Arab spring = Facebook revolution #1?

Arab Spring

= Facebook revolution #1?

In Tunisia, Mohamed Bouaziz,

a 26-year old

fruit and vegetable street vendor,

set himself on fire

on December the 17th 2010.

He was protesting against

corrupt local police and authorities.

He died on January the 4th.

Protest spread following his death,

both across the country

and the Internet.

Protesters uploaded videos of unrest

whilst the authorities fought back

with censorship and hacking.

But by January the 14th,

ex-Tunisian President Ben Ali’s

23 years in power were over.

Social media played a role,

but not a determinative role.

The dominant medium

is still television.

And part of that is due to the fact

that social media are not as pervasive

in that part of the world as they are

in the more developed nations.

You look at Facebook, which is used

by only about 5% of the population.

Internet penetration

throughout the region is about 20%.

So, that's important,

but television, on the other hand,

reaches 80% of the population,

particularly in the big cities.

And so the dominant medium

was television,

sometimes re-purposing material that

it found on the social media sites.

In Egypt, a Facebook page

called for a day of protest

on the 25th of January 2011,

over the death of a 28-year

old man named Khaled Said.

Police officers had dragged him

from an Internet cafe

and beaten him to death.

More than 80,000 people signed up

for the protest on the Facebook page.

The protest continued

despite the mobile phone and

Internet network being down for days.

On February the 11th,

ex-Egyptian President Mubarak’s

thirty years in power were over.

The original Facebook page

called We are all Khaled Said

has nearly one million likes.

Social media is much broader than

sending 144 characters over Twitter

or updating your status posts

on Facebook. Those are useful,

but if you look at how people

are sharing videos and information

in Egypt, in Tunisia, in Libya,

it's primarily through SMS,

not through Twitter.

We observe Twitter,

so we give Twitter a lot of credit,

but there is a lot more communication

going underneath that obvious.

The three highest

Internet penetration percentage rates

in the Middle East are the United

Arab Emirates, Israel and Bahrain.

The number one enemy

it seems nowadays

in every state in North Africa

is Al Jazeera,

whether you are Israel,

Jordan, Egypt, Tunisia:

they all blame Al Jazeera

for everything that has gone wrong.

And Al Jazeera has taken a very

aggressive stance, one might say,

in broadcasting events,

whereas 10 years ago

that would have not been possible.

So we see a broader

dissemination of information

when Al Jazeera's signal is jammed

or cut off and there's only state TV.

We see people picking up

the slack through mobile phones,

through telephoning, through

voice over Internet protocol, etc.

Arabic is the seventh

most used language on the Internet.

The top three are English,

Chinese and Spanish.

You have cases, for example, in Cairo

where people came out

into the streets

in poor neighbourhoods where

they didn't even have television.

But the sort of the ambience

of the city changed.

It became a revolutionary city.

People were shouting into entryways

of apartment houses: Come, join us.

It wasn't any fancy technology.

One of Tunisian ex-President Ben

Ali’s attempts to placate protesters

was to make the dissident

blogger Slim Amamou

Minister for Youth and Sports.

He resigned within days.