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.