians in the south, people who arent so readily identified with
social media.
(Shenker, 2011a).
The MENA region has seen an impressive spike in Internet penetration. Still, only 20
million out of its total of 80 million citizens have Internet in Egypt. The situation is slightly
better in Tunisia, with 33% of its inhabitants enjoying the technology. A quarter of the
Egyptian Internet users have a Facebook account, while in Tunisia Facebook members
account for more than two thirds of all Internet users. In Libya, less that 0.3% of the
inhabitants have Internet, and only 14% of those are on Facebook. The Syrian Internet
users make up 6.2% of the countrys total population, and in Yemen the percentage of
those connected to the Internet drops further to 3.2%, with only 13% of those going on
FacebookX.
These numbers dont bode well for a social-media facilitated rebellion. As Howard remarks, not all citizens need to be Internet users for it to enable an uprising (2010). After
all, the French revolution was the initiative of the aristocracy, the populace was only too
happy to follow their guiding hand. Sitting well with this logic are the numbers advanced
by Castells (2011), who remarked that although Internet use is relatively low in Egypt,
45

for the inhabitants of Cairo and Alexandria, between the ages of 16 and 40, Internet
penetration levels rise to 65%, and it is specifically this segment of the population that
was at the forefront of the uprising. This is true, but not conclusive as to the democratic
character of the uprising, since it was restricted only to a small segment of the population. This is particularly remarkable in Yemen or Syria, where Internet is the privilege of
a very small minority4. Finally, if we go back to the French example from the past - the
revolution did succeed, but democracy did not prevail.

Blows and Counterblows


The less a government is transparent, accountable, and relevant, the more
powerful the network society is. The bigger the degree of separation between
the traditional political system and the network-based one, the more probable
their confrontation.
(Asmolov, 2011).
Internet is one of the most visible and important transformations [in Russia]. In
1999, less than 10% of its citizens were online and skulking behind grey boxes
of work, hardly perceived as much of a threat to the regime. After Putins clamp
down on television independence, power rivals, and NGOs, the Internet was left
pretty much untouched. Russia, unlike China, did not want to invest in a great
firewall of censorship.
However, Russias online population has boomed, from 10% to 50% this year.
The Russian blogosphere has exploded. Russias own Internet giants have also
emerged; building up global ranking brands such Yandax and mail.ru.
So if the Internet was a truly transformative technology, distinct from the printing
press, radio and television, how is it that Russian authoritarianism is entrenched,
and now displays markedly autocratic tendencies?
I want to argue that the Internet is not a transformative technology. Its impact
had been lessened in Russia and will continue to be lessened in Russia for the
coming years by two over arching political forces.
Firstly, the online coercion model in Russia is mostly one of co-option, not confrontation, working with the grain of Russian society. The Kremlin had accepted
and worked with the Internet to achieve its goals, not against it. The Kremlin de-

4) The Economist came up with an interactive chart called The Shoe-Throwers Index, supposed to allow the readers to determine which will be the next
centre of unrest in the MENA region, according to variables such as the dictators number of years in power, corruption rankings, and last but not least,
the number of Internet users (http://www.economist.com/blogs/dailychart/2011/03/arab_unrest_0)

46

ploys the Internet co-option in the following manner: Kremlin e-activists, known
as the web-brigada and paid to post pro-government comments, are at the
first line. Then you have Kremlin e-training centres that issue tools for the webbrigada and pay them.
The Kremlin also increasingly uses YouTube. Take for instance Medvedevs
blog. The Kremlin uses social media as a promotional tool as well, exemplified
by sad Putins Army adverts online that encourage young ladies to join and support the once and future President.
Crucially, the Kremlin is operating its co-option through the Skolkovo Project,
which it calls a high technologic growth spot, offering cheap loans, grants, and
access to government funds for Russias young entrepreneurs, taking them into
the system, instead of pushing them away. Also, the Kremlin is pushing for more
e-government and a greater online presence, thus opening up more contracts
and more involvement for anyone working on the Internet in Russia, allowing
them to profit from collaboration with the State, instead of opposing it.
Additionally, for the Kremlin, the Internet is not only about communications, its
also a data revolution that helps government planning and helps the monitoring
of dissent. Thus, the wealth of new online information about Russias citizens
makes efforts like monitoring them a lot easier.
The government has also spent good money in contracts abroad, purchasing
foreign products, which all enable deeper surveillance of Russian society. Coincidently, many of these products come from the EU.
And then there are the methods of online confrontation that the Russian government has. Theres a widespread use of distributed denial of service attacks
[DDoS] on foreign and opposition websites. Theres a variable geometry of repression within Russia. You have certain provinces that are more repressive
than others, and you also have provinces that have taken to detaining bloggers.
Beyond Russia, the Kremlin has launched an e-foreign policy of sorts, seeking
to challenge global Internet norms, in partnership with China. An example of this
was the recent proposal made by those pioneers of Internet authoritarianism,
Russia, China, Tajikistan and Uzbekistan, at the United Nations, to establish a
new online code of conduct, establishing these issues as the sovereign rights
of states.
So all in all, we see a Russian government thats working with the Internet and
thats working with foreign partners, not against them. Its a relatively subtle and
sophisticated policy.
As for the second broadly political and economic trend thats stopping the Internet from becoming a transformative force in Russia - I will argue that despite
the illusion of a vast array of different voices, Russias online world is actually
47

developing a corporate oligarchy, resembling how its television or radio markets


work, which also makes it easier for authorities to manipulate. Russia has a
strongly indigenous Net culture and its sites have regional dominance. The key
corporations that control the Russian Internet like Yandax, Vkontakte or mail.ru,
are effective online hegemonies. If you want to search, if you want to use social
media or if you want to email, there are dominant websites. You also have key
oligarchs behind these platforms. This means that there may be a cacophony of
voices, but there are only a few bosses, there are only a few people you have to
call, and there are only a few companies claiming tax returns that the Russian
government can pressure.
Add to this the corporate desire for users to remain visible online, liking the advertising that obviously helps the Russian secret service to monitor its citizens.
To sum up, the system is not as decentralised as it may look.
(Judah, 2011, ENJN conference).
Social media may be perceived as the peoples weapon of choice, but unfortunately, repressive regimes do not sit idly by, watching passively as they are turned against them.
In The Net Delusion, Evgeny Morozov extensively discusses the many non-democratic
backlashes inherent to social media. The unsuspecting, freedom-fighting user of YouTube may end up paying a very high price by taking the struggle to the digital dimension.
There is a tendency to regard authoritarian regimes as backward or unsophisticated.
The West tends to fall in this trap, taking for granted its technological and social superiority (Morozov, 2011). But, regardless of ideology and culture, survival is a powerful
instinct for the ruthless ruler too. It is therefore naive to expect the regime not to fight
back. When it comes to dissidents using social media to organise, coordinate, and garner support, the State may take advantage of the media for surveillance purposes. The
exact same properties that make social media such an important tool for protesters and
opposition leaders also excel in facilitating repression, providing state security forces
with all the information necessary to identify those they consider to be a threat, their
future plans, and where they can be most easily intercepted.

48

Watch Thy Enemy


Belarus President, Alexander Lukashenko, has been in power since 1994.
Every election he has presided over has been deemed unfair by the OSCE. The
December 2010 presidential elections have again been disputed by the OSCE,
the US, the EU, and the Belarusian people. In the post election crackdown, the
police violently dispersed thousands of people who were protesting vote fraud.
Seven of the nine presidential candidates were arrested, including one who was
dragged from his hospital bed by the KGB. Two candidates, including one we
worked closely with, are still languishing in jail.
Lukashenkos model of dictatorship has made this central European country
of ten million people economically dependent on Russia. He has subordinated
public institutions, while the countrys opposition is fragmented and finds it is
almost impossible to operate openly.
Belarusians get their news from state controlled television channels and the
traditional media. The position of independent newspapers is extremely fragile.
For this reason, even prior to the mass uptake of social media, international
experts promoted the Internet as the vehicle most likely to drive democratic
change in Belarus. Unfortunately, despite an old school Soviet reliance on rhetoric and military parades, Belarus leaders are well versed in the modern tools of
repression. In 2006, an attempted revolution failed when the authorities simply
cut off mobile communications and people who participated in the protest following the 2010 elections were tracked down and convicted, thanks to telecommunications data.
In a July 2011 speech, ironically celebrating Independence Day, Lukashenko
described information intervention as the main danger to Belarus. According to
him, external enemies deploy weapons of mass information to manipulate public opinion. But Lukashenko hasnt just woken up to the threat that the Internet
and social media play. He deploys web filters, similar to those used in China,
routinely blocks critical websites, and ensures opposition websites suffer under
crippling denial of service attacks.
In the lead up to last years election, with the traditional media under his control,
the regime pursued an offense against new media, or what the regime called:
Anarchy on the Internet. Comprehensive new laws and regulations guaranteed
the government extensive control over Internet access and online content, including the compulsory registration of all websites, requiring all legal sites using
a .by domain to move to Belarusian hosting; requiring Internet service providers to register and provide technical details about online information resources,
networks, and systems; forcing Internet providers to store data on individuals
49

using Internet for a full year, and hand that information over to law enforcement
agencies; establishing individual responsibility for any information posted on
the Belarusian Internet and forcing Internet cafe users to show a passport or
other identification; not to mention introducing bans on spreading illegal information.
Freedom House have documented the way Belarus blocked access to international SMTPs and HTTP ports, to prevent users from securely posting content
on social media sites such as Facebook, or sending secure messages through
Gmail. In addition to outsourcing intermediary censorship to corporations, the
Belarusian security state discovered a long time ago, and to its great delight,
that the customisation inherent to Web 2.0 offers a range of options for comprehensive online surveillance. One of the chapters in Morozovs books is titled
Why the KGB wants you to join Facebook, and in it he highlights the case of a
Belarusian activist, whose real life activities, including travel and organisational
connections, were easily gleamed by the KGB from his online presence.
One day in June 2011, a total of 450 protesters were arrested and brutally
shoved into trucks, which then became huge holding cells. Amateur activists,
as usual, are fairly easy prey. The KGB obtained information about those behind
the protests by forcing information out of contacts. They detained a websites
administrator and forced him to give up a list of passwords. One activist, who
was interviewed earlier this year, was detained and released only after disclosing his passwords to social media websites. The police removed his postings
that spoke out against Lukoshenkos policies.
[In early October 2011], a new law passed in the Belarusian house of representatives that specifically bans demonstrations organised through the Internet or
social networks. The law places flash mobs at the same legal status as pickets,
which are almost impossible to organise in Belarus.
(Butselaar, 2011).
The regime does not need to exert itself to unearth the dissident threat, since social
media are inherently designed for augmented visibility. All a state security service has to
do is to plug in and check the latest developments on Facebook. Even when opposition
members are smart enough to avoid these pitfalls, it is still difficult enough for them to
distinguish between genuine dissidents and the planted ones, putting them in constant
danger of being lured into the lions den.
Tunisia [before the 2010 revolution] was implementing a very sophisticated
censorship machine. The regime carried distributed server attacks, hacking
blogs and websites that were publishing political content. The State created an
50

atmosphere of fear, making Internet users refrain from publishing critical voices
and arresting digital activists. This started in 2001, with the arrest of Zouhair
Yahyaoui, followed by that of other activists and bloggers, which raised to 29 the
number of people in Tunisia arrested because of their online activity. And in the
middle, to control the flow of information between the Diaspora and the Tunisian
inhabitants, Tunisia also implemented what we call deep packet inspection
or deep packet intrusion. It also implemented email and Facebook phishing,
which is a technique allowing the government to crack into the accounts of activists using Facebook or Gmail and to follow their computer activity.
(Ben Gharbia , 2011).
While Tunisias approach was to heavily restrict Internet use, limiting the number of accessible sites, Egypt, prior to Mubaraks demise, preferred to leave the Internet relatively
open, opting for a crackdown not of the technology, but of its users, facilitated by the
technology. The arrest, imprisonment, torture, and sexual intimidation of the exposed
dissidents was common practice. In extreme cases, such as that of Khaled Said, the
harassment led to death.
Syria, ever the faithful adapter of repressive measures, has been blocking Facebook
and Twitter periodically since 2007, but when pressure rose in the country in the beginning of 2011, the regime allowed access to the media again, officially as a gesture of
good will. Most likely, the gesture camouflaged a will of security forces to use social
media to better monitor protester activity and plans. The State also set up a number of
honey-trap websites to attract opposition activists, monitor them and eventually strike
them (Filiu).
In the CIS countries (Commonwealth of Independent States, a regional organisation
formed by former Soviet republics), Russia is the leader and template-provider of opening the Internet to state surveillance and passing on personal content to FSB (Federal
Security Service, the KGBs successor) inspection. Its ultimate weapon is the Law on
System for Operational Investigation Activity devised for the Internet, or in short, SORM
II. The legal measure allows the FSB to monitor users Internet activity. Accordingly, ISPs
are required to submit all information pertaining to Internet traffic and to install software
that allows the Russian security service to follow in real-time all online activity of its users, including emails and browsing activity. Apart from the users general information,
such as name and address, the Internet providers are also obliged to give away their
email addresses, all passwords and user identifications. During his second mandate as
president, Putin extended the authority to monitor all Internet activity also to other security services, such as the Kremlins, the Border Guards, the Ministry of Internal Affairs,
and the Presidential Security ServiceXI.

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Azerbaijan tried to copy the Russian SORM II model, but its attempt failed and it has
to content itself with monitoring ISPs and Internet cafs. Belarus has had more success with the SORM II adaptation, and uses it widely in monitoring Internet activity in
the country. Considering that its Internet policy is even more restrictive than Russias,
it probably even made extensions to the Russian archetype. Moldova has also been
considering its own home-version of the system, which will allow it to go down the same
road of conducting tight surveillance of ICTsXII. The Ukrainian legislation also allows
for the surveillance and monitoring of Internet on a large scale, supposedly aimed to
unmask illegal transmission of state secrets, even though it is not exactly clear what
these secrets could entailXIII.
In addition to setting up specific surveillance measures, Russia, Belarus, Ukraine, and
Moldova have also created special security service units dedicated to curb cyber-criminality, a broad term that usefully covers all kinds of interests. Ultimately, although filtering
and surveillance is not as harsh as it is in the MENA region, the CIS states often resort to
surveillance of users and intimidation, leading to arrests and self-censorshipXIV.

Flying Under the Radar


In authoritarian states, where the stakes of political action can be extremely high, the
potential and pitfalls inherent to the use of social media in protest activity grow exponentially, compared to such activity in democracies.
Egyptian activists, students, and union members were highly aware of this, as they
were of the surveillance measures enforced by the security apparatus in their country,
making them wary of digital communication in general and social media in particular.
Interviewed by Brisson and Lee, some of them indicated their preference for the old
fashioned cell-based organisation, which included the distribution of a great amount of
printed and hand written material. This does not mean that online activity was irrelevant,
but simply that it was derived, to a large extent, from offline ground work:
... the amount of knowledge transfer that occurs in cafes, on street corners, and
from roadside newspaper vendors is immense. It is this primary layer of offline
interaction that provides much of the fodder for connections happening online.
(Brisson & Lee, n.d.)
Technology assisted by facilitating and accelerating events, but it was not indispensible
for the uprisings. The forces of change in the Egyptian society and in all other societies,
which chose the path of insurrection, were strong enough without social media, and are
likely to have erupted, regardless of the technology available.
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In the case of mobilisation, for instance, Levinson and Coker of the Wall Street Journal,
who recounted the planning of the protests on the 25th of January 2011, revealed that
while Facebook was widely used to set up most of the protests, the organisers also resorted to distributing flyers in the days preceding the protests in one of the poorer areas
of Cairo, where Internet penetration is low. According to them, it is this face-to-face distribution of information about the uprising that proved decisive. They carefully planned
this specific gathering, assuming police would be monitoring the preparations of all
other protester groups by following the exchange on social media and subsequently
intercepting them. Ultimately, they were proven right. Of all the groups of protesters organised before the 25th, it was this particular one, organised offline, that made it through
police forces and roadblocks all the way to Tahrir Square, which it occupied till the
wee hours of the night. All other demonstrators, mobilised through social media, were
stopped in their tracks, as predicted by the organisers.
A similar conclusion is made by Emad Mekay of Inter Press Service, who highlights the
primacy of the Friday noon prayers in coordinating mobilisation and collective action.
They played a central part not because they provided some spiritual awakening, but
merely because they were the most broad and readily available means to assemble
participants, without requiring additional investment of time or costs and with a reduced
risk of interception (Mekay, 2011). Similarly, in Syria, more than a year after the protests
first erupted, Friday continues to be a particularly explosive day in the country, with processions of dissidents forming up once the prayers are done.
The Tunisian blog Nawaat, which was an active opposition voice for many years, also
warns against making wide sweeping assumptions about the contribution of Facebook
and Twitter to the revolution. Quantifying the feeds and posts on both social media
and analysing their content, the blog states that nothing shows that their contribution
was greater than that of the Friday prayer gatherings, family reunions or mobile phone
chain-communications, all of which were more difficult to monitor than Facebook activity
(2011).

The Honourable Intention Paradigm


Aside from security forces and the intrepid freedom fighter, other political forces might
also wish to tap in to the social media potential, without this having a particularly democratic effect. Not all opposition to autocratic regime embodies aspirations for democracy.
For instance, some of the strongest opponents of Medvedev and Putin in Russia are
partisans of the extreme right, known for their xenophobic opinions and acts, including
assault and murder of homosexuals and ethnic minorities. A case in which a crowd53

sourcing map was used by a nationalistic Russian group to track ethnic minorities is
brought up by Machleder and Asmolov, who point out that the map in question was
used to encourage attacks against foreign communities (p. 18).
On an international scale, perhaps the most flagrant example is the use of Internet and
social media by Al Qaeda and other Islamist militants.
In the modern era, the truism that information is power is very clearly understood by the media and governments; it is also understood by terrorists, their
audiences, and their adversaries.
(Martin, 2003, p. 280).
Terrorists, like other minority groups, would normally find it difficult to get the media to
listen to their story. Social media afford them, like they do for other marginal ideologies,
the capacity to broadcast their message at minimal costs and with maximal effect. As
a matter of fact, media are an all-important ingredient in terrorism, which can only gain
power as it gains notoriety. A terrorist act with no media coverage is like a wink in the dark.
Al Qaeda understood this perfectly, often posting messages and videos on the Internet.
Some of them are merely typical propaganda messages, while others include filmed
executions of hostages. The emergence of al Qaeda in forums, websites, and blogs,
catering not only to its hard-boiled followers but functioning also as means of recruitment, makes it difficult to promote a moderate Islamic ideology and tends to radicalise
the debate in the Muslim world (Conway, 2007, p. 247).
If social media allow dissidents living under repressive regimes to bond with their supporters in the West and learn the secrets of the trade from supporters spread all over
the world, it can certainly serve terrorist groups in a similar way. Conway remarks that
websites of Islamist extremists are no longer only in Arabic, Urdu and Indonesian, but
increasingly also in English, French, German, and Dutch (p. 250).
There is another, slightly more optimistic interpretation of the Islamist incursion into social
media. Marc Lynch studied the activity of blogging members of the Muslim Brothers,
recognising in their posts an evolution towards a more open and moderate reading of
Islam (Lynch, 2009b). According to him, the blogs were supposed to be a proselytising
tool directed towards the Egyptian society, but lead instead to a certain liberalisation of
those online, or at least the formation of a growing intellectual and political force within
the movement that could, over time, help tip it in a reformist direction (ibid). But Lynch is
also forced to admit that for the time being, these developments have also led to a growing schism between the minority of young, urban, online community of members, and the
great majority of Muslim brothers, who, on the contrary, push for a more extreme agenda.

54

Chapter 3.
Mediating the Struggle
The less professional and efficient traditional or professional media is, the
more non professional media becomes active and aggressive, in a good way.
Its very simple. If theres demand for news, but we, as professional journalists,
are not providing it, then someone will appear on Facebook and other social
networks to give an account and post pictures of what he has seen.
(Strokan, 2011, ENJN Conference.)
In the age of the all-media, a struggle can only take place once it has entered the
media realm. But media are not neutral. They are brimming with interests and torn by
conflicting forces, such as the democratic ideal of the Fourth Estate, commercial claims
of corporate owners, and political tampering by opposing parties. In non-democratic
regimes, the strongest force manoeuvring the media are the communication needs of
the authorities, which view them mostly as their own, private PR agencies. The capacity,
then, for a pro-democratic movement to use media platforms to expose its demands
and motivations are practically nil.
Social media seem to be a blessing for pro-democratic movements, as they redefine
the rules of the game. The possibility to express and mass-communicate ideas ceases
to be the governments prerogative and is given to citizens of all political inclinations.
For the first time, they are capable of challenging the imposed narrative and proposing
their own framing.
Authoritarian rulers have grasped long ago the danger of abandoning social media in
the hands of their opponents and have adopted various means to tackle the problem,
means that can be separated into two groups censorship and propaganda. The first
response is meant to silence the opposition on the Net, as it does on other media, while
the second one uses the digital platform as a new branch of the regimes PR system.
And so, the Internet, and more specifically social media, become the new battle ground
of the political struggle, as a Netwar between the regime and its supporters on the one
hand, and the opposition groups on the other, rages in full. The cultural diversity and the
political specificities of each country define the contours of this Netwar. The more liberal
Lebanon provides greater opportunities for cyber-dissidents than Syria, intent on stifling
any sign of resistance at its very inception. The blogosphere of technologically savvy
Russia is more confrontational than the subdued Armenian Facebook citizenry, which
makes up less than 10% of its total population. A victory in the social media front will
undoubtedly signal its democratic potential, but when all vectors are taken together, it is
impossible, at least at this stage, to determine whom social media will favour.
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This chapter will address the aptitude of social media to democratise the media landscape in repressive regimes. It will start by discussing the handicaps of legacy media,
the so-called Fourth Estate, that hinder its democratic role in society, and the response
provided by the Internet and social media in the form of blogs and citizen journalism. It
will then put their contribution into perspective, by analysing their interaction with other
media forms and by exploring the inherent weaknesses that limit their ability to play a
strong, credible media part. Finally, it will examine regime response and how it counteracts both, on- and offline oppositional elements using social media platforms.

Ideals and Ideologies


Any talk about social media at the nexus between activism and reporting has
to begin with an assessment of whats wrong with the conventional, mainstream
media model, and what holes have been left gaping by traditional forms of journalism. (Shenker, 2011a)
The mnage--trois, made up by journalism, the ruling class, and the public was seldom
easy or straightforward. As a rule, throughout history, journalists were met with suspicion, both from their audience and from policy makers. The former regarded journalists
as dubious characters, engaging in a questionable trade, either busy with sensationalism or conniving with the State to keep the masses at bay. The latter had an inherent
dislike for the institutionalised whistle-blower and tried with all its might, from the onset,
to muzzle it.
Journalism, on the other hand, had a good number of noble aspirations, all of them
already formulated with the emergence of New Media in the late 19th century. It positioned itself as the Fourth Estate a (unofficial) national institution of a kind, independent
from government intervention and therefore credible and objective in its approach of the
political scene. The subsequent establishment of journalism as the states watchdog
and protector of the people was only a stones throw away (Conboy, 2004, pp. 109-127).
The growing journalistic independence and the widening readership led to the newspapers reaching real public influence, as can be seen already with the fall of the British
government during the Crimean War - a direct result of The Times treatment of the British
debacle, the shortcomings of the command, and the horrendous hardships suffered by
the injured soldiers (Gorman & McLean, 2003, p. 15).
Some editors and newspaper owners, such as W. T. Stead, the Pall Mall Gazette editor
in the 1880s, had social and political aspirations that continue to shape journalism to
this day. They saw the political education of the electorate as their mission and strove to
shape journalism as the guide of an educated and democratic society (Conboy, p. 168).
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And yet, these social and political pretences were continuously confronted with economic and political imperatives that, just like journalisms high ideals, cling tenaciously
to its practice. Conboy, quite accurately, describes the development of journalism up to
this day, not as a constant, coherent ethical, and professional progress, but rather as a
series of negotiations and compromises made in order to achieve its role in the public
sphere while at the same time ensuring its commercial viability (p. 199). Most people
and commentators would probably conclude that ultimately, it is the commercial viability
that came out with the upper hand. Some even say that both are long dead and buried.

Negotiating Compromise
The main handicap of journalism is intimately linked to its distribution through mass media. Mass production required great funds, which had to be got through advertisement,
an imperative that forced newspapers and then broadcast news programs to refrain from
printing or transmitting content deemed too controversial for the advertisers to endorse
(Gorman & McLean, p. 71). In parallel, the need to appeal to a large popular audience
continuously eroded newspapers, and later broadcast news programs role of hard
news delivery, and in exchange promoted the tabloidisation and entertainment mode,
considered easier for the readers to digest and therefore deemed more sellable (Conboy,
pp. 181-186; Gorman & McLean, p. 162). The constant consolidation of media in an everreduced number of hands exacerbated this trend and accelerated the transformation of
journalism into a mere commodity, following the laws of the economic market5.
In the sharp Flat Earth News, Nick Davies (2008) analyses in detail the havoc wreaked
in the newsroom by economic restrictions and downsizing imperatives. The image he
paints is a gloomy, hopeless one of a profession at the end of the line. The new financial organisation of news corporations, which imposes on journalists a factory-paced
production of articles, inhibits them from doing their jobs. Instead of unearthing news,
researching and analysing events of national importance or of human interest, they are
often forced into Churnalism, a sad rehashing of press releases and PR statements
taken at face value, and seldom checked or challenged. The result, again, is that of a
profession that is not only incapable of living up to its ideals, but one which is in danger
of betraying the very foundations of its existence.
5) Interestingly enough, media consumerism and commercialism is not always all that bad. Granted, the entertainment as news and the tabloidisation
of the media that go hand in hand with it have been detrimental to political discourse and democratic participation in the Western world (Sennett, 1992).
The abandonment of expensive investigative journalism in favour of cheap and profitable sensationalism hardly bodes well for civic engagement.
Still, this can also globalise pro-democratic ideals and values (Cottle, 2011a; Levitt & Dubner, 2009). Western mass media do not only recount Kim
Kardashians latest visit to Aspen and other adulating reports of extravagant consumerism, they also adhere to certain societal norms, which include
civil rights and liberties, broadcasted by cable television, increasingly pervasive throughout the world. Tools of new media, social media among them,
are strengthening this trend, by pluralising interaction and discourse (Cottle, 2011a, p. 651).

57

Journalisms limitations in delivering its ideological and ethical promises are also, in
part, a result of national interference. This is certainly clear in undemocratic regimes,
where the press can be fashioned as another propaganda institution or continuously
censored. As in the case of economic imperatives dictating content, the distortion of
news coverage can be either forced on the press by exterior elements, such as the
American Defense Department, influencing news coverage by embedding journalists
inside military units, thereby controlling their point of view, but also by the media adopting nationalistic postures and gratifying populist trends while disregarding their role in
providing in-depth coverage and analysis (Gorman & McLean, pp. 179-181).
Another critique of journalism is that while it claims to represent the population at large,
in fact it mirrors the reality and values of the ruling elites. Ethnic minorities, the working
poor and the underclass, and to some extent women and homosexuals, remain voiceless and therefore further excluded from the public debate. Thus, not only does the
press not carry out its function, it actually betrays it (Terry Flew, 2008, pp. 164-165).
Thus, the basis of the struggle opposing journalistic ideals and political and economical
imperatives have been laid in the early days of mass-media, more than a century ago,
and to this day remain unresolved. One might even say that the contradictory forces
have grown stronger over the past twenty years, strengthening and generalising the
publics discontent with the press. This in turn led to a shrinking readership, resulting in
staff reduction and budget cuts, which only further undermine the capacity of journalists
to truly fulfil their mission.

The Unholy Alliance


Media and authorities are uneasy bed fellows, particularly in transition societies.
(Strokan, 2011)
The problems plaguing journalism from infancy tend to undermine its capacity to play
a relevant role in the public sphere i.e. informing an inclusive, critical debate. And
although they are global in nature, affecting all countries in the world, they are compounded in non-democratic states by regime pressure and intimidations, which end up
transforming the media into one more state apparatus.
In the case of Europes ENP partners, the latest Press Freedom Index of Reporters Sans
Frontires for 2011-2012 reflects a situation that can be described as mediocre at best.
Most of them occupy the lower echelons of the listing and a handful is concentrated at
the very bottomXV. Moldova and Armenia are the exception to this, positioned at 53 and
77 respectively. They are followed by Israel (Israeli Territory) at 92 and Lebanon at 93.
Georgia is situated at 105 and Ukraine at 116. Algeria comes at 122, Jordan at 128,
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Tunisia at 134, and Morocco at 138. Russia is seated at the 142nd position, with Libya at
155. The last ones to appear on the list are Azerbaijan, ranked 162, Egypt, ranked 166,
Belarus, ranked 168 and at the very last Syria at 176 (the complete listing includes
179 countries). The Palestinian Authority appears as Israel Extra Territorial, at 133.
Russia is experiencing some problems, which are common for transition societies. While the number of media outlets in the world is growing dramatically and
media is becoming more and more diverse, and while social media emerge as
independent players, theres a continuing proliferation in the ways to control the
media. Theres a popular belief that the major threat to media freedom comes
from rigged government control, intimidation and harassment of journalists, and
even their murder. This is partly true, since authoritarian systems and other societies in transition have powerful apparatuses, which use these means to crack
down on media.
Still, there are also smarter techniques to control the media. They are the less
known, but we see them when we work in our newsrooms, when we talk to our
editors. And these techniques are becoming more and more prominent.
I started my career as a journalist nearly 30 years ago, in pre-perestroika times.
At that time, the government kept the media under strict control. Every day,
our editors-in-chief were summoned to the Kremlin, where they were instructed
what to write about, what news to transmit. [...] Nowadays, media control and
other threats to media freedom are self-censorship and corruption. Theres no
need for the Kremlin to make any calls, you simply impose the principle of selfcensorship.
A colleague once told me this joke: There are two types of journalists - those
who write and those who dictate. All you need to do is place the journalists who
dictate as chief editors. They know the rules of the game, the dos and the donts,
and they tell reporters, observers, and sub-editors where the red lines are.
The Russian medias self-censorship implies a certain interpretation of reality:
- Top leadership is divine. You may never touch it. You may criticise local
authorities, municipal authorities - we have plenty of that - but not Putin or
Medvedev, that is not allowed.
- Russias course of development is the best course and it has no alternative.
- The foreign plot narrative - if Russia has problems, these are not of domestic
but of foreign origin, mainly European or American.
The second challenge to media freedom in Russia is corruption, which has multiple
facets. Most cynically, it involves bribing journalists. Companies have big budgets
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for advertising. They employ PR agencies that contact journalists and say, listen,
we need a positive story about this company, and a negative story about its competitors. They offer the journalist an envelope of money and he writes the stories.
There are journalists in Russia who sit for weeks and weeks without writing anything. They only start writing when a PR agency passes an order. These practices
are not restricted to business reporting. They also concern political reporting and
news reporting. Let me give you an example. During the run-up to the Ukrainian
presidential elections in 2004, the Russian media engaged in a tremendous smear
campaign against the candidacy of Victor Yushchenko, labelling him a fascist. It
looked like news, appearing on major TV channels, but it was a prepaid campaign.
Anchormen and women were getting money for this. Another way to control the
media is to create alternative structures. For example, in the case of a journalists
union, critical of the government, an alternative confederation of journalists will be
created, loyal to the government and critical of the first union. From the outside, it
would look as if there is a struggle going on within the journalistic community, and
few people would know that spin-doctors stand behind this.
[...] It would not be fair to say that we dont have media freedom, or that we have
no critical coverage of the government. The print media provides a very critical,
in-depth analysis of the Russian managed democracy. But nobody cares about
it and the regime doesnt try to crack down on print media. They understood that
they need to control broadcast and digital media through the mechanisms Ive
mentioned before, making sure they obey an indirect code of conduct.
I will give you an example. Youve heard perhaps about the long controversy
concerning who would run for the [2012] Russian presidency - Prime Minister
Vladimir Putin or President Dmitry Medvedev. This question remained an enigma until Medvedev approached the United Russia ruling party a little while ago,
announcing he would not be running and proposing Vladimir Putin as candidate
for the party. As you can imagine, this was number one news. I switched on the
Russian television and tried to find at least one political talk show discussing
this development, but all I could see were culinary lessons and programmes
on health - nothing of relevance. The only political talk show that was really
hot, on the second channel of Russian television, was discussing the events
of 1993 - Yeltsin shelling the Russian parliament. That was really hot stuff, but
that was not related to todays news, but to news dating back 18 years ago.
Thus, the compounded effect of self-censorship and corruption in the media
leads to a distorted reality, which has a very remote relevance for the day to day
reality in Russia.
(Strokan, 2011).
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Regime takeover of media is not only a threat to national reporting. It can be equally
harmful and misleading when reporting international news. Examples of this are also rife
in Western democracies. Since 9/11, the West is increasingly wary of the Arab World
and the Muslim countries, and quick to endorse any government that appears friendly,
whatever its other faults may be. Mubaraks regime for instance, won the U.S. approval
not only by its repression of Islamic forces at home, but also by maintaining correct relations with Israel. His treatment of his own countrymen, however, was widely ignored.
Western media tended to reproduce this outlook of foreign relations, ultimately adopting
the narrative of the Egyptian government, largely ignoring the reality on the ground.
Prior to the Egyptian revolution, which began in January, I have been based
in Egypt for nearly three years. I saw with my own eyes just how skewed a lot
of the mainstream media narratives were when it came to covering the country,
and that was partly the result of Mubaraks strategic alliance with Western governments and partly because of inherent flaws in the corporate mechanics of
mainstream international media.
The result was that international consumers of news, be they newspaper readers or television viewers, were left with a distinctly inaccurate picture of what
was happening in the country, and that, in turn, helped promulgate the endlessly repeated mantra that the political upheaval came out of nowhere and
was completely unexpected, which always run hollow for those on the ground.
Im talking about these tales of Egypt being an economic success story under
Mubarak, 7% GDP growth rates, and this wonderful liberalising government. All
the while, 9 out of 10 people in the country got poorer in real terms, the number of people living in absolute poverty doubled, the number of children who
were malnourished rose. And yet, these kinds of figures were never discussed
in the media. Nor were some of the key drivers of political change, like the
trade unions movement or working class activism in factories, in textile miles, in
work places around the country. Rather than seeing a division between a social
movement on the ground and the regime, the international media was keener to
concentrate on sectarian tensions or on the division between religious thought
and secular elite. So, subtly Mubaraks prism was being repackaged and reinforced through the international media, which had fairly toxic consequences.
(Shenker, 2011a).
The authors of the Arab Human Development Report (2004) warn against the tendency
of Arab rulers to take institutions, which appear pro-democratic at first glance, and transform them into instruments of their own regime. This tendency includes national media:

61

There are some media outlets that are little more than mouthpieces for government propaganda, promoting freedom of speech only if it does not turn into
political activity. Such captive outlets fail to stimulate intelligent and objective
debate, enhance knowledge acquisition, and advance human development
among the public at large.
(Arab Human Development Report, 2004).
The Middle East is hardly the sole area on the globe to suffer from restrictive and repressive media policies. Still, their scope and prevalence make it the region with the least
media freedom, a reality that is strongly felt by its inhabitants (ibid).

Blogs of Dissent and Hope


[In Russia] Over 12 million bloggers maintain their own blogs. About a million of
them are quite active. They provide a good public service, by whistle blowing at
dubious practices, such as traffic priorities taken by numerous politicians, who
basically drive in whatever way they want. [They report on] excesses of power
made by the authorities and on over-spending by state finance corporations.
Bloggers simply wont leave these issues alone, and as a result, news media
respond, obliging politicians to respond too.
(Levchenko, 2011, ENJN Conference).
Nawaat blog published the Tunileaks cables on the 28th of November 2010,
only two weeks before the Tunisian revolution started. Those cables were addressing the corruption and the nepotism of the political establishment in Tunisia. I think that had a very important psychological effect, at least inside the
political establishment in Tunisia. It also played a role in convincing the bourgeoisie, those living in the cities, in Tunis, to join the protest, [which is exactly
what they did] on the 14th of January.
(Ben Gharbia, 2011).
Blogs, born a decade before Facebook and Twitter, raised expectations similar to those
associated with social media. Considered, for better or for worse, as the closest digital
relative of journalists, bloggers democratic aspirations were not less pronounced. But
while bloggers and journalists were not quite different, they were also not quite the
same. As Rosenberg (2002) pointed out,

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If the pros are criticized as being cautious, impersonal, corporate and herdlike,
the bloggers are the opposite in, well, almost every respect: Theyre reckless,
confessional, funky -- and herdlike.
Jesse James Garrett, content editor and weblog editor for jig.net, is quoted by Allan as
comparing blogs to the pirate radio stations of lore,
[...] personal platforms through which individuals broadcast their perspectives on current events, the media, our culture, and basically anything else that
strikes their fancy.
(Allan, 2006, p. 46).
The blogs big defining moment was 9/11, as both Allan (pp. 53-71) and Gillmor (pp.
ix-x, pp. 18-22) explain. While the big networks were broadcasting loops of the horrendous footage, many readers, both in the U.S. and abroad, turned to the Web in search
of personal accounts that might help them make sense of the colossal events. And with
Internet access to the websites of networks such as CNN or MSNBC shut down due to
the sudden surge in traffic, readers reached for blogs as if they were precious lifelines.
As it appeared, when the macro narrative became incomprehensible, people sought
meaning and solace in the multitude of micro stories that filled the Net. This was, in all
probability, the first boom of amateur journalism, supplementing personal accounts with
links to official reports and footage of the event posted by the public. But perhaps what
made blogs such an important part of mediated exchange that day is precisely their
capacity to provide true exchange, allocating an important space to comments from
readers, thus enabling the public to weigh in on the debate (Allan, p. 68).
In the years that followed, bloggers continued to build their existence as a counterpoint
to traditional journalism, plagued by what they saw as corruption and obsessed with a
misplaced sense of objectivity and aloofness that no longer served a professional ethic
but merely reflected its detachment from society. The bloggers felt a certain shared
ethos of their role in democracy supplementing, correcting and commenting on the
media (Hall, 2001, p. 135; Gillmor, p. 111).
Indeed, blogs were perceived by their writers as a means to set the old, big media
straight. There was a certain messianic undertone to it the lone, idealistic blogger,
behind his computer screen, taking on the monopoly of media conglomerates (Allan,
p. 74). To a certain degree, there was some logic to this view, as Rosenberg reflects:

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Photographs by Lucas Danils

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Pros get pay checks, and that gives them the chance to devote themselves
full time to writing and editing -- but it also means that they have to write about
things that can attract a big enough crowd to fund those checks. Amateur status
can free a blogger to focus on material that fascinates the blogger and a few
others, material that no media with any mass is going to touch.
(Rosenberg, 2002).
Another aspect of the ethos uniting most bloggers is the strict adherence to the subjective tone. Originally, the subjective narrative was simply a result of the blog being a
personal account of individuals interests. But nowadays, this is nurtured by political
bloggers as a clear response to journalisms objective tone, which they often criticise,
considering the medias claim to objectivity a mark of hypocrisy. Interestingly, notwithstanding the personal touch, or perhaps due to it, blogs tend to be perceived as more
credible, compared to other media (Carlson, 2007).
This rivalry with bloggers is seen by many journalists as a threat (Farmer, 2006), while
others, such as Rosenberg and Jarvis (2008) see blogs as a tool that could contribute
to journalism, expanding the media landscape and forcing mainstream media to reform,
or else risk its very existence.
The rise of blogs does not equal the death of professional journalism. The media world is not a zero-sum game. Increasingly, in fact, the Internet is turning it
into a symbiotic ecosystem in which the different parts feed off one another
and the whole thing grows.
(Rosenberg, 2002).
In non-democratic countries, where medias capacity to fulfil its role is even more limited,
the first impulse of citizens with a political awareness is to step in and take up that role.
But more than that, the blogger in this case does not only challenge the media, she also
pokes at the regimes hold on the country.
Bloggers understand their role as that of providing a direct link to what they
call the street, conceived primarily as a space of state repression and political
violence, but also as one of political action and popular resistance. They render
visible and publicly speakable a political practice the violent subjugation of
the Egyptian people by its authoritarian regime that other media outlets cannot
easily disclose, due to censorship, practices of harassment, and arrest.
(Hirschkind, 2011).

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As Levchenkos quote above indicates, this is precisely what is happening in Russia,


where blogs are taken up massively by a population that sees them as a new entry
point into the political debate. But this phenomenon is not equally reproduced in all
countries. Like social media, the use of blogs is determined by factors such as societal
differences, gaps in literacy levels, and Internet penetration. Thus, the use of blogs as
a tool of dissent is not generalised. Egypt, for instance, counted only 160,000 blogs in
2008XVI, a blogosphere of minuscule proportions when compared to its Russian counterpart, which has as many as 12 million bloggers (Levchenko, 2011). This discrepancy
remains big, even when the difference in population size is taken into account (82 million
in Egypt, compared to 138 million in Russia).
Lynch divides the involvement of political bloggers into three categories, mainly activism, bridge-blogging, and public sphere engagement (Lynch, 2007a). (Howard and
Hussains categorisation of social-media enabled action, into preparation phase; mobilisation etc. not dissimilar). His analysis refers to Arab bloggers, but it can easily be
applied worldwide.
The first category of bloggers concerns those who not only discuss politics, but who are
also engaged in dissident mobilisation. Their blogs are used to publicise their activity
and provide leverage for their political messages. Lynch claims this is typical of Egyptian bloggers, who often stand at the forefront of the protest, unlike Jordanian bloggers,
who have a tendency to remain at the sidelines.
Egyptian bloggers, husband and wife Alaa Abd El Fattah and Manal Hussein, exemplify
this perfectly. The couple originally dedicated their blog manalaa.net to social issues,
but the April 6 movement, discussed earlier, pushed them towards a more political orientation. Abd El Fattah participated in the landmark demonstrations of 2005, and again
in a protest that took place in 2006, the latter earning him 45 days of imprisonment. The
couples political activity has always remained tightly linked to their blogging, which
allowed them to win, already in 2005, the Special Reporter Without Borders Award in
Deutsche Welles Best Blogs competition (Gundy, 2011).
The couple left Egypt for South Africa, but when the anti-Mubarak demonstrations began in January 2011 they quickly returned to the country, taking a prominent part in
the movement to overthrow the Egyptian ruler. Abd El Fattah remained mobilised after
the military leadership took over and maintained his pro-democratic activity. This culminated with his participation at the Maspero protests, which were violently crushed by
the army, leaving 27 of the demonstrators dead. Having pinned the responsibility of the
massacre on the Egyptian military, he was arrested again on October 30, 2011, charged
with inciting violence against the army (Shenker, 2011b). Abd El Fattah was finally released on December 25. Throughout this period, including his time in prison, the couple
continued to publish information and personal impressions on their blog.
Marina Litvinovich is another blogger to fit this profile. The Russian opposition militant
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and civic rights activist uses her blog, abstract2001.livejournal.com, as an extension of


her political struggle, which is Internet-based to a large extent. Through her blog, she
raises controversial issues, discusses them and turns them into matters of public interest, both by massively publicising them and by pushing the media to step in, thereby
creating blog waves, in effect massive networked campaigns. Her ultimate goal is
to influence the governments agenda, by creating a chain reaction of pressure, running from citizen to mainstream media to the regime. She often uses pictures, videos,
or other official documents that confirm her story, giving her blog an added credibility
(Machleder & Asmolov, p. 9). In this way, Litvinovich managed to expose several cases
of police and state corruption, such as the case of Anna Shavenkova, the daughter of a
high-ranking regional official who was responsible for a fatal car accident but managed
initially to escape any judicial pursuits. Only following networked campaigns, such as
those generated by Litvinovich, was she brought to trial (ibid, p. 7).
The second category of bloggers that Lynch refers to is Zuckermans famous bridgebloggers6. These local bloggers, writing mostly in English, use their blogs to translate
to the rest of the world the local social and political context and provide the necessary
background to understand a situation that can be too complex for foreign readers. In the
words of Zuckerman, a bridgeblogger is:
[...] someone who acts as an interpreter between cultures, introducing people
who look at the world in one way to another way of looking at the world.
(Zuckerman, 2008).
The Iraqi blogger, Salam Pax, is one of the first, and perhaps most famous bridgebloggers, providing firsthand accounts of the American invasion of Iraq in 2002. The Global
Voices project (glovalvoicesonline.org) is also a bridgeblogger of a kind, a community
of bloggers, translators and editors, who curate, translate and provide perspectives to
blogs from the entire globe. Rebecca MacKinnon and Ethan Zuckerman created global
Voices in 2004 specifically to bring to the English-speaking world voices it would otherwise not be open to.
The goal of Global Voices is to take a look at bloggers from all around the world,
see what they were saying and present it back out to the world. Part of it is a sort
of translation of ideas, curating and explaining them in a cultural context. And
so, typically, Global Voices authors either come from or live in the country they
are covering. Originally, we focused on blogs, but since social media cropped
up in the past few years, Global Voices also covers content from Twitter, Face6) As a matter of fact, Chinese blogger Xiao Qiang was the one to coin the term in 2004 (Zuckerman, 2008c).

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book, and YouTube. And so we are just looking at citizen generated content and
trying to bring that back out into the world, to offer a complementary narrative
to mainstream media.
(York, 2011).
The third category of blogs concerns those that constitute an alternative public sphere
and facilitate an informative discussion, mostly on domestic policy. Although they are
oriented mainly towards a local audience, they are nonetheless often written in English,
as is Baheyya - a political blog, written under a pseudonym, that provides sharp and
knowledgeable commentary on Egyptian politics (baheyya.blogspot.com/) and which
has been dubbed the best source of political analysis on Egypt (Lynch, ibid). But
Baheyya not only provides valuable insight and interpretation of events in the country, it
was also highly critical of Mubaraks regime, prompting discussion on matters such as
the rule of law, civil rights, and corruption, matters that the countrys legacy media preferred to sweep under the carpet. Like in the case of Litvinovichs writings, it is a prominent and popular blog, oriented towards broadening the public sphere and capable
of introducing to the national debate questions hitherto ignored. Forcing, in a way, the
medias hand to address topics they prefer to bury, can have powerful consequences.
There are also blogs, which cannot be exclusively limited to one category or another.
Nawaat, for instance, discussed above, probably belongs to all three categories at
once. The blog was meant to provide a space for an engaging debate for the opposition
forces in Tunisia, but it also served as an activism platform during the Tunisian uprising,
and to a certain extent - to this day. In addition, the blog, written in French, also works
in the capacity of a bridgeblog, providing broad insight to the events that are shaping
the country.
But then again, Sreberny and Khiabany also see a political role for blogs which might
not be political to begin with, and which do not provide direct political insight. This is
particularly true under repressive regimes, where any partisan message can be violently
reprimanded. In this way, poetry blogs can contain, between the lines, political messages and exhortations that go well beyond the literary. A female blogger in a Muslim
country, discussing questions of fashion, may also be questioning patriarchal values
and the incursion of the public into the private domain (p. 59). In this way, even a blog
dealing with miscellanea can, in effect, push the limits of public discourse.
An additional blog category concerns those written by journalists, which usually enjoy
the greatest visibility7. Journalists turn to this means of self-publication either to increase
their notoriety or to address concerns that their editorial board prefers to leave aside,
7) These blogs are also often perceived as very credible a paradox, since the reputation of journalists, which was already disputable to begin with,
is increasingly eroded.

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either for lack of interest for political, financial, or ideological motivations. The subjective
tone of the blog is another advantage, allowing the writer to engage with the reader in a
direct, passionate tone, conveying a clearer message.
Israeli +972 (972mag.com) is such a blog, managed, edited, and written by its bloggers, who, for the most part, are also affiliated with other mainstream media outlets, or
have been so in the past. The outstanding feature of the blog is its militant, critical tone,
leaning very much to the left, and its handling of topics which are often ignored by Israeli
legacy media, such as corruption, or institutionalised human rights abuse. Through this,
the blog acts as a corrector to the countrys news outlets that tend to overlook these
issues, presenting society with a very skewed image of the local reality.
Another interesting feature of +972 is the fact that its harsh critique of Israeli policy is
written in English, making it a bridgeblog of sorts, albeit an internally censorious one.
This is an outstanding feature, considering that Israelis of all political inclinations are
generally highly averse to having their political dirty laundry washed in public.

Citizen journalists
Certainly, when we look at the practice of journalism, we see that it was constructed in a time when its relationship with the authorities was absolutely necessary because the means of communication were controlled by them. Today,
there are so many ways to communicate in society, without broadcasting, without traditional print, but simply with social media. What we have is a means
through which power can be held accountable, through which corruption and
bad behaviour can be revealed. Thats not to say that the large methods of communication and the large media organisations arent useful, merely that they are
not the only way. And that of course complicates the discussion about whos a
journalist and whos not, because some of the functions of journalism can be
performed by those who are not journalists.
[...]
People have always been a source of information in society. They would go
to cafes and tell people what they saw. They would tell their friends and relatives what they saw. And when media would come to them, they would tell the
media what they saw. And so, theyve always been sources. But they become
particularly powerful when the media themselves are constrained from telling
their stories, while people are able to mass communicate through social media,
the Internet, or text messaging and mobile phones. Then, they become very
important.
(Picard, 2011).
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The means of self-publication are not the bloggers prerogative and the wish to correct,
enhance or provide an alternative to mainstream media is widespread, coming in all
shapes and sizes. One of those is citizen journalism, also known as participatory journalism or amateur reporting.
Citizen journalists are individuals with no journalistic background who cover events and
provide reports either for mass media news outlets (such as CNN iReport) or to alternative platforms such as Wikinews or Indymedia. In the first instance, the objective is to
supplement legacy media with witness accounts and personal perspectives, while the
latter is a more politically engaged act, aiming to challenge the dominating mainstream
account of reality, promoted by mass media and state administrations. The past few
years saw the rise of a new type of citizen journalism the posting of instantaneous
reports and comments on social media, a development that made the participatory
coverage even more individualised.
As in the case of blogs, many commentators on the subject see 9/11 as the turning
point, when citizen journalism ceased to be a niche activity, known only to a very restricted audience. Somehow, that day in the U.S. crystallised the need of an entire nation to take part in a communal contact, to convey ones emotions and to collect as
much information as possible, in order to even begin to grasp the magnitude and the
significance of the occurring events.
Since then, citizen journalism has become a booming business, attracting an evergrowing readership. But like blogs, the opinions regarding this trend vary widely. Can we
really consider it a worthy and valuable contribution to the public debate? Dan Gillmor
is perhaps one of the biggest proponents of citizen journalism, emphasizing the importance of citizen journalism in all its aspects: a source collaborating with the journalist, a
media watchdog, or an amateur reporter (2004). The new power, accumulating in the
hands of those who once constituted hitherto the passive audience, will enable communities and even nations to hold an improved discourse, and will allow individuals to
become more fully engaged as customers, families, neighbours, and citizens (Gillmor,
2003).
Furthermore, most medias ownership structures and the socio-economic background
of those working in medias mass-distribution complexes often mean that voices outside
the mainstream, expressing fringe ideas and representing invisible minorities, are often
inaudible. Yet new journalism enables those who have been hitherto quiet to share their
story and provide a fuller and therefore more accurate image of reality.
In non-democratic regimes, where it is even harder for citizens to get media and media
coverage to represent a more diverse image of reality and of their grievances, aspirations, and demands, citizen journalism is all the more important. If mainstream media do
not try to redress wrongs, hold the government accountable, and appropriately inform
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the public, a gap is formed, which the citizen might attempt to fill. Blogs are one way
and citizen journalism is another.
The rise of social media allowed citizen journalists to take advantage of the new digital
broadcasting methods in their reporting endeavours. It also gave them the opportunity
to exchange information in a more direct, immediate, and informal fashion, bypassing more established platforms of alternative journalism such as Indymedia. In a way,
although citizen journalism on social media is still reliant on corporate outlets, such as
Twitter or YouTube, it becomes a more individual, nuclear act, beyond the constraints of
an organised movement.
There was a blast in the Moscow metro in the spring [of 2010]. My daughter was
close to this place, so I was half mad. I switched on the TV and all I see is the
same bullshit, culinary lessons and the like. Journalists were scared and editors
were scared to report for five hours, and we, as an audience, we were deprived
of the right to see what the hell was going on there. That was the problem. But
on Facebook, there was some news. People were posting pictures there, and I,
a media professional, I was taking news from non-professionals for half a day. Of
course, the news was not filtered, but somebody had to fill this niche.
(Strokan, 2011).
The terrorist attack on the Moscow subway, which took place in March 2010, was a case
of emergency, in which citizens spontaneously took upon themselves the journalistic
mission of keeping others informed. It was an ad-hoc response to a crisis situation. But
some citizen journalists take this task as an ongoing mission to which they dedicate
time, money, and energy. Ukrainian Serge Dibrov has a degree in plumbing, a company
for pest management, and a risky night-time hobby tracking, investigating, and reporting on the failures and misdeeds the countrys establishment is trying to cover up. In
other words, hes a typical amateur reporter, doing what Ukrainian media is incapable
of doing. Dibrov specialises mainly in uncovering medical corruption and criminality
cases, which he subsequently publishes on his website (dibrov-s.livejournal.com). His
experience and perseverance enabled him to gain prominence, credibility and trust
over time. This meant that he was able to diversify his sources and gain access to information others tried hard to cover. Basically, amateur or not, Dibrov was acting as a
journalist, a position that made it possible for him to play an essential part in cases such
as the pneumonia vaccine that was pulled off the market after he demonstrated that it
had not been properly tested in the Ukraine, leading to complications among young
patients (van der Kamp, 2011).

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Relying on citizens engagement and appealing to their civic duty, citizen journalism is
not merely an exercise in media literacy and analytical thinking. It is, in and of itself, an
act of resistance, a political gesture and a personal stance in contentious politics. It is
therefore not only an attempt to reach other citizens and encourage them to take action,
but also a deed of resistance. Hence resides its power, and this is what makes it even
more compelling than an article in a journal.
It is the personal testimony provided by user-generated content that gives the
emotional power to the storytelling unlike much of the professionally shot material, which is one step removed from the events portrayed. It is an emotional
power that has an impact on our audience and newsroom journalists alike.
(Eltringham, 2011).
The more journalism is controlled by the State, the bigger the incentive of news consumers to rely on citizen journalists:
The example of Syria is a flagrant one, where journalists are not allowed to
operate, unless they are government controlled journalists, and where foreign journalists are not allowed to go freely. They have to be accompanied by government journalists at all times, ultimately producing controlled
journalism. Now, with Syria, citizens are playing an important role in filling
the gaps, posting online news and YouTube videos. For us, as journalists, it
is sometimes difficult to tell which is genuine and which is not. But still, that
is essential, enabling us to try to understand whats happening in Syria.
Now, it is happening elsewhere in the Arab world, not only in Syria, where people see what mainstream media is missing and try to correct it.
[...]
We can consider Facebook users as competitors, but we can also view them
as sources of information, providing us with tips that we can follow up on for our
own stories. They also express opinions, which we might have ignored in the
past. They were voiceless before and now they are expressing their opinion.
Ultimately, they have the right to influence public opinion, and finally they have
the chance to do so.
(Barhoum, 2011, ENJN Conference).
Citizen journalism through social media, correcting mainstream media and providing
alternative points of view in the national coverage, begs the question of social medias
position in the general mediascape. How does it interact with other media forms and
what does this interaction mean for journalism in the context of democratic processes?
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Remediation and Media Synergy


The participatory culture, brought about by Web 2.0 technologies that allow individuals
to contribute their bit to the media culture, is taken as a break with the past. No longer is
each medium photography, radio, television, and cinema a closed, independent entity.
New media opened the door to an open, constant flow to and fro between diverse media
that feed and alter one another. Or at least this was the assumption, which Bolter and
Grusin challenged. In Remediation, (2000), the two academics demonstrate that new media, to which Internet is central, is following a media-old habit of borrowing, repackaging,
enhancing, and adapting content from one medium to another. This remediation, literally
the representation of one medium in another was already largely in practice well before
the inception of the Internet. The cinema always borrowed from photography, inspiring
and refashioning television, which ended up influencing the radio.
Thus, Internet is joining an old media custom, and it does so to its own advantage.
Social media do not replace journalism in the traditional way, nor do they pull the plug
out on cinema and television. They merely joined the conversation. And this actually
makes them stronger. Posts, viral videos, and other online media campaigns become
truly ubiquitous and generally acknowledged once they have been picked up by other
media, especially television. This is particularly relevant in societies in which Internet
penetration is relatively low and which still rely heavily on radio and television as their
main source of information. This means that the population of these societies can be
divided between a minority that gets its information through the Web, and a majority that
is dependent on television. This was true in Tunisia and Egypt before the uprisings, and
it is also definitely true in Georgia, which has an Internet penetration rate of 28.3%XVII.
Subsequently, the Internet alone cannot have a nation-wide reach. For that, it remains
reliant on other media forms, primarily television. The same holds true for social media
and its use in contention politics:
The Tunisian revolution created a new media ecosystem, in which, for the first
time in history, user-generated content became so central and important. This
media ecosystem was formed by three hubs: social media; online platforms,
such as Global Voices, curating the user generated content; and Al Jazeera.
Those three hubs acted in synergy, informing and educating Tunisians about
the revolt, and ultimately, influencing also Egyptians, Yemenis, Libyans, Syrians,
and so forth.
Facebook was the first media hub during the protests, used to inform Tunisians,
mobilise activists, and notify them about the coming protests, gatherings, and
sit-ins. Facebook also centralised the support from international grassroots
movements, mainly from Egypt and the Arab world.
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Nonetheless, for international journalists, who dont speak Arabic or French,


Facebook is a hard platform to navigate, and a hard platform in which to identify
the good and the right content. They would require the assistance of Tunisians,
who understand the context and the Tunisian dialect, who can translate the
video footage posted on Facebook, and then pass it on to mainstream media
and human right advocates in the West.
That, in essence, was the second hub - the curators who understood the context, translated the materiel and prepared it for the use of international journalists, mainly from Al Jazeera and France 24, who were following day by day
the events in Tunisia (the rest of Western media began to cover the Tunisian
revolution only two weeks after it began, following an attack on the Tunisian
infrastructure). Facing a very sophisticated censorship machine, Tunisian activists were also keen to work with online curators. For them, it meant that by just
sending an email [to the curators], they could get their content published across
the Web. So people sent us the information they gathered by email. Sometimes
we got the information out of Facebook and sent an email to posterous.com, for
example. Posterous would then broadcast and cross-post the information on 20
different platforms. This helped, in a way, to circumvent the Internet censorship
in Tunisia and reach a broader audience.
The third hub of the new media ecosystem was Al Jazeera, putting the focus on
the revolution in Tunisia. At the time, Al Jazeera didnt have a correspondent in
Tunisia. It didnt have the kind of crew they sent to Egypt or Libya. That made the
network completely reliant on user generated content. [And this is where we, in
Global Voices, came in,] translating the information and passing it on to Al Jazeera, which then fact-checked the information provided by users on Facebook
or through online curators, and rebroadcast it in Tunisia.
In this way, we had what we call an information cascade, which had political
implications, encouraging Tunisians to join the protest movement. Without the
information cascade, we couldnt have toppled the regime.
(Ben Gharbia, 2011).
The remediation of personal accounts from the street to Al Jazeera did not always follow this scheme, though. It was at times more direct, a result of the networks policy to
foster links with bloggers and protesters even prior to the uprising. The ties enabled Al
Jazeera to establish them as reliable sources and to use their content in its broadcasts.
This entailed the meticulous, and at times tedious, task of verifying the veracity of these
accounts, by analysing locations, slogans heard, and so forth. This work allowed the
network to identify falsifications and errors when they occurred.

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This collaboration was particularly important in Egypt or Syria, where either Al Jazeera
itself was targeted, or where no foreign journalists were allowed to work. In this way,
having already established valuable contacts, the network had an edge over its competitors when reporting on the events. While Al Jazeera could access original video
footage, pictures, and audio recording, other channels often had to choose between
keeping their viewers in the dark, or rebroadcasting Al Jazeeras material (Fisher, 2011).
Hence, Al Jazeeras rapidity in recognising citizen reports as a worthy contribution, to be
encouraged and cultivated over time, set it apart from other media corporations, which
find it difficult to come to terms with citizen journalists.
This relationship, between Al Jazeera and the cyber-activists, was not only profitable for
the network. It also proved invaluable for the Tunisian and Egyptian opposition forces,
which were conferred through Al Jazeeras treatment a legitimacy that no other national
medium would accord them, at least not in the early days of the revolution8.
Lynch is also convinced that the story of social media and television is not a story of a
competition or of a rivalry, but rather one of synergy. This was the media reality in the
Arab world for the past ten years, YouTube, Facebook, forums, and blogs working with
Al Jazeera to transform the face of the local media environment and counter the dictators capacity to manipulate it according to their own personal needs and interests. This
was first and foremost a layered, collective effort, which enabled the creation of a new
framing narrative and its widespread distribution (Lynch, 2011). In the case of the Arab
uprisings, this widespread distribution of the framing narrative was stronger than anything that could have been previously anticipated, transmitting the revolutionary ideas
and values to societies throughout the world.
The role played by Al Jazeera in Tunisia, and later in Egypt, made it all the more suspect
in the eyes of Mubarak and his administration, which shut down its offices and targeted
its journalists (or any journalist it suspected of working for the Qatari network). Egyptian
security forces were going from one caf to the other, asking the owners to shut down
the transmission of the networks broadcasts (Filiu). But either Al Jazeera, its employees,
and the dissidents on the ground were not as susceptible to state intimidation as they
used to be, or the repression was not harsh enough, because in Tunisia and Egypt,
unlike Syria, the media synergy was not broken. Together, the pan-Arabic network and
social media proved that the regimes and their repressive apparatus were, in fact, vulnerable and fallible, and all the rest was state propaganda. And so, they broke the spell
that had stopped millions of ordinary people from rising up and claiming their
legitimate rights
(Miles, 2011).
8) Sadly, Al Jazeera, for internal political reasons, chose not to extend the same courtesy to the opposition movements in Bahrain and Saudi Arabia.

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But this cascade effect, as Ben Gharbia calls it, can only exist where there is at least
a shard of media freedom, or a foreign media outlet immune to local political pressures. In Russia, corporate media started to cover the anti-governmental protests of
December 2011 weeks after they started, and it did so reluctantly. Subsequently, the
protesters were, for the most part, mobilised through the Internet and social media, or
through word of mouth. As a result, the volume of the demonstrations never reached the
impressive dimensions of the protests in Egypt, for instance, even if they remain unprecedented in contemporary Russian history.

The Revolutionary Cathode


The information cascade, or the triangular media synergy created by social media;
Global Voices and other bridgeblogs; and by cable networks such as Al Jazeera and
Al Arabiya, was therefore important to the political upheaval in the MENA region. And
yet, most discussions about the Arab uprisings give primacy to social media over television, or any other media for that matter. But is this interpretation justified? The case of Al
Jazeera might contradict it.
The Qatari network appeared in the Arab airwaves fifteen years ago. Emir Sheikh Hamad bin Khalifa Al Thani, the man behind its creation, had the intention of creating a regional equivalent to CNN that will address matters that concern the Arab world through
an Arab perspective. More specifically, in the internal MENA front, Al Jazeera aimed to
become a powerful leader in politics and mores, whereas in the external front, it viewed
itself as a diplomat of sorts, representing the Arab Nation and Muslim world. Qatar was
the right launching pad for such an endeavour, since it had already one of the most liberal media policies in the area (Powers & Gilboa, 2007). Through this, the small country
hoped to increase its political influence on the region, and perhaps even grow to become one of its leaders.
By no means was the network shy in pursuing its goals. With ambition and daring hitherto unseen in the Arab world, the TV channel tackled subjects perceived as taboo
both in the MENA region and the Western countries. It addressed topics such as sex,
governmental corruption, and womens rights. It enraged Arabs by interviewing Israeli
officials, and infuriated the U.S. by giving airtime to Iraqi officials and Al Qaeda leaders.
Unlike other Arab media that maintain intimate relationships with the powers that be,
so close as to appear like an unofficial information ministry, Al Jazeera managed to
unearth the sins of (almost) every Arab government, attracting the wrath of states such
as Algeria, Egypt, or Jordan. Its talk shows, chief among them The Opposite Direction,
notorious for the levels of vehemence and brutality of dispute between the opposite
parties interviewed, brought to the region a new, almost revolutionary culture of political
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discussion and debate. Not only did it put an end to Arab state control of media narrative, it also undermined the dominating unitary Arab nationalist discourse. It gave
citizens the opportunity to call-in, raise concerns and voice opposition publicly, on air,
in front of millions of other viewers. This was a coming-out moment for internal conflicts within the shared Arab identity - in total contradiction to the ideals of Pan-Arabism
(Lynch, 2007b). This nationalist concept of consensus within the Arab nation hinted at
the importance of fealty to the ruler, as long as this served to preserve the Ummah. Al
Jazeera, discussing birth control methods and criticising state endorsement of police
violence, weakened the official consensus favouring the Arab rulers and gave rise to a
new, alternative shared Arab experience, made of grievances and aspirations that were
kept hidden up to that moment.
This is not to say that the networks journalistic practices are always without blemish, or that its motives are always pure. Some of the criticism directed towards it is not
without foundation, such as its tendency to highlight one kind of violence (for instance
Mubaraks crack down on protesters), while completely ignoring another (the torture and
mass killings of civilians by the Taliban regime in Afghanistan or by Saddam Hussein
in Iraq)(Powers & Gilboa, p. 66). Still, Al Jazeera enjoys tremendous popularity in the
MENA region, its credibility soaring in Middle-Eastern terms, ranking between 89 and 96
percent in the eyes of its viewers (ibid, p. 56). Another study, quoted by Saleh, confirms
this trend (2007). While 100% of people surveyed in the study confessed to watching
television, 62% of them named Al Jazeera as their leading source. Al Jazeeras closest
competitors, MBC2 and Al Arabiya, trailed behind with 44% of the respondents watching their broadcasts.
In a region suffering of relatively high rates of illiteracy and extreme poverty, these figures hint at a greater political influence by Al Jazeera than by Facebook and Twitter
combined. Even if not all households are wealthy enough to own a television set, they
are ubiquitous enough in cafs, restaurants and other public places, transforming public debate and political dispute into an intrinsic of street life.
Al Jazeeras edge over social media with regards to the influence it has exercised over
the Arab society is not only due to its popularity. It is also a consequence of its enduring
presence in the regional media landscape. The network recently celebrated 15 years of
devoted service, while Facebook opened up for mass registration in 2006, giving the TV
station a ten-year lead in the transformation of minds and spirits.
Al Jazeeras aspirations to play a democratising role, whether a noble pursuit or a populist facade, were always brightly displayed by the medium. Since the MENA region
lacked the institutions that normally promote the rule of law, human rights, freedom, and
equality, the network proclaimed to take it upon itself to fulfil this mission (Powers & Gilboa, p. 65). The Arab Spring, Al Jazeeras great CNN Moment, put these aspirations
to the test, thereby obtaining mixed results. As mentioned earlier, the channel kept mum
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about the repression of protests in Bahrain or Saudi Arabia. But in the case of Tunisia
and Egypt, the reporting of the events was quite partisan, leading to the question whether it was merely reporting on news or actually instigating them, espousing the political
line of the protesters, thus practicing campaigning journalism (Mir, 2011).
Many analysts, quoted by Mir, clearly see the channel as an important player in the ousting of Mubarak, turning it into a force of change (p. 166). And in this, citizen journalism
was highly valuable, supplying the network with an infinite amount of raw material that
was shot and commented from the demonstrators point of view. Al Jazeeras personnel strongly denies this, insisting the English channel of the network, at the very least,
provided a balanced level of reporting. The Arabic channel, on the other hand, seemed
to have indeed pushed actively to give a platform for the opposition. But is this truly a
campaigning journalism, or a balancing of the Egyptian media environment at the time,
one that was completely given to the Mubarak cause?
Al Jazeera was not only the revolutions unofficial broadcaster; it was also the oppositions favourite source of information. Considering that it was one of the first Arabic TV
channels to broadcast in a dissenting voice, this is hardly surprising, but in effect, what
this created was a sort of insurgency network of sorts. The fact that Al Jazeera was
transmitting directly at Tahrir Square, both filming the demonstrators and then broadcasting the images back to them, was a good symbol of the mediums position in the
conflict. As Filiu summarised the debate on social media and Al Jazeeras role in the
uprising, the Egyptian revolution was not tweeted, if anything, it was televised (p. 53).
Finally, when weighing in the importance of social media in the Arab uprisings, it is essential to put it in perspective by discussing another medium mobile phones. These
also play an essential part in the remediation of political contention. Like television,
mobile phones are more commonly used than the Internet. Additionally, unlike social
media, which are by definition almost completely porous and open to hostile inspection,
telephone communications cannot be as easily and massively watched and supervised.
Brisson and Lee insist that on the basic level, it was primarily phones, via text messages
and calls, and not social media, that allowed the militants to stay informed, coordinate,
and communicate, among themselves and with the outside world. Still, even in the case
of the ever-present mobile phone communication, the democratic role remained superficial. Any contact between the leaders of the Egyptian revolution and the masses was
done with offline communication methods, since it was assumed that all electronic networks would be closely monitored (p. 12). The real added value of mobile phones, according to Brisson and Lee, was to allow demonstrators to document the events during
the revolution, giving them a certain sense of empowerment, since they could, for the
first time, produce their own media coverage, and therefore, in a way, their own political
reality (p. 29).
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The Hidden Divide


Blogs and social media-enabled citizen journalism appear to be a part of the media
ecosystem, existing in interaction with and through other media. But if we were to take
these other means of communication out of the equation, such as television and radio,
what then would be the reach of citizen contribution? Would it be quite as relevant?
Would it reach the same level of visibility and eminence?
Matthew Hindman, studying the reach of political blogs in the U.S., arrives to a rather
pessimistic conclusion concerning the capacity of individuals to acquire a true position
of influence in this ecosystem (2007). As a matter of fact, the capacity of most individuals to break the wall of anonymity through a political blog is negligible, contradicting the
commonly accepted paradigm that blog writing equates to a participation in the political
debate.
In his book, The Myth of Digital Democracy, Hindman maintains that ultimately, blogs
do not open up the political debate, making the public sphere more inclusive. Indeed,
almost everyone can produce his political writings, but only a selected elite manages to
be heard. It is no longer the production that defines exclusivity, but the filtering system
of these blogs, that excludes those outside the social and political power circles. Social hierarchy is as pronounced on the Internet as it is offline, upheld by the economic
dominance of the Web corporate behemoths and by the social advantages enjoyed by
white, highly educated males.
The Net, says Hindman, is a Winner-takes-it-all arena, where the few in the top get exponentially more attention than all the scraps of interest taken together, extended to the
multitude below. Hindman talks specifically of a Googlearchy, which is ruled by those
most heavily linked. The number of links is the crucial factor determining a sites importance. The less a number of links to a site, the more difficult would it be to find, making
the dominance of the few a self-perpetuating phenomenon.
Though millions of Americans now maintain a blog, only a few dozen political
bloggers get as many readers a s a typical college newspaper. Yet the problem
is not just the small number of voices that matter; it is that those voices are quite
unrepresentative of the broader electorate.
(P. 103).
Without surprise, those enjoying all the attention online, are also those at the top of the
social and political pyramid, constituted of highly educated white males, with a big representation of the business sector, while females and ethnic-minorities are reduced to a
minuscule presence, smaller still than their offline position in society.

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The problem is not merely that blogs fail to represent the real social fabric of the State
and give voice to the voiceless, it also lies in the yawning gap between the theoretical
claims made about blogs democratising power and the reality of their effect on political
and social representation. We are told that the citizen contributors that we read represent diversity, although they ensure the same division between the haves and have
nots. The result is that those who remain in the background are shrouded by an additional layer of obscurity, exacerbating the political inequality.
If we look at citizens voices in terms of the readership their postings receive,
political expression online is orders of magnitude more unequal than the disparities we are used to in voting, volunteer work, and even political fund-raising.
(P. 17).
Hindman discusses blogs in the U.S., but the problem is a global one, and while the
elite in the country owes its existence to social divisions, in repressive regimes it also
reproduces the political bias enforced by the ruling class.
The same holds true for social media, where the number of contacts of a certain member of a network is often a reflection of that persons position in society. Would the power
circle of an authoritarian country be more connected than those belonging to the opposition? While this remains to be proven, it doesnt seem far-fetched to assume that those
holding prominent positions and decision makers are better networked than those who
are out of the regimes favours.
As for citizen contributions to mainstream media, it remains to be seen just how diverse
the sources feeding their coverage are and if they truly reflect the makeup of the societies in which they take place.

Smoke Screen Formations


Another weakness confronting social media and blogs in their role of opposition media
is their lack of accountability. Any person may start a blog or open a Facebook account,
and whatever they wish to share is a matter of personal choice. At the simple, entertainment level, nothing else remains to be said these are commercial products, available
for free use, and the nature of their use is a matter of personal discretion. Yet when social
media and blogs are taken to be a media tool in contentious politics, the user acquires a
certain responsibility, to her readers and to other members of her network. Issues such
as veracity, disclosure, and objectivity come into play. The writer also needs to keep in
mind the implications that may arise from what can appear at first glance as inconsequential posts.
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Veracity and precision are particularly important if citizen journalists and blogs are expected to provide information in cases where regime and state media misinform or cover up the truth. In these cases, they are expected to shed light on the events, enabling
a debate and exchange of ideas the prerequisites of any democratic process. But the
inherent lack of accountability undermines this, and citizen contribution may thicken the
smoke screen, instead of blowing it away.
The difficulty of discerning the true from the false is crystallised by the story of Amina,
the Syrian lesbian blogger, who wasnt. Amina was supposedly the author of the A Gay
Girl in Damascus blog, attracting increased interest and support in the West during the
spring of 2011. In her blog, she described her experiences as a homosexual, a dissident, and the daughter of a pro-democracy activist in Syria. She was pretty, half American, and very politically correct, thus making her the perfect bridgeblogger. Except
that Amina turned out to be Tom MacMaster, a married, middle-aged American studying
in Edinburgh University, who claimed after his exposure that he wanted, through this
fictional blog, to put a human face to matters he cared greatly about (Bennett, 2011).
Unfortunately, MacMasters hoax ended up damaging the very cause he claimed to
promote. Before his exposure, Amina became a very popular figure and other bloggers,
Western media, and platforms such as Global Voices reviewed her blog. In Western
eyes, she became the star of the Syrian insurrection. When MacMaster realised his
heroine was attracting too much attention and that his fantasy was getting out of control,
he had the unfortunate idea of escalating his fiction by having Amina arrested by Syrian secret services. MacMaster claimed later he wanted, in this way, to whisk her out of
public attention, hoping that the story would eventually die. That turned out to be a gross
miscalculation and the effect Aminas arrest had over the media and the blogosphere
was the exact reverse of what he was aiming for. NGOs, media organisations, and personalities, among them Reporters Without Borders and US embassy officials, rose to the
occasion, calling for her release (ibid).
It is at this point that MacMaster was exposed and his elaborate fantasy came crashing
down. But by then, the harm had been done. MacMaster had been feeding the West
false information about the Syrian uprising for many months already. Worse, he discredited opposition activists and bloggers and wasted valuable time and resources in trying
to get Amina out of Assads clutches, time and resources that could have better been
spent coming to the aid of true activists who have been perishing by the dozens in the
dictators dungeons.
Beyond the hoax and the deception, Amina/MacMasters story reflects the vulnerability
of journalists and readers alike to what Bennett calls the false Authentic Voice online.

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By removing the physical body and collapsing the geographic, the Internet allows us to alter, switch, conceal and simulate our identities more easily and to a
greater extent than we have done in the past.
(Bennett, p. 188).
In that sense, social media and blogs do not solve any problems. Deception, whether
government issued or generously contributed by supporters and opponents of the regime, only becomes more easily produced and distributed, while the truth remains hard
to access.

Hush, tag!
The ultimate weapon against citizen-produced content comes from the existing state
communication arsenal censorship and propaganda. While repressive regimes have
an important advantage over their democratic counterparts in their capacity to enforce
these measures and their tendency to do so, democracies do not shy away from using
them either.
Censorship can be accomplished by various means. Either through legal measures,
which means the State needs to pass a number of laws prohibiting certain uses of Internet or social media. Additionally, it can appeal to the Internet service provider (ISP),
or contact the developer of the social media platform a measure rendered particularly
easy under repressive regimes, where loyalty and political, financial or even family ties
with the ruler is often rewarded by granting licenses and ownerships of media. It can
also direct automated attacks that target certain websites or individuals, or even better intimidate cyber-activists into silence. Finally, when everything else has failed, the
censoring authorities can go as far as arresting the perpetrators, and in some cases,
brutalise and even kill them.
The OpenNet Initiative (ONI), a joint programme of the University of Toronto, the University of Harvard and the SecDev Group, crowns the MENA region as one of the most
censored in the world. As the regions countries invest increasingly in Internet penetration, so grows state intervention and efforts to control access and limit the nature of the
use. For this, the governments do not hesitate to use laws, regulations, surveillance, and
censorship technologies, in addition to arrest and physical abuse of dissidents (Noman,
H., n.d., Middle East and North Africa report for ONI).
As Noman points out, the censorship is not always apparent:

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Though many governments acknowledge social filtering, most continue to disguise their political filtering practices by attempting to confuse users with different error messages. [...] Many ISPs block popular politically neutral online
services such as online translation services and privacy tools fearing that they
can be used to bypass the filtering regimes. The censors also block Web sites
and services such as social networking Web sites and photo and video sharing
Web sites because of the potential for content is considered objectionable.
(Ibid).
According to ONI, the approach to Internet and social media is generally more liberal in
the CIS region, although the improvement is neither uniform nor conclusive. Practically
all countries in the region restrict Internet freedom in one way or another.
Regimes often devise ways to target specifically bloggers, citizen journalists, and other
social media dissidents, whom they perceive as a threat, precisely because they challenge the authorities control over media and weaken dominance of their narrative:
States, of course, will not take increased blog power lying down. Internet filtering is already common, though of dubious effectiveness, and a number of
prominent bloggers have already struggled with their Web sites being blocked
in their home country. As blogs gain political relevance, bloggers will attract
the attention of the repressive state security services. Most bloggers already
assume that state security monitors their blogs, and perhaps even actively infiltrates the blogosphere (either posing as bloggers or as commentators).
(Lynch, 2007a).
But States dont always need to go to such extremes. To begin with, they can simply request bloggers and citizen journalists (or social media users) to follow the same
ethical guidelines and regulations enforced upon journalists, thus depriving them of any
initial advantage they may have had in reporting events, unhindered by governmental
restrictions. Thus, the Azerbaijani defamation legislation criminalises equally any criticism emanating from both bloggers and journalists, and the prosecution of bloggers is
at least as common as that of journalistsXVIII. But because their activity is external to any
regulated journalistic activity and union organisation, they are deprived of any basic
protection extended to a professional media worker:
You have the issue of intermediary liability, whereby bloggers are not afforded
the same protection as journalists and this is something that is very problematic,
also in the West. In the UK, for instance, there was a court that issued a super injunction a few months ago to block discussion of an extra marital affair between
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a football player and a certain someone. Twitter, an American company with a


presence in the UK, was forced to hand over the private information of British
Twitter users who had tweeted about this case. Obviously, they werent aware of
the super injunction because it was secretive.
[...] In Israel, theres the anti boycott law. Bloggers are afraid now to speak out,
both in Israel or the Occupied Territories, because they could be held liable for
what they say. Journalists could also be held liable, but bloggers in particular
have no protections.
(York, 2011).
The Israeli police and internal security forces are increasingly sensitive to publications
endorsing what they deem to be hate speech or incitement to violence, investigating
and questioning bloggers, tweeters, and other volunteer contributors of content. While
this is common practice in democracies, often as a means to curb and limit the bashing
of ethnic and gender minorities, Israel often resorts to this when the State perceives the
content is abusive to its ethnic majority. In January 2012, for instance, the blogger and
activist, Yossi Gurevitch, was taken in for questioning over a post written in his blog. The
investigation against Gurevitch was instigated by a complaint made by the right-wing
organisation the Legal Forum for the Land of Israel five months earlier, accusing the
blogger of inciting violence. The basis of the complaint is a post, published in July, in
which Gurevitch pointed out:
[There are situations in which] violence is necessary and justified, such as the
opposition to invasion or conquest. But it must be limited towards those who
carry out military operations and who carry arms, whether or not they wear a
uniform.
(Ravid, 2011).
This scrutiny of citizen contribution does not always need to be followed by legal measures in order for it to subdue the ardour of opposition activists. The mere threat of raising
police interest can create an atmosphere of uneasiness or fear that will naturally lead to
self-censorship.
But when this is not enough, the censorship arsenal contains a large array of means and
methods. Denying access to blogs and other online media is commonly used with little
inconvenience to the regime. The Internet source can be shut momentarily, at sensitive
times, such as the closing of opposition blogs in Azerbaijan, prior to the 2008 parliamentary electionsXIX. Similarly, in Belarus, access to the websites of opposition parties and
media was blocked during presidential elections, using second-generation just-in-time
filtering techniques, that include network disconnection and DDoS attacks. The state
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agency Beltelecom, which controls the Belarusian Internet, is also adept at devising
measures to subtly influence the use of the Net, for instance by slowing down considerably the access to certain IP addressesXX.
Certain countries also block access indefinitely, as Morocco did, in the case of the blogging website LiveJournal (livejournal.com) or the GLBT (Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual and
Transgender) site kelma.org, presumably because it has a section dedicated to the
MaghrebXXI. The champion of permanent blocking and filtering of websites in the MENA
region is probably Syria, which filters foreign sites such as YouTube or Amazon.com,
blogging sites (Arab or otherwise), sites it accuses of being pro-Israeli, sites having the
word Israel in their URL and all Israeli domains. It also blocks sites of Lebanese newspapers and Lebanese groups opposed to Syrias influence in the country. It filters websites
of Syrian opposition parties and those of leading Arab newspapers. Finally, the regime
also blocks anonymizer platforms, which allow Internet users to circumvent censorship
and surveillance on the web, by protecting their identityXXII.
Following the Syrian model, Belarus attitude towards Internet users and social media
activists has gone from bad to worse. The country has announced in the beginning of
2012 it will further limit access to foreign websites. A similar ban has been put on opposition websites. Additionally, any company wishing to sell merchandise to its citizens
will have to use a Belarusian server. These new measures would make it easier for Lukashenko to nationalise Internet services, paving the way for increased monitoring and
controlling of Internet activity.
Tunisia was also exceptionally efficient in filtering access to websites it deemed unsuitable, either to Tunisians or to the interests of the regime. The Internet control authority of
the deposed regime was so pervasive and omnipresent it even got a nickname - Ammar 404 (Error 404) - after the error message that would appear on blocked pages. The
security service did as it pleased with Internet content, going as far as altering emails
and replacing the original message with threats, spam, or even pornographic content,
an act that could potentially ruin the reputation of the sender in a Muslim society. Asma
Hedi Nairi, former coordinator for Amnesty International, interviewed by Vernon Silver,
described the atmosphere of fear that prevailed among Internet users:
Ammar 404 would see everything. [It] was more dangerous than any policeman on the street. It was an information war. (Silver, 2012).
The tactic of the Tunisian regime was particularly insidious, since it replaced messages
with spam. Thus, when an individual received spam on his email account, it was impossible for him to know whether this was an innocent, unwelcome ad, or a sign that Big
Brother was watching, distilling fear of a constant surveillance that led, once more, to
self censorship.
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Another way to silence bloggers and social media users from criticising the authorities
is to submit them to DDoS attacks, in which a large number of computers are taken over
remotely and are used to flood a website or a user page on a social media site. This coordinated flood can crush the website, which is usually not equipped to deal with such a
spike in visitors volume. In this way, a blog or content posted on social media is not officially censored, yet nevertheless it becomes inaccessible. As Morozov points out, the
amount of DDoS conducted is on the rise, and they target increasingly individual bloggers and other opposition members (p. 107-109). He recounts how Cyxymu, a popular
Georgian blogger, found himself under such a DDoS attack on the first anniversary of
the Russian-Georgian war, in August 2009. The DDoS was so intensive it damaged Facebook and Twitter, where Cyxymu had duplicate accounts.
Apart from shutting down websites and networks for short or indefinite period of times,
States are also known to deny complete access to the Internet, as Mubarak famously
did on January 27, 2011, on the eve of the great demonstration that sealed his demise.
But shutting down the Internet can yield unexpected results. Mubaraks decision proved
to be a strong incentive for those Egyptians who have not hitherto taken part in the protests to join the masses in Tahrir Square, thus confirming Zuckermans Cute Cat theory
of Internet activism. Even if the Internet and social media were used primarily for entertainment purposes, they created unexpected paths to activism.
Mona Eltahawy, an Egyptian columnist who is based in New York and who returned to
Egypt after the protests broke confirmed this analysis:
Mubarak was stupid enough to turn off the Internet. People who got bored from
not having Facebook to go on, went to Tahrir Square.
(Eltahawy, 2011).
Zuckerman also thinks events in Egypt vindicated his theory:
We saw [this] on Global Voices. We heard people say: I was following the protests on Al-Jazeera, I was following them on Facebook, I was following them on
Twitter, but then the bastard went and shut down all of that, so I had no choice,
I had to go to Tahrir to see for myself what was going on.
(Zuckerman, 2011).
Ben Gharbia speaks of a similar experience in Tunisia. Ben Ali was very wary of online
opposition, and did everything he could to silence it.

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Tunisia blocked all video sharing websites, starting from 2007. They blocked
YouTube, and Daily Motion. In April 2010, they blocked the rest of video sharing
websites - Blip TV, Vimeo, Metacafe, etc. They blocked more than 200 blogs that
criticised the government; they blocked dozens of Twitter accounts, hereby creating a major migration of users from blogs and video sharing websites to Facebook.
But the question is: why didnt Tunisia block Facebook during the revolution?
The answer is that they tried to do that in 2008, they blocked Facebook for
around 10 days, but the protest was so strong that Ben Ali was pushed to unblock the website.
(Ben Gharbia, 2011).
Still, the fact that shutting down the Internet or social media can backfire does not mean
that the measure cannot prove effective and that dictators are about to strike it out of
their manual.
Internet and social media corporations are sometimes willing to accommodate up to a
certain measure the censoring wishes of autocratic regimes. Twitter announced in January 2011 it will enable country-specific censorship of posts on its website, meaning the
content will no longer be displayed in the country where it is regarded as problematic,
replaced by a grey box notifying readers the content has been censored. The post will
be visible in other countries where it will remain accessible under normal terms. Google
came up with a similar initiative for its Blogger platform, one week later, allowing blogs to
be filtered by certain countries, while maintaining their visibility for the rest of the world.
Both corporations point out that the new measures will allow for more transparency. In
the case of Twitter, for instance, readers from all countries will know a post has been
censored. Furthermore, the post will not be entirely deleted, merely made inaccessible
in the country where it is contrary to regime public speech policy.
Some commentators see this as a compromise, even a fair one, and a real attempt
at transparency (Smalera, 2012). This is perhaps so, although one might argue that
censoring a post that is critical of Lukashenko in Belarus, while allowing it to be read in
Finland diminishes significantly its relevance. Furthermore, even if this is not quite the
equivalent of arresting and torturing the dissident, it does seriously limit the capacity of
social media platforms to act as a democratising tool.
There are also other, more insidious ways of censoring online exchange that may seem
innocent at first, but which are just as harmful to freedom of expression on the Net. Among
them is the tendency to use pricing as a means of controlling Internet penetration. In Jordan and Lebanon, for instance, the price of Internet services is maintained at a relatively
high level, making it difficult for the middle class to access it. Hampering with infrastructures is another way of reaching this goal. Israeli troops damaged Palestinian telecommunication networks to hamper contact among opposition members (el Goby, 2007).
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Finally, the ownership of telecommunication infrastructures and services remains often


in the hands of the States, which can in this way control and limit the number of ISPs,
making the surveillance of its activity all the more easy. Syria also makes the ownership
of hardware an issue of state security, requiring all those who wish to obtain a modem
to make an official appeal for government approval. Additionally, owners of PCs must
register with the military authority. Other countries also ensure censorship and surveillance through software, which is either imposed through the national ISPs or installed by
default on all computers in cyber cafes (ibid).

Activist Harassment is the Continuation


of Censorship by Other Means
The harassment of bloggers and activists is the next step in the struggle over information domination. Once more, Tunisia proved to be a leader in the field, being the first
country to arrest a blogger, in 2000, but it had many disciples in the region. Ghannam
describes a handful of particularly outstanding cases of bloggers arrested in Syria,
Egypt, and Bahrain, including 19-year-old Syrian, Tal al-Mallouhi, the youngest Internet
dissident to serve a prison sentence for her activity. They are but a small sample of the
hundreds of others who share a similar fate.
In Egypt, Syria, Tunisia, Lebanon, Morocco, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, Bahrain,
Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, and the Palestinian Territory, authorities have incarcerated bloggers and others who have expressed their opinions,
communicated on Facebook, or written poetry in ways deemed offensive to
government authorities.
(Ghannam, 2011).
A number of Syrian cyber-activists escaped the country when the 2011 insurrection
began, but not all were so lucky. Tal al-Mallouhi is perhaps the most famous blogger
to be arrested, but hardly the only one. Other cyber-activists were imprisoned, tortured
or killed. Hussein Ghrer and Razan Ghazzawi are perhaps among the most prominent
among them.
The regime change in Egypt did not alter significantly the treatment of cyber-dissidents.
The military rule appears to be as averse to criticism as its predecessor, arresting those
who publish criticism online. Alaa Abdel-Fattah was arrested by the military authorities,
which accused Abdel-Fattah of inciting violence and use of military property. Fattah, a
known blogger and leading activist, is also known for his vociferous opposition to the
military rule. Blogger Maikel Nabil Sanad suffered a similar fate for criticising the interim
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military regime in his country. Other users of social media were questioned under similar
charges of suspicious online postings (York, 2012).
These practices are not reserved to the MENA region alone. Azerbaijan arrested two
activists who posted Facebook messages calling for a demonstration in the spirit of the
Arab Spring. In February 2011, Bakhtiyar Hajiyev and Jabbar Savalan were taken in for
custody on politically motivated charges, although Savalan was released before the end
of the year (Krikorian, 2012).

The Attention Seekers


In the battle for information supremacy, the State will act to silence and discredit any
opposition, while at the same actively promoting its own narrative, thus complementing
censorship with propaganda. The main difference between the two is that propaganda
is supposed to win hearts and minds. As such, it can hardly use methods, which are blatantly repressive, as censorship tends to do, making the targeted population suspicious
rather than favourable towards the message. Propaganda can be aggressive - it cannot
be violent. But it can also be much more pervasive, and at times more difficult to identify.
Strokans account of Russias reliance on PR in its communication policy is a good example of propagandas multiple facets. It is perhaps its most common, ordinary incarnation. Other testimonials, like that of foreign correspondent James Rogers (2011), reflect
just how pervasive the method is, as journalists are presented with stories that had
previously been washed, scrubbed and ironed by PR agencies, making the task of untangling the truth from the neatly packaged propaganda a hard one to achieve.
Currently, the whitewashing of state policy has become a flourishing industry. Russia is
an expert in the field, but the West cannot pretend to hang the blame on Putin alone.
He can hardly be credited with the invention of Spin Doctors. The problem has existed
in one form or another since the invention of media, regardless of regime or political
orientation, and is likely to persist. Nonetheless, it is currently taking on unprecedented
proportions, and the weakening of the journalistic profession a process that, coincidently or not, is evolving simultaneously renders it all the more dangerous. Faced with
such a well-oiled and powerful machine, individually disseminated messages on social
media seem ill equipped to deal with it.
But while hiring a PR agency at a great expense is an obligatory tactic in the communications war, simpler, more immediate methods are easily available that also use social
media. They, too, profit from social medias inherent advantages of immediacy and mass
distribution capacity:

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In Syria, people use Twitter minimally, because Syria does have low Internet
penetration, heavy censorship, and heavy surveillance. But we have, nonetheless, seen people use tools such as Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, to show
whats going on there on the ground. At the same time, weve seen a propaganda narrative forming to counter that. One day in March, I was looking at the Syria
hashtag on Twitter, trying to figure out what was going on that particular day, receiving contrasting narratives. And all of a sudden, the entire flow of tweets was
flooded by images, just pictures of the landscape. Look at this beautiful Syrian
food; look at this bottle of Arak. And I figured, these were automated feeds,
pushing out other content in an attempt to block legitimate content about what
was happening, either pro or anti regime, for the sole purpose of propaganda.
And we have seen the same thing with the Syrian electronic army, which has
been hacking sites, flooding Facebook pages with irrelevant content, always
pro-regime.
(York , 2011).
Incidents like the one discussed by York are frequently recorded. In December 2011,
unknown elements have taken over thousands of home computers in Russia to spread
hundreds of thousands of messages expressing support for the government on Twitter.
The messages were mostly published using hashtags that concerned the demonstrations following the contested elections in the country. Computer experts in Russia believed the messages praising the regime were generated by a botnet, a network of
computers taken over by a remote agent, who uses them to massively distribute whichever message he wishes to (Haaretz, 2011c).
In both the Syrian and the Russian cases, social media were swamped by an automated
system. But many countries also hire human armies whose task is similar flooding the
Internet and social media with content favourable to the regime. Israel has recruited an
army of bloggers tasked with such a mission, or as the Immigrant Absorption Ministry
names it: representing the country in foreign, anti-Zionist blogs. The recruits Israelis
who fully master a second language are asked to visit foreign websites and blogs that
are deemed problematic in their treatment of Israels policy and to respond to the articles and the posts presented there. In their comments, they give Israels version of the
event, ensuring, in this way, that the media field is not left solely in the hands of its critics.
This is one more propaganda method in which Russia excels. In this case, it is the webbrigade that takes on the digital fight, but unlike its Israeli counterpart, it does not focus
its cyber information warfare on the international stage. It is first and foremost an important ingredient in national and internal confrontations. Putins supporters are particularly
adept at using social media to spread their message. Nashi, the youth movement affiliated with President Putin, is involved in promoting his Internet campaign. A group of
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Russian hackers, who intercepted and published emails exchanged between Nashis
leaders, revealed in February 2012 that the organisation has been paying hundreds of
thousands of dollars to a wide network of bloggers, journalists, and Internet trolls, for
flooding the web with pro-Putin messages and denigrating his opponents. Up to 20,000
dollars are paid for expressing support for Putin in platforms that criticise him. Nashi
members are also encouraged to dislike videos of Putins opponents and to come up
with new, original smear campaigns (Elder, 2012a).
Navalni, one of the strongest figures of the opposition, is a favourite of Nashis attacks
and the movement is constantly busy devising new videos and posts that vilify and
discredit him. Referring to Nashi activists policy of commenting on Navalnis blogs, as
well as on the blogs of other opposition leaders such as Ilya Yashin, one of the emails
intercepted states:
More than 1,200 comments were left. Twelve publications on social-political
themes and in support of the prime minister [Putin at the time] were written, and
reposted more than 200 times.
(Elder, 2012b).
The emails also indicate that Nashi paid up to 250,000 dollars for Twitter posts and messages on other social networking sites that support Putin and Medvedev (ibid).
The same emails exposed by the hackers reveal the importance, not only of the sums
engaged, but of just how essential is the financial motivation of the commentators engaged in Nashis endeavour. In one correspondence, the commentator complains of not
being paid, contrary to his expectations and states:
Kristina, I dont understand at all what the hell happened with the money for
LiveJournal this month. Why didnt you tell me there would be no money? Kristina, dont think just about my rudeness or complaints, but for me financial motivation was the most important thing
(ibid).
The financial exchange points to the main problem behind the web-brigade and the political content they generate. They pretend to voice an opinion, representing the Russian
population, or at least one of its segments, while in effect, they are a state apparatus in
disguise. Moreover, by their sheer number they may lead to the assumption that they
reflect the view held by a majority, or at least a significant amount of people, although in
truth, this majority is artificial. Botnets are used to create similar effects, although they
pose an added threat. The sheer number of messages they produce dont only create a
false shift in the public opinion; they can be so large as to crush the platform on which
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they reproduce, effectively putting an end to any debate that may have been going on.
The example of the Israeli army of bloggers, presented earlier, is slightly different. Their
motivation is not financial no money was promised or exchanged at any time between
the State and the bloggers it recruited. In their message, the Ministry of Immigrant Absorption appeals to the bloggers sense of patriotism, calling upon them to contribute
to Israels defence, a formulation that resonates strongly in the Israeli culture, especially
among new immigrants, which are the Ministrys primary target audience. In addition to
the group the ministry initiated, others are created in the country, which treat the posting of statuses on Facebook like a mission of national importance, statuses that defend
Israels policies and attack its opposition, both at home and abroad.
In the Israeli case, the posts advertised on social media and blogs cannot be blamed
to represent an artificial political reality, spurred by ulterior motives. The authors of these
messages represent a certain part of the Israeli society that is by no means negligible.
Still, their purpose is not to create a dialogue, or to reach any ideal of the public sphere,
promoting an informed debate. Rather, it is an organised attempt to push for the spread
and acceptance of certain political ideas, in a manner that resembles more a propaganda campaign than a heated discussion on state policy (although, admittedly, the
line dividing the two may be thin). Naveh (2007), who studied the manifestation of the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict on the net, notes that the Internet and its diverse tools such
as blogs, have taken propaganda out of its narrow meaning as a state apparatus, and
transformed it into a tool thats readily available for large publics:
[...] The appropriate use of the Web for purposes of international propaganda
provides an additional dimension to international processes, adds new actors to
the propaganda arena, and integrates them in a manner that was not possible
in the actual-external environment.
(Naveh, p. 182).
Neveh explores Israels propaganda structure in relation to its Palestinian counterpart,
which was just as quick to rush to the new, digital battlefront. Both sides use Internet,
blogs and social media as spaces where the conflict now takes place and evolves. This
development, the rise of a Netwar, seems to strengthen the fear expressed by Sunstein,
namely that instead of promoting a space for political debate, the Internet might lead to
the creation of separate echo chambers. In the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict,
the two echo chambers are particularly aggressive in their attitude towards one another,
making the existence of a fruitful debate appear like a far-fetched eventuality.

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A softer, subtler way of promoting regime policy on the Net is to simply move there as
well, and many have done so. As rulers started to grasp the political and social benefits
attached to online presence, it became clear that this scene could not be left only to
their opponents. If anything, they had to push back, aggressively, and make social media a new front in their communication battle.
Gamal Mubarak, Hosnis son and heir apparent, decided to register to Facebook after
witnessing opposition parties using the media to promote their anti-governmental protests (Morozov, p. 134). Ghannam mentions that a similar step was taken by other Arab
states, including Jordan, whose officials are now contributing content and information
to Twitter and Facebook. More importantly, they use the media to engage with citizens,
exchange ideas, and promote debate. Russias leading duo, Putin and Medvedev, has
also gone down this road. The Kremlin even posted a police law on the Internet and
allowed citizens to comment on it and give their recommendations, a crowdsourcing
operation of a kind. Medvedev is often tweeting and video-blogging, and a social networking site was set up by the Kremlin to allow Russians to take part in the forging of
its ideological basis (Allnutt, 2010). Azerbaijan and Moldova have joined the trend of
late, as the authorities of the two countries have encouraged ministers and other high
officials to keep websites and blogs, using them as means of communication with the
younger generation, as well as conducting interviews and posting them on YouTube
(Deibert & Rohozinski, 2010).
It is unclear though, whether an online presence of a non-democratic regime can truly
herald a change in its policy with regards to free expression and the like. As Morozov
mentions, Gamal Mubarak participated in a couple of online discussions, and those
quickly led to the spontaneous creation of about 50 Facebook groups, dedicated to
the promotion of his election as the next president. Ultimately, when a regime is repressive, putting on a nice face on social media will not change the fundamental truth of its
methods. Merely debating with citizens on Facebook is not a sign that the State cares
about their concerns, it is a sign that a State wants to be seen debating with citizens.
The actions that may or may not follow would certainly not be documented or posted on
YouTube. Confusing PR with performance is undoubtedly the mistake a ruler would like
its citizens to make, but hardly one that would benefit them. And yet, many analysts do
mix the two. Ghannam, who praises these regime escapades on social media, is hardly
the only one. But as Allnutt states, the regimes new Internet participation is first and
foremost a smokescreen, a liberalisation without democratisation, in which social
media play an essential part.

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Chapter 4.
The International Appeal
Social networks are useful in generating political pressure and they continue
to play a key role in ensuring that governments are susceptible to international
pressure.
[...]
Social media alone wont make the difference. But Lukashenkos hold on power
is weakening. Belarus is in a financial crisis. To survive, Lukashenkos government must secure a much needed bailout loan from the IMF or from Russia.
And this is where social media is crucial. As well as playing an essential role in
mobilising and organising, documenting protest actions means that the international community is much more aware of the political situation. With the new law
banning mass demonstrations, the cycle of unrest will continue, but the world
would be watching, as demonstrators will continue to post footage online. Social
media will make it harder for Lukashenko to justify an IMF or a EU engagement.
It places a spotlight on the regimes behaviour. Which in turn, in many countries
weve seen, does alter foreign policy.
(Butselaar, 2011).
Social medias inherent qualities, which endow cyber-dissidents with the capacity to
form an alternative, relatively more open public sphere; mobilise an opposition; and
gain a more equal footing in the communication war, cannot be confined within national
borders. Most social media are international platforms, which means that their reach is
global. For this reason, activists appeal to the international community, the Diaspora,
and global institutions for assistance and acts of solidarity. Social media is particularly
important at this stage, since under repressive regimes, mainstream media is unlikely
to publicise the dissidents claims and demands. Additionally, due to the relatively low
figures of Internet penetration in the MENA region and the CIS countries, social media
as a lobbying tool could possibly be more effective abroad and in the Diaspora community than it is at home.
The appeal to the international community, targeting civil society, foreign governments
and international institutions, is meant to provide the movement with support, either
moral, such as the vote of resolutions condemning the regime, or physical, by providing
the dissidents with financial and material means. Similarly, the international community
can express its support of the opposition by exercising pressure or even adopting punitive measures against the regime, such as enforcing an embargo or freezing the assets
of the ruling class. In some cases, the support can go as far as setting up a foreign
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military intervention. A particular emphasis in the international media war is given to the
Diaspora, which enjoys a special position, retaining a certain influence on policy matters
at home and better positioned to plea for action abroad. The Diaspora can also act as
a cultural bridge - translating into the local idioms the political and social background of
the uprising and raising public awareness to the movements goals and to the regimes
shortcomings. This in-between national status, as well as its financial situation, which
can often be better than that of the indigenous society at home, make it an important
and powerful ally.
And yet, is it truly possible to assert social medias capacity to alter foreign policy and
promote greater international interference in cases of human rights abuse or violent
repression of democratic movements? Can social media transform the worlds stance
towards a repressive regime? Can it force it into action? In this chapter, we will trace the
contours of social media action oriented towards enlisting the international community.
We will address social medias particular contribution to the way conflicts are perceived
in the international sphere and how it can be restricted by certain political or social contexts. Finally, we will discuss the limits of the media in altering foreign policy.

We Are the World


The information and communication technologies have transformed the world into a
smaller place, enabling individuals from all parts of the world to communicate with one
another, abolishing barriers of space and time. People who have never previously met
and who, in other times, would not even know of each others existence, can now build
ties and lasting relationships.
Abolishing geographic frontiers and contracting distances, even if only on digital media,
means that the other ceases to be a foreign entity of suspicious intent. This does not
mean that people would stop dividing society into us and them along national lines,
but to a certain extent, the level of mistrust can be dropped. Social media made the very
humanity of the others, the foreigners, slightly more palpable.
Apart from establishing between individuals new points of contacts where previously
none, or very few, existed, social media can also alter the way a society, as a whole,
constructs an image of other peoples. Legacy media, mainly television and the press,
were the leading conduits in the introduction of other cultures. They did this mostly by
addressing issues of international importance. At times they displayed colourful images
of national celebration. Mostly they showed pictures of disasters and wars. And yet,
even at those times of human dramas, traditional medias handling of violent conflicts
abroad could hardly diminish the emotional distance between the us, the viewers, and
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between the them, the victims. Undoubtedly, images of horror could shock the viewers
in the West, but this shock could be dealt with by a soothing rationale that this horror
could not be reproduced at home.
Social media challenged this rationale, by modifying the basis of the journalistic coverage and by giving precedence to personal accounts. This means that in the coverage of
civic unrest abroad, professional media objectivity (or at least its pretence) has gone to
hell, contextual background stories were diluted and lucid analysis relegated to the margins. They were replaced by individual testimonies and intimate descriptions, relayed in
real-time to the world, rough, unedited and uncut. This transformation of the journalistic
report led to a primacy of the sentimental and the empathy over concerns such as realpolitik and national interests. The hardships of Chinese factory workers cease to be
an exercise in macroeconomics and are absorbed, to a certain degree at least, as the
sufferings of fellow men.
Market and media globalisation also means that motives of unrest are no longer exotic oddities. Western commercial media have disseminated Western ideas and values
throughout the world, not uniformly perhaps, but further than ever before (Cottle, 2011a).
Subsequently, motives of political discontent are easier to understand, resting on ideals
and aspirations that are shared by many. This makes empathy and identification easier,
even for individuals of distant countries or even warring nations. Market globalisation
reinforced this trend and created an economic bond between distinct regions, which
meant that a crisis in one part of the globe became a concern in all of its parts. Thus,
when young protesters took to the streets of Tunis, Cairo, and Homs, shouting for dignity
and for the end of state abuse, TV viewers in Ashdod, Israel, and Baku, Azerbaijan,
could relate. Ultimately, through social media, even local insurgencies can resonate with
a global voice (Cottle & Lester, 2011a).
Moreover, many national decisions nowadays are taken at the international level, beyond the reach and the influence of most people. The UN and its agencies may promote
certain foreign policies, the IMF and the World Bank can dictate economic measures
and global conglomerations can fundamentally change markets or even governments
according to their needs. All countries share this loss of national sovereignty, at least to
some extent. Since these developments are transnational, they are also dealt with on a
transnational level.
This reinforcement of shared political, social or ideological crises means that certain actions are taken at an international level. Networked communication systems mean that
protests staged in disparate parts of the world can be jointly coordinated and presented
to the world.

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And it is here too [through the flows and formations of worldwide media and
communication networks] that they often discharge their affect and effects on
supporters, wider publics and different decision makers; whether by redefining
the terms of public discourse, bolstering solidarities and identities of opposition,
mobilizing supporters of shifting cultural horizons as well as seeking to influence
political elites and government policies.
(Cottle, S. & Lester, L., 2011b, p. 4).
The influence of social media on international affairs, or at least its popular perception,
goes beyond creating an intimate knowledge of the claims and aspirations of peoples
from far away countries. They also allow for a larger and broader dissemination of information and ideas concerning these issues among a wider public, beyond the usual,
rather restricted crowd that would stop to browse the foreign section of a newspaper.
Thus, foreign policies can become a matter of popular, or populist, debate, trickling to
a bigger audience.

Ill Send an SOS to the World


Understanding the need to escalate the conflict to the international scene, activists use
social media in a way that builds on their qualities as global communication instruments
and weakens the established political frame.
One problematic aspect of the existing political frame is the often-conservative interpretation legacy media offer to contentious politics, mentioned in the previous chapter. As
demonstrated by Bowers (2011), these have a tendency, to this day, of favouring existing
institutions over non-institutional sources in their coverage, leading to a skewed coverage of events that privileges the standing order, whether democratic or not. The ideal of
pluralism is not respected and the opposition continues to be underrepresented (pp. 126127). Prior to the uprising against Mubaraks regime, this propensity was certainly a part
of Western coverage of opposition movements in Egypt, often depicted as either hostile
Islamists or a potential threat to inter-religion and inter-ethnic peace in the country. In line
with this tradition, the violent repression of the Maspero protest by military forces and the
deaths that ensued were widely portrayed, both in Egypt and abroad, as the result of rioting demonstrators, thereby adopting unquestionably the military rulers interpretation of
events. This official and media-promoted version was later disputed by witness accounts
that pointed rather to military brutality and excessive and unjustified use of force.
The demonstrators choice in Egypt and Tunisia to conduct peaceful protests, and the
use of social media to document this, counteract the mainstream medias traditional
aversion to popular uprisings. The regimes may have announced they were fighting
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reckless, lawless individuals undermining state security and social peace, and the media may have taken up this version of events for its own, in some cases, but the pictures
that circulated told another story, one of purposeful, non-violent rallies. The brutal reaction of the security services served only to further credit the narrative proposed by the
opposition and to undermine the regimes legitimacy.
Political movements are aware of this power, and they use it to their advantage, maximising the dramatic effect produced by the imbalance between their (mostly) pacific mobilisation and the States violent response. Again, social media play an essential part in
this dramatisation, spreading a large volume of images that give credence to their side.
Certain tragic events then become symbols that are taken up by the revolutionaries as
their standard. This was the case of Neda, shot to death in the 2009 protests in Iran.
Images of her falling wounded to the ground circulated all over the world and resonated
strongly. Similarly, images of Mohamed Bouazizi setting himself on fire served to ignite
the whole Tunisian nation, while the picture of Khaled Saids body added an accelerant
to the simmering Egyptian street. 13-year-old Hamza Ali Al Khateeb, who went missing
in Syria in April 2011 became the tragic figure of the uprising in the country and all over
the world, after his tortured and mutilated body was returned to his family a month later.
These are not new phenomena. The killing of Hector Pieterson, a boy of Hamzas age
shot in the 1976 student Uprising in Soweto had a similar effect at the time, gripping a
whole nation and echoing the shock throughout the globe. The difference is that in all of
the recent cases recorded in the MENA region, pictures of the deceased were taken by
family members, or passersby, and later uploaded on YouTube and other social media
by activists. The shock they engendered undermined the state posture and its moral
foundations (Cottle, 2011b).
The staging of the demonstration as a dramatic space, pitching the good against the
evil, does not always have to be tragic to catch worldwide attention. The organisers of
anti-governmental protests in a Siberian town, for instance, went in January 2012 for a
media gimmick that won them international interest, while forcing the local authorities
into a reaction that bordered on ridicule. The activists first filed a request to conduct
a demonstration in Barnaul, similar to those organised that winter in Moscow, which
the towns administration repeatedly rejected. Finally, the organisers chose to set up a
public display of dolls and small toys, such as Lego figurines and teddy bears, holding
up miniaturised signs condemning the ruling duo, Medvedev and Putin (Elder, 2012c).
Normally, a demonstration in a mid-sized provincial town would hardly prompt media
interest on a global scale. But in this case, the activists used skilfully the authorities
restrictive measures, turning them into a farce on social media and making Barnauls
administrators the losers of that battle, at least in the media field. The fact that the police
chose to take up measures against the doll protest only made it easier to cast it in the
role of the villain.
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The appeal to the international community can have unexpected results. In the case of
the Arab uprisings, it seems that the sympathy it enlisted was also linked to a great feeling of shared grievances, hopes and aspirations throughout the MENA region, and even
across the globe. The rallying cry of the Tunisian youth, proclaiming their right to live in
dignity echoed powerfully in the Middle East and North Africa. As a result, virtually every
country in the region experienced upheavals of sorts. The uprising set off by Bouazizis
desperate act ignited Egypt and led to the demise of its 30-year ruler. It also put an end
to the 34 year-old rule and life of Libyas Gaddafi and forced Yemmens Ali Abdullah
Saleh out of office. Israel was besieged by protests during most of the summer of 2011
and Jordans authorities hastened to announce reforms, thus pre-empting social unrest.
Syria, in the meantime, has been going through one of the darkest chapters of its history,
and the fate of Assad, or that of his countrymen, remains unclear in the spring of 2012.
This social and political regional cataclysm echoed in other parts of the world too, with
the creation of the Indignados movement in Spain, which manifested itself in other EU
States as well and finally metamorphosed into the Occupy Wall Street movement in the
U.S. It is probably too soon to provide a definite analysis of this trans-national evolution.
Still, for some commentators, social media played a particularly important role in this
regard, acting as a potent, political infectious agent (Howard et al., 2011).

Politics Through and the Real Diplomacy


Considering all that has been said above, can we conclude that social media meaningfully transform foreign policy? The very fact of the international intervention in Libya
could make this case a good starting point to address this question.
The appeal to the international community proved crucial, since without it, it is quite
possible Qaddafi would have had the upper hand, or the country would have sank into
a long and excruciating civil war. Still, can we say without a doubt that this appeal is the
effect of social media? Would it not have succeeded without their use? It is difficult to
make such an assertion, especially considering the countrys low Internet penetration.
Thus, even if social media were used to gain international support, their employment
remained rather marginal.
At any rate, Libya remains an extraordinary case, the international intervention, there,
being the exception to the rule. Syrias opposition, on the other hand, hasnt enjoyed
such a privilege. While the outrage towards Assads brutal methods has been growing
by the day in the course of 2012, the international community is still at a loss, at the
time of writing this, as to finding a solution that would save civilians from the regimes
daily violent raves, which result in quotidian loss of life, sometimes counted by the hundreds. The West and the Arab League were willing to impose sanctions, but these hardly
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seemed to hamper Assads determination to quench the rebellion by the blood of his
citizens. Russia and China, for a number of reasons, refused to adopt a resolution that
would truly put the regime at risk, ultimately leading the world to a stance of impotence,
if not one of indifference. Clearly, the actions of the Libyan dictator and the subsequent
UN 1973 resolution for the protection of the countrys civilians, raised hopes of a new
world order, where the UN Responsibility to Protect (R2P) doctrine would not remain but
mere words on paper, but translate to a definite action in the protection of human lives.
Unfortunately, the events in Syria underlined just how long and arduous the road to such
a new world order is.
It would be wrong, though, to hang the blame on Russia and China alone for failing to
implement a more just and humane foreign policy. The two countries opposed international intervention in Syria because this would endanger their interests. The West
has acted similarly in the past. Its support of the Tunisian and Egyptian governments
pre-uprisings is but one example. Granted, Ben Ali and Mubarak did not resort to measures as drastic as those adopted by Assad, but some of their policies were sanguine,
nonetheless. Even after the uprisings began, the mobilisation of global public opinion
had mitigated results. The world turned its gaze on Tunisia well into the rebellion, when
Ben Ali was close to the brink. Nawaat shows that the number of tweets concerning
Tunisia worldwide remained relatively low, with most interest elicited in France, where
a big Tunisian Diaspora resides, and the Middle East. As for the political class, its lack
of enthusiasm was even more blatant. Three days before Ben Ali was deposed, French
Foreign Miniter, Michle Alliot-Marie still proposed, in a public announcement, to send
French expertise to help the Tunisian regime deal with the demonstrating ruffians. Only
one day later, two days before Ben Ali was gone, did the French Prime Minister, Franois Fillon, Catherin Ashton, the High Representative of the EU for Foreign Affairs, and
the American Administration express some sympathy to the Tunisian liberation cause
(Nawaat, 2011). The same slow reaction was repeated in Egypt, where politicians were
just as cautious in condemning Mubaraks exactions against the protesters, and where
international public opinion remained divided on the desirability of a regime change.
Political interests and realpolitik are not the only elements to distract the international
community from making a positive stance in favour of democratic movements. Economic and financial interests can be just as powerful. The U.S. and the EU have proclaimed
the promotion of democracy throughout the world an essential part of their foreign policy. They have adopted scores of legislation and measures that go in the same vein. And
yet, to this day, these two most powerful Western entities have failed to stop the sale of
technology widely used by authoritarian regimes against their people:

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For years, European and American companies have been quietly selling surveillance equipment and software to dictatorships across the Middle East and
North Africa -- products that have allowed these regimes to maintain a stranglehold over free expression, smother the flames of political dissent, and target
individuals for arrest, torture and execution.
(Chambers & King, 2012).
As a matter of fact, most regimes in the MENA region, but also among the CIS countries,
dont have adequate know-how to develop these tools, and so they are obliged to buy
them from external providers. Western democracies, such as the US, France and the
UK are the biggest exporters. The arsenal they propose is vast and advanced, including
Trojan systems, malware and spyware.
These systems are sold regularly in surveillance trade shows that have been dubbed
the Wiretappers Ball. Between the years 2006 and 2009, these shows have been attended by surveillance agencies from Algeria, Belarus, Egypt, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon,
Moldova, Morocco, the Palestinian Authority, Russia, Tunisia and Ukraine, i.e. - 12 out of
the 17 ENPI partner countriesXXIII.
While the EU and the US have been adopting in the past years measures that restrict
the sale of dual use technologies to dictators, the implementation of these measures is
not always successful. The corporations that develop these tools are well versed in the
arts of going around restrictions, and often find ways to put their products in the wrong
hands.
The EU needs to be very, very strict and stop the sale of information technology to authoritarian states such as Russia and China, where dual use can be
used for surveillance and censorship of populations and take away their human
rights. The news that Western companies sold surveillance and censor technology to Ben Alis former government in Tunisia for testing with a significant
discount should not come to anyone as a surprise, but as a warning to policy
makers that this needs to be investigated and it needs to be stamped out.
We should not be surprised if the FSB is surveying dissidents with technology
purchased in Germany, France or the UK.
A few weeks ago, the European parliament passed a resolution banning the
sale of dual use technology to countries that have authoritarian governments.
Now this needs to be implemented and it needs an urgent follow-up in all of the
EU-27 Member States. To do this, I think that the EU should establish a commission, which will have diplomats, business and civil service, to assess and find
out what is the right balance, and get a conversation going, so that we dont
have different aspects of the European Union working at cross-purposes across
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the world. Nor do I think that the EU should hold back from naming and shaming
companies that have been selling such dual use technology to Russia, China
and some other Arab states. We could even consider having a branding system, forced on their products, within the EU, which have green for clean human
rights record, or red, for having a history suspicious dealings with dictators.
(Judah, 2011).

Tidying up Your Backyard


The difficulties of Western democracies in protecting basic human freedoms and brandishing the Internet as democracys standard also originates from their own uneasy
attitude towards technology. Although their citizens enjoy a relatively high freedom of
use, this freedom is not total, and it is under constant scrutiny and questioning from the
authorities. Often citing reasons such as child pornography and the threat to intellectual
property, democratic States adopt measures that restrict the use of Internet and social
media. The reasons invoked are hard to dismiss. No one can make light of child abuse
and the protection of intellectual property is anchored in law. Still, the broad, almost
automatic reference to these two spectres begs the question whether they are not too
easily employed, serving, as a matter of fact, to cover censoring practices which would
be otherwise more difficult to explain.
This is not a paranoid scenario. In their article, When do States Disconnect Their Digital
Networks? Howard, Agarwal and Hussain draw a startling picture of Internet censorship
in the world (2011). According to their research, democracies do not hesitate to disconnect social networks used for collective political action. The main difference between
democracies, emerging democracies and dictatorships is not so much in the frequency
of the practice, as much as it is in the tactics adopted.
Surprisingly, we find that while authoritarian regimes practice controlling fullnetworks, , and nodes more than democracies, democracies are the most likely
to target civil society actors by proxy by manipulating ISPs.
(Ibid, p. 224).
Dictatorships tend to resort twice as often to the extreme measure of shutting down all
access to the Internet, while democracies
are much more likely to engage in online content censorship than other tactics,
although they also frequently target civil society members offline.
(Ibid, p. 225).
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As the authors of the study remark, authoritarian regimes may attack individuals expressing criticism, but democracies are much better equipped, legally, to penalise users for online political activity that is deemed problematic (ibid, p. 226).
One of the most publicised examples is the British prime ministers proposal to restrict
social media and to ban certain people from using them, following the August riots that
shook England for four days in 2011. Cameron:
Everyone watching these horrific actions will be struck by how they were organised via social media. Free flow of information can be used for good. But
it can also be used for ill [...] and when people are using social media for violence we need to stop them. So we are working with the police, the intelligence
services and industry to look at whether it would be right to stop people communicating via these websites and services when we know they are plotting
violence, disorder and criminality [...] I have also asked the police if they need
any other new powers.
(Halliday, 2011).
Camerons proposition has not yet been followed by any direct action, but the mere utterance of this idea was damaging for pro-democratic activists across the world, as autocratic rulers quickly applauded Britains head of State for his remarkable suggestion.
Iran and China, for instance, were charmed by these developments (Somaiya, 2011).
Another big censoring operation of global dimensions involves the U.S. and the European Union. Having failed to stop WikiLeaks from publishing documents they deemed
damaging by legal means, the two entities pressured corporations to virtually drain the
organisation of its financial means. This move was clearly aimed at pulling the plug out
on the Internet whistle-blower and shutting down its operation.
The EU needs to realise that precedents for more Internet control are being
set at home [...] The EU should heavily discourage Member States from making
statements such as those that the British government made during the London
riots, about controlling social media that indicated that the EU might be open to
persuasion by Putin or China.
(Judah, 2011).

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The Double-Edged Endorsement of Online Activism


The policy of Internet control and the intimidation of online activists in non-democratic
countries prompted protest and condemnation in the democratic West, and led Hillary
Clinton to declare Internet Freedom a matter of U.S. foreign policy, as mentioned earlier. Unfortunately, this attitude does not always bear the expected fruits. According to
Morozov, the sudden interest in Internet regulation in repressive regimes led their rulers
to pay even more attention to what goes on in the domestic Net, deducing logically,
from Clintons position, that the media is a wormy can of dissidents that needs to be
closely watched and tightly monitored. The American administration famously appealed
to Twitter, asking the company to delay a programmed shut down of the service for
maintenance purposes during the Iranian Green revolution, so as not to hamper the
insurgency, which was supposedly reliant on the social medium. As Morozov indicates,
the Iranian regimes prompt response was to increase its clamp down on the Internet
and on its suspected users.
The endorsement of a particular activist by the West can also have disastrous consequences. For Lynch, encouragement of Internet and social media activism on the part
of dissidents living in authoritarian states may have grave consequences, condemning
them to harsh retaliation from security forces and government supporters. Therefore,
promoting online activism, as long as the West is incapable of truly protecting those who
practice it, is a highly irresponsible act, the equivalent of painting a bulls-eye on the
activists forehead (Lynch, M., 2009a).
Lynchs observations on the consequences of such a stand rose following the harassment and arrest by Egyptian security forces of Abd al-Monem Mahmoud, an active
blogger for the Muslim Brotherhood, the most prominent opposition movement under
Mubaraks reign. As Lynch explains in his article, this surfeit of interest on behalf of the
Egyptian authorities towards Mahmoud was partly the result of an article Lynch wrote
about him, praising his political importance.
An appeal to the international community can be regarded as problematic not only
by the regime and its coalition, but also by other opposition movements, or within the
group that makes the appeal. A great majority of Israelis, from almost all political parties,
consider the mere expression of opposition to the countrys policies on an international
forum an act similar to treason. In this, it is not unlike the situation in Iran today, where a
strong internal opposition to the regime exists, but where external hostility to the regime
and the internationally adopted sanctions tend rather to unite the nation and create a
united, national front.
In these cases, the use of social media as a global platform to condemn or criticise the
existing political order can often lead to a backlash and raise against the media users
the ire of their peers, going as far as verbal assaults and threats of death.
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Equally disputable is the Wests insistence on providing technological solutions to problems of liberty. Clinton, in her famous speech of January 2010, vowed to promote the
development and distribution of electronic systems that will allow dissidents to bypass
censoring and surveillance measures used online by repressive regimes. Clintons
promise did not remain an empty rhetorical exercise. As a matter of fact, the U.S. earmarked at least 45 million dollars in the years 2008-2010 for support of Internet freedom.
But these large sums are too short by far to seriously put a dent in Internet censoring,
which in a country like China, with 384 million users, would quickly soar to the hundreds
of millions a year in bandwidth costs alone, if the U.S. decides to offer them an open
Internet alternative to their national, censored one (Zuckerman, 2010).
As Morozov explains extensively, the rush to produce technological answers to political problems is running in full steam. Unfortunately, the results are mitigated. Morozov
brings up the infamous example of Haystack, an American company that got an export
license to sell a system in Iran that will allow dissidents to get around state firewalls and
hide politically oriented activity on the Net. The effort to get the system approved for
export was arduous, accompanied by massive lobbying and media campaigns, which
transformed the company and its founders into national champions of democracy.
Haystack refused to put the system up for review in the U.S., claiming that publicising it
would make it vulnerable once in Iran, as this would give the authorities an opportunity
to get acquainted with it early on. Instead, the company asked a group of Iranian dissidents to act as its independent testers. Within a few hours of receiving the system, they
concluded that the system was unsafe and would make it easier for the Iranian regime
to actually track and identify its users (Morozov, pp. 207-208).
Granted, Haystack is a rather extreme example of a failed promise delivered by dubious
entrepreneurs. But is it enough to make broad assumptions about anti-censorship tools
in general? Admittedly not, but there are other indications that engaging in this technological battle is not a productive endeavour. A report for the Berkman Center for Internet
and Society at Harvard University reached some sobering conclusions about the capacity to provide technological fixes to the problem of censorship (Robert, Zuckerman,
Faris, York, & Palfrey, 2011). The writers of the report, among them Internet enthusiasts
such as Zuckerman, point out that their findings lead them to lose the faith they had in
such measures:
Four years ago, we were reasonably sure that the developers of circumvention
tools were winning the match against government censors. Not only is victory
in that match less assured, now, the entire playing field has changed, and new
technologies of control are far harder to defend against than national Internet
filtering.

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While circumvention and anonymity tools are likely to continue to play an important role in digital activism in repressive online environments, investing disproportionate resources on technological solutions may be counter-productive.
Increasing the performance and availability of circumvention tools may make it
easier for a larger set of Internet users to access content that would otherwise
be out of their reach, just as reducing the effective cost of using anonymity tools
could make it safer for political dissidents to express themselves online and investments in more secure hosting solutions would reduce the vulnerability of
independent media sites from malicious attacks. It is unclear though how advances in each of these liberation technologies might contribute to freedom of
expression online or political reform, particularly given that none of these changes would take place in a vacuum; to the extent that they succeed, all of these actions will shift the benefits and costs to repressive governments of implementing
stricter Internet controls and investing in more sophisticated counter-measures.
Defeating government Internet filters, even if feasible, may provide the catalyst
for more draconian government restrictions. In such a context, it is impossible to
predict whether these moves will ultimately increase or decrease online access
to information and the ability of people to organize online.
The Firewall race, pitching repressive regimes and dissidents against each other, is a
costly one, for all sides. Unfortunately, States are usually the ones who have the biggest
financial leverage, compensating through investment for what they lack in appeal. This
means that they can invest more in technological developments than those who wish to
bring them down. But governments, too, are reluctant to spend money, if they can make
someone else pay the bill. Most often, they tend to pass it on to the Internet companies,
which must apply the censorship and surveillance tools, lest they lose their operating
license. In this way, the regime can have these measures applied by the technological
experts themselves, engaging in no cost on their side (Morozov, pp. 101-103).

On Fickleness
In many cases, acts of political and social injustice are picked up by the media (social
or not), which in turn broadcast the information widely. And yet, most of the time they
are met with a general indifference. Corporate media is blamed for poor coverage of
foreign conflicts, for the tabloidisation of news, and for its partisan stances. Still, with all
its faults, it does occasionally report on tragedies from afar. Nevertheless, these stories
seldom elicit a worldwide interest. For many analysts, social media can make the difference, transforming indifference into indignation and action. It is unclear for the moment
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whether this is indeed true. But assuming it is, it remains a problematic claim, providing
a somewhat dispiriting reflection on human empathy and engagement. What this means
is that a televised coverage, or an in-depth article in the press is incapable of moving us
into action. A YouTube video, on the other hand, or a Facebook status, can do just that.
The question that arises then is: What are we reacting to? Are we touched by the tragedy
we see in front of us, or are we affected by the technology?
The theories and practices of social media are filled with terms such as trending and
memes, which are used to describe the continuous flow of changing vogues and fashions on the Net, and more specifically, on social media. These are the flavours of the
day. Tomorrow, new ones will follow, pushing their predecessors to the desktop bin. Is it
possible, then, that social media do not actually open us up to the suffering of others but
merely allow us to adopt the latest trend in todays politics? And what would be the trend
tomorrow? After we have browsed to the next tragedy, would there be anyone to stay
on the same page and keep a watchful eye on yesterdays sad story, alerting us to the
alarming developments? And what about the ones that never make it to the Net? What
does that say about human empathy, if social media is needed for it to be exercised?

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Conclusion.
The Future of Social Media as a Democratic Tool
Tomorrows media technologies will no doubt be still more breathtaking. Yet, at
bottom, democracy simply cannot exist without input from its citizens - their participation. The character and forms of participation are evolving but can never
be taken for granted. We cannot know what kinds of media-based civic cultures
will develop in the future, but the struggle for democracy, for present and future
generations, will remain inexorably political.
(Dahlgren, 2009, p. 202).
Internet and social media would not necessarily create democratically relevant
journalism. The analysis, the investigative journalism, the intelligent comment,
which allows people to make sense of the political and social environment, they
are not very likely to appear, or at least not often, through social media or on
the Internet in general. It could get there later, but it wont appear without the
incentives.
[This democratic role needs to be nurtured over time.] You dont just build it up and
leave it there, for it to stand on its own. Freedom of expression does not stand. It
can erode, as we have seen in the Eastern democracies. So every day we have to
make the effort to keep it in place, put a little brick in the wall, every day.
(Nikoltchev, 2011).
Considering all that has been said previously about social medias multiple and contradictory effects on pro-democratic movements, what conclusions can we draw when
we look at the events that took place at the EUs southern and eastern borders? Which
side has prevailed? Was it the technology-savvy dissident or the existing, conservative
system, brandishing old values and holding fast to tradition?
The Russian electoral season that started with the contested parliamentary elections in
December 2011 and reached its climax with the re-election of Vladimir Putin as president was accompanied by a wave of protests against the countrys corrupt and biased
voting process. The stars of the demonstrations were Alexei Navalny and Rustem Adagamov, the leading opposition bloggers in the country. Like Wael Ghonim in Egypt,
those online pamphleteers came to represent the opposition parties in their country.
This evolution, which gave online activists a front-line position in the contestation, led
certain commentators to remark upon the transformative power of online presence effecting offline politics (de Carbonnel, 2011). The defiance of the regime online is no
longer a mere appendix to a true resistance movement - it is the spearhead of the in123

surrection. This, at least, is the image widely projected by the political revolutions that
swept over Europes ENP partners.
But a year and a half after Tunisian youths sent the world reeling, an interim analysis of
the actual situation in the MENA region and among Europes eastern neighbours, Russia
chief among them, favours a more subdued interpretation of social medias role in these
passing events.
Notwithstanding the massive work done by Putins critics on the Net, his party won
the parliamentary elections, while he himself sailed smoothly to a third mandate at the
head of his State. This contrast seems to validate Machleder and Asmolovs assertion
concerning the growing polarisation between the on- and offline communities (p. 6).
Certainly, a closer look at the media coverage, proposed by national television on the
one hand, and by bloggers on the other, confirms the existence of two Russias, one informed by the national television networks, and the other one getting its news coverage
and analysis online. Whereas the former shied away initially from covering the anti-governmental demonstrations and broadcast soviet-style films praising Putin on all fronts,
the latter was highly critical of the Putin-Medvedev duo and used the online platform to
push back against the narrative promoted by television and the Kremlin (Stanley, 2012).
Russias social media users and TV audiences live in the same physical space
but in two different information realities, and their responses to the very same
event may be different as well.
(Machleder & Asmolov, p. 6).
While the Russian blogosphere and social media platforms are brimming with contributions made by anti Putin and Medvedev activists, the two Russian politicians and the
party they represent still enjoy a big support in their country, a support that has landed
them a new, consecutive victory, 12 years after Putin first rose to power.
A similar schism between the on- and offline populations can be seen in Egypt, one
year after the overthrow of Mubarak. With the legislative elections giving the Islamist
Brotherhood in Egypt an overwhelming majority and the Salafists the second place on
the political podium, the countrys revolutionary youth seems to be increasingly setapart from the rest of society. During the months of the uprising, a majority of Egyptians
have stood behind the protesters, fought by their side in the countrys city squares,
and sent them messages of praise and comfort. Nevertheless, once the revolutionary
page had been turned, a majority of citizens turned away from the liberal, westernised,
democracy-seeking youths and gave its vote to the countrys traditional and conservative forces. The core values of Egypts society have remained the same, and although it
has given its support to the insurrection, it could not identify with the spirit of liberalism
that accompanied it (Roy, 2012). And so, a great divide is forming, between the urban
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youth, that led the revolution and still cannot fully abandon the fight, and the rest of the
population, largely rural, that chose to put its future in the hands of those representing
more traditional values (Pommier, 2012).
The rise of the Islamists has also marked the Tunisian and Moroccan elections, organised at the aftermath of the Arab uprisings. As in Egypt, the cyber community that led
the contestation lost the political game to its Islamic parties, those same organisations
that preferred, during the uprisings, to remain at the sidelines of the revolution, at least
as an organised body.
Undoubtedly, the situation in the MENA region and on the eastern borders of the EU is
quickly evolving and we have yet to see the final outcome of the processes that have
only began. Additionally, social media are still in their infancy. For them to become a
true political weapon in contentious politics they need time to evolve. Similarly, their effect on political processes and pro-democratic movements cannot be gauged in such a
restricted frame. And yet, notwithstanding all these reservations, the developments that
took place in North Africa and Russia in the second half of 2011 and early 2012 seem to
raise certain doubts about the sweeping optimistic reading of social medias contribution to the downfall of repressive regimes.
It appears that one of the major characteristics of social media powered movements,
i.e. their horizontal, non-organised, and non-hierarchical structure, that allowed them to
gain so much momentum and to appeal to such large segments of the population, are
also their biggest weakness. In Tunisia, Egypt and Morocco, the population, faced with
the great void left after the disappearance of their decennial leaders, preferred to entrust
its fate in the hands of the renowned, organised, experimented and well-implemented
Islamic representatives. The bloggers who stood at the forefront of the revolution failed,
or perhaps chose not to create an alternative organisation. They remained amorphous
and thus, lost the legislative fight.
Second, the digital divide clearly proved to be a problem, contradicting the assumptions made by Howards and Castells, detailed earlier. Both academics presumed that
it is not necessary for the whole population to have access to the Net for a democratic
movement to grow out of its midst. Perhaps they were right on this account, as the digital
divide did not prevent the uprising. And yet, from the examples we have here, it may well
seem that the divide inhibited the transformation of the social movement into a political
entity with the capacity to influence the electoral process. Clearly, the digital divide,
which stems from a socio-economic one, also contributes, in its way, to the creation of
a cultural and political divide. In Russia and Egypt, and to a certain extent in Tunisia as
well, the divide is only made more blatant by the recent elections, which drew a political
map made of two distinct parts, with on the one side, the technology-savvy, connected,
revolutionary youth, and on the other - the rest of society.
Interestingly, a reversal of situations seems to occur. Contrary to academic discussion
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of the problem, the digital divide does not favour those on the connected end. The elections in Egypt, Tunisia, and Russia have put victory in the camp of the disconnected
who seem to have gained the political upper hand, while those who have access to the
Internet and to social media find themselves relegated to the margins of society, at least
in the political sense.
Nonetheless, these two observations above concerning the failings of social mediated
movements cannot, on their own, explain the big gap between the great popularity the
revolutionary forces won and which transported them to victory over the regime, and
between the overwhelming success of the Islamist, and even extreme-Islamist organisations in the post-uprising era. This raises the possibility of an additional structural weakness of social media in the organisation of anti-regime campaigns.
The uprisings in the MENA region originated out of a popular frustration, without a political structure, with no leader or strictly formulated goal, aside from the universal aspirations to dignity, humanity and the end of corruption. These are movements that truly rose
from the bottom up, fuelled by social rage. In this sense, they represent a genuinely
new phenomenon - since the very beginning of the 20th century, no other movement
has emerged in this way. It was probably the advent of the Internet that paved the road
to this change, in which society as a whole, and not a political organisation, is initiating
change (Badie, 2012). In effect, contemporary societies in North Africa and the Middle
East had plenty of reasons to feel dissatisfied with their governments. Human rights
abuse, unemployment, and corruption can only begin to describe the hardships felt by
their populations. It is no wonder, therefore, that the Internet and social media could enable such a movement, uniting as they did disparate segments of society, separated by
geographical, social, and cultural differences, who nonetheless share many grievances,
both on a national and on a regional level. Thus, Internet and social media united different groups on the basis of the single goal they shared - the toppling of a system that
was putting them down.
Also in Israel, the mass protests of summer 2011 won substantial popular support that
was not far from becoming a national consensus. Resting to a large extent on social
media, where it also originated, the movement united a vast number of different socioeconomic groups, including students, young middle-class families, pensioners, new
immigrants, Arab-Israelis, and many others. Their demands were fundamentally social,
but varied in their focus. They called for a more protected, affordable housing market,
cheaper education, greater social security, a revision of the taxation system, and more
regulated market. The movements comprehensive programme attracted a crowd of
followers never seen previously in the history of the country, following the pattern set in
Tunisia, but mostly in Egypt. It raised the hope that Israels political system is about to
change, that priorities will at last be redefined, and that human dignity will return to the
countrys agenda. And yet, by fall, the movement was dead.
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Interestingly enough, its premature death came about once the social process reached
the political echelon. At that point, Israels prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, pledged
himself to the demonstrators cause and appointed a special committee tasked with
studying ways to implement it. But the government, made up by an ultra-liberal coalition,
had no such intentions and it managed deftly to bury the promises it made in a torrent
of new, controversial legislation (Rinat, 2012). And yet, notwithstanding these mitigated
results, the movement never re-emerged, even though Dafna Leef, the movements initiator, and a small number of militants tried vainly to breath a new life into it. And so,
once more, a campaign that began on social media and garnered unparalleled support
collapsed once it reached its realisation phase on the political level.
In this constellation, it appears that social media work perfectly when it comes to bringing together disparate factions, who would otherwise not connect. The difficulty arises
once the common goal is achieved. The cohesion factor is gone once the opposition
breaks down into its most elementary parts. Alternatively, movements that addressed
more specific issues that concern (at least in appearance) only certain, strictly defined
groups in society, such as ethnic minorities or LBGT, never managed to transform social media into a communication tool that will bring them unprecedented visibility and
promote their cause in a manner never achieved before. It seems, therefore, that social
media can only play a meaningful role when they touch on matters of consensus, and
those that appear to touch society at large.
On the international front, social media did not fare better. The uprisings in North Africa
and the Middle East raised great hopes and expectations throughout the world. They may
have stirred fears as well, but many empathised with the hopes and wishes expressed
simply, and yet also passionately by those who fought some of the worlds most obscure
regimes. Social media, along international networks such as Al Jazeera probably contributed to this, allowing the creation of points of contact and sympathy where previously
there were none. Under such circumstances, it is much harder to remain impervious to
the plights of others. Still, as Syrias opposition can testify, this is not enough to seriously
challenge realpolitik as the decisive factor in determining international policy.
Since the wave of protest has reached Syria, the repression has continued relentlessly,
in effect emptying all meaning of any attempt at a peaceful resolution. While Europe
and Russia battled over definitions of peacekeeping missions, citizens were killed in the
streets by the dozens. To at the time of writing this, more than 9,000 people lost their
lives in this conflict (Hubbard, 2012). All know of this story, and the international media
did not make light of them, nor did it attempt to hide them from the public eye. And yet,
no cross-border movement of solidarity was created, demanding immediate, forceful
action. And when finally a group of 300 UN observers were dispatched to the country,
they appeared incapable of altering the reality on the ground as the killings continued,
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seemingly without change (ibid).


It isnt lack of interest or ignorance that failed to bring immediate relief to Syrias population, rather it is the policy of international relations, which requires unanimous decision
before such a move can be made. It is also the fear of Russia and China of creating
precedents for international intervention which might one day turn against them that
made them stall a clear condemnation of Assads regime. At the face of such considerations, social media remain powerless, at least at the short run. To this day, social media
failed to create consensus where it did not previously exist. This strongly hampers the
capacity of social media to provide a solution to conflicts abroad or to even allow for
measured support of dissidents.
Does this mean that social media are powerless to bring about change? Was the hype
surrounding them completely misplaced? Are all their communicative qualities merely
the trappings of a consumer-oriented product?
Not necessarily. Social media present a great potential, and this potential can be fulfilled, at least in part, if social medias limitations are addressed and dealt with overtime.
Those shortcomings that cannot be solved need to be taken into account and their
effect entered into the overall appreciation of the tool and what it is hoped to achieve.
The process of changing a repressive regime is a long and arduous one. The exact list
of ingredients is still being debated and is not likely to be finalised in the near future.
Ultimately, it is a process of trial and error, error for which the regimes subjects are the
first to pay. Therefore, any outside interference should be considered very carefully, running as it does the risk of backfiring in everyones face, particularly in that of the local
opposition. Still, taken from the opposite direction, certain societal issues can indeed
be dealt with, ones that would ultimately enable social media to play a greater part in
pro-democratic processes.
The social divide is one of the biggest problems hindering social media from playing
a truly inclusive role. A movement cannot claim to represent a people if it is endorsed
by means that are available to but a few. Beyond the basic, blatant contradiction between an exclusive system and pro-democratic pretensions, this paradox represents a
concrete threat to the movements future. The consequence of an exclusive system is
that only a fragment of society participates in drafting a programme or an agenda. The
endorsement given by the population to the movements short or mid-term goals will
ultimately mask the underlying rift in ideology and that in the long run, the movement
and its support base may have contrasting interests. As we have seen in Russia and
Egypt, this may or may not put an end to a repressive regime, but in any case, it leaves
the movement at the edge of consensus and out of its goals reach.
Moreover, the advent of social media makes the subject of media literacy all the more
relevant in todays societies. As we have previously seen, the participation potential of128

fered by this tool is immense and new, at least in scope. Never has mass communication
been so close to individual use. This implies a greater responsibility on the users part,
which in turn raises the need for greater knowledge - both of the promise held by social
media and of the many dangers they encompass. Social media can promote the existence of echo chambers, they can be used to silence those who hold different opinions,
they may replace a profound, meaningful engagement with a quick show of interest,
easily expressed, easily gone. They also risk falling into a frenzied pursuit of the latest
trending topic, avoiding a lasting commitment to the achievement of a goal that may
require its supporters to take part in a continuous, arduous struggle. These dangers
are not theoretical. In the context of pro-democratic movements they are very practical. Democratic processes require patience; they call for openness, inclusiveness, and
intelligent debate. They need a long lasting dedication and the capacity to look beyond
ones own, restricted interests. They may be boring, they may be frustrating, as they can
take as much as centuries until they fully mature. In this sense, social media will only be
relevant if they can accompany these processes for as long as they last, without distractions or the mere quest of the hype. All these problems are known. To a certain extent,
they can be solved, if media literacy is promoted.

A Final, Cautious, Optimistic Note


In the spring of 2012, the Israeli government escalated its promotion of a military attack
against Irans nuclear sites. The subject has dominated much of the Netanyahus visit to
the U.S. in March of that year, and took a prominent place in both the American and the
Israeli political agenda. A majority of Israelis are opposed to such a move (Heller, 2012),
as well as the countrys defence establishment (Sherwood, 2012), but this has not deterred the countrys prime minister and his defence minister from tirelessly pushing for
international support of this Israeli move.
In the face of such a stark dissention between the countrys political class and the population, an Israeli couple started what seemed like a doomed, naive, Facebook gimmick.
Michal Tamir and Ronny Edry posted on their page pictures showing them with their
children, with captions declaring their love for the Iranians. In essence, those messages
read, Iranians, we love you, and We would never bomb you. At first, the couple attracted hostility and antagonism from Israelis, who judged their actions naive at best.
But a few days later, they started getting positive messages and support, with fellow
countrymen and women joining their initiative and sending their messages of love (Saar,
S. 2012). They then opened a new group on Facebook they named Love & PeaceXXIV
and created the israelovesiran.com website.

129

Soon, the Israeli initiative was met with a similar Iranian response which filled both Facebook page and website, replete with posters, videos, and pictures of the so-called
archenemies proclaiming friendship and love. One of those messages, an unusually
long one, read:
I send the Israeli people my warmest Iranian regards and I wish that someday
we Iranians can befriend you without fear, that we can welcome you in our ancient Iran (Persia) and you can enjoy the hospitality, friendship and good will
of the Iranian people. I wish that someday Iranians and Israelis can meet each
other the way they meet the other nations and discuss whatever they like, whatever that there is in their hearts... To say the words: I love you my dearest Israeli
companions from the bottom of my heart.
(Iran Loves Israel, n.d., 2012).
The messages often contained promises of one side not to bomb the other, but ultimately, it is difficult to imagine how these promises could ever be kept, when the Israeli
government finally decides to go on the warpath, or when the Iranian administration
engages in hostile action. It is hard to imagine the power holders stooping to listen to a
handful of voices rising from their peoples.
Nevertheless, whatever will be the final outcome, the grassroots attempt at peace processing is an admirable one, and could hardly have taken place between two societies
at war without social media, at a time when no other venue for dialogue exists. The vast
majority of Israelis and Iranians know nothing of their supposed foe, a situation that
feeds the atmosphere of mutual suspicion and projected hostility. Still, the Israel Loves
Iran initiative, through social media, provided a unique opportunity to break through the
wall of frenzied drum beats resonating in the political discourse. As such, it gave the
citizens of both countries a glimpse at what relations between them could be, in effect
deflating state propaganda and mainstream media posturing. At best, this could lead to
a true boost of the peace camp in the Middle East. At worst, it would remain a valuable
lesson in unmasking the pervading propaganda, its futility, and inherent misconceptions.

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IV

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XVIII OpenNet Initiative (n.d., 2010). Retrieved February 14, 2012, from http://opennet.net/research/profiles/azerbaijan.
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