Tunisia and the Real Net Effect: Getting It Right on Protest and Social Media

As with the uprising in Iran in 2009, this month's protests in Tunisia, culminating in the ousting of President Zine El Abidine Bin Ali, have sparked a debate about the role of social media in public resistance. While many seem to have been inspired and given hope by the roles of social media in helping to mobilise action or to spread news of developments, eternal net skeptic Evgeny Morozov continue to dissent.

But he and his allies aren’t just dissenting.

Morozov, in his "First Thoughts on Tunisia and the Role of the Internet", re-invents the course of  events to fit his pre-set narrative minimising the place of social media in activism. While I may not be a net-positive, I’m not as net-negative as Morozov and Co.

To be up-front and accurate, I’m replying to Morozov's entire article, paragraph by paragraph:

News from Tunisia looks good. For better or worse, many of us will be pondering the role that the Internet played or didn't play in the events of the Jasmine Revolution. Below are some preliminary reflections, which, if you know me well, are likely to change by the end of next week!

The Jasmine Revolution? Really? If we agree from the start that the Wikileaks Revolution is a misleading coinage put forth from the "West", why endorse this term, which suddenly arose far from Tunisia a week ago? Why not let the people who bled for the revolution pick a name for it?

Oh, wait, they have. They spread the news of "Sidi Bouzid", the province where Mohamed Bouazizi's attempted suicide by immolation on 17 December was the catalyst for mass protest. Long before "Jasmine Revolution" made a catchy headline, #SidiBouzid was getting out word that something important was developing in a country which was not often at the forefront of international attention.

One thing to keep in mind is that revolutions will continue and Twitter won't go away anytime soon. So, it's reasonable to assume that there WILL be some new-media activity for any social or political turmoil. But correlation, as well all know, doesn't always mean causation. To reiterate: Yes, there will be YouTube videos, Flickr photos, and Twitter messages --- some written by people on the ground and some by those outside --- accompanying any revolution, successful or not. To deny this would be silly.

Morozov seems to be implying that there might be some people out there who think social media starts uprisings. I haven’t seen anyone credible saying that at all. Please let me know if anyone has.

Just as Pascal said, "If God did not exist, he would have to be invented," so Morozov has to invent a foe to put out his supposed argument.

What strikes me about events in Tunisia is that social media seems to have failed in what many of us thought would be its greatest contribution (outside of social mobilization) --- that is, in helping to generate and shape the coverage of events in the mainstream media. On the contrary, despite all the buzz on Twitter it took four weeks to get the events in Tunisia on the front pages of major newspapers, at least here in the U.S. (the situation in Europe was somewhat better --- and it was way better in the Middle East --- for all the obvious reasons).

Congratulations everyone on #IranElection on Twitter. Finally someone --- not just someone, but an arch-skeptic --- appreciates what was being attempted. With the international media effectively blinded by intimidation, restrictions on their movements and expulsion after the 12 June 2009 Presidential election in Iran, citizen journalists and activists tried to move news in and out of the country, and to bring that news to the notice of a "mainstream" media which had lost its ability to report.

Just because people on #IranElection are using Twitter for this purpose does not necessarily mean Tunisians were or are using social media to generate news content abroad. But if they were, they succeeded. Let’s not forget that an event does not have to be on the front page in US papers to be notable, given that the majority of the world’s population lives outside American boundaries. While the mainstream media ignored Tunisia for weeks in the US, the media in Europe and the Middle East did not. And that spread of information through the region and beyond has a significance, even if Evgeny Morozov chose not to put it on his front page before it had an "American" affirmation.

Indeed, perhaps one lesson of the Sidi Bouzid Uprising --- and the attention to it on social media --- is that a movement does not have to be put through a US prism to be important, that it does not depend on a Washington label to rekindle a sense of hope in the population of the Middle East and to put fear in the hearts of autocrats.

How does it fare historically? Well, much of the enthusiasm related to the "Twitter Revolutions" in Moldova and Iran was based on the expectation that social media would help to push these events on the agenda of traditional media -- and it actually worked. By 2011, however, I think that the novelty had worn off -- and few media outlets were interested in carrying "Social Media Changes Everything!" stories. I'm sure there are many other reasons why Tunisia matters less than Iran for most media -- but then so did Moldova…

Actually, the enthusiasm this time was that in 2008 almost 1.7 million of Tunisia’s 10.5 million people had access to the Internet, and that number will have grown in the last 2+ years. So the Web could assist mobilisation by getting information to them --- circumventing State media --- about what was happening inside their country. Opennet Initiatives summarised:

The government has energetically sought to spread Internet access. The ATI reports connectivity of 100 percent for the education section (universities, research laboratories, secondary schools, and primary schools). Government-brokered “free Internet” programs that provide Web access for the price of a local telephone call and increased competition among ISPs have significantly reduced the economic barriers to Internet access. Those Tunisians for whom personal computers remain prohibitively expensive may also access the Internet from more than 300 cybercafés set up by the authorities.

Almost 1 in 10 Tunisians [Editor: another report said close to 1 in 5, higher than the rate in Germany]has a Facebook account, with usage especially high among youth in a country where half the population is between the ages of 20 and 30.

"Tunisia matter[ed] less than Iran for most media" --- and indeed for Morozov, who took little notice of the events until this past week --- because no one anticipated the escalation of protest and political challenge. Thus there was no stage set for the Punch-and-Judy show of "social media caused a revolution; no, it didn't" staged by Morozov and his net-pessimist co-starts.

When Tunisia threatened to go beyond Iran in its political outcome --- oh my goodness, this President might not only be illegitimate but might have to admit that illegitimacy and give up his office --- then the stage had to be set quickly, with little examination of the political, economic, and social dynamics that brought the country to this point. And thus the pantomime discussion of "social media" was already detached from the essential context.

This is not to deny that many of us were watching the Tunisian events unfold via Twitter. But let's not kid ourselves: This is still a very small audience of overeducated tech-savvy people interested in foreign policy. I bet that 90% of Twitter users are not like that -- and that percentage will get worse as Twitter becomes more mainstream. So, if we evaluate it in terms of awareness-raising by exploiting and building off the mainstream media, Tunisia's "Twitter Revolution" (as Andrew Sullivan was already quick to dub it), seems to have failed.

Here, Morozov goes out of his way to insult the hundreds of millions of people who have Twitter and Facebook accounts and know how to browse YouTube. What does tech-savvyness have to do with following news on Twitter and Facebook and watching YouTube videos? You don’t need a degree to click on hashtags on Twitter or read posts on Facebook. The truth that Mr. Morozov seems to not be able to admit is that people are slowly moving away from the mainstream media to getting their news from social-networking sites.

If this statement weren’t true, you wouldn’t have Twitter feeds running underneath news coverage on network news channels. You wouldn’t have them reading your reactions on Twitter. You wouldn’t have their reporters lining up to be on social media. What has become a norm for most people interested in foreign policy –-- check Twitter to get the citations for the best coverage --- is still the domain of the tech-savvy for Morozov.

I'm curious to see more data about the role that social media have played in the mobilization of protesters. I hope that Sami ben Gharbia and others would enlighten us here. Off the top of my head, it strikes me as improbable that some people in Tunisia had a higher chance of learning about the protests from the Internet than they did from conversations in the streets. Besides, many people got killed, the situation was highly emotional --- and I'm not sure how much anger tweets and blog posts could add to such visceral developments.

Maybe Morozov should have waited for others to enlighten him before commenting on this subject. There’s a great saying, “When in doubt, get horizontal.” Writing a lengthy piece about what you are not sure about is hardly constructive. To the contrary, opinions off the top of your head --- when you are presenting yourself as an expert on the role of the Internet on social change --- does nothing but demoralise those who are spending time, energy, emotion, and thought in doing something constructive with social media.

I don't deny that the Internet may have played a role in publicizing the protests in Tunisia; it's just that the conditions in which the protests took place do not strike me as those where the leaders of the protest movement had to post updates on where to meet and when. Maybe I am wrong, but it all seemed to be somewhat chaotic and decentralized. Once again, it would be great to see more data on this.

Four paragraphs earlier, the Internet had failed to publicise the protests. But Morozov moves from his quick contradiction to mis-understand the nature of the Tunisian movement.The uprising did not have visible leaders --- it was pretty much spontaneous amongst a large group. That’s why it was chaotic and decentralized.

Another myth broken: uprisings don’t necessarily need leaders. 

What also strikes me as very odd is that just two weeks ago the Tunisian government was bold and strong enough to break into the email accounts of Tunisian activists -- surely, they could turn off the Internet in the whole country if they really wanted to and saw it as a lethal threat? This speaks either to their misjudgment of the situation or to their dismissal of the Internet as a tool of mobilization -- which, given the profile of those who started the protests (mostly the poor and the unemployed), doesn't strike me as an unreasonable assumption.

Yes, cutting off internet to the whole country would have paralyzed people’s activity on social media. But they would have had to do it for all of this past month. In the meantime, let’s not forget the cost of that shutdown. The Internet doesn’t just serve to facilitate Tweeting, Facebook networking and YouTube video uploading. It has become the backbone of global commerce. Tunisia might be an Arab country in Africa, but it is far more advanced than what Morozov would have you believe.

Think of a country where three quarters of the population is literate, two-thirds of the population is urban. Only 3.8% of the population live below the poverty line, almost 90% of the population have cell phones, and more than 15% have access to the internet in 2008. Think of a country where commerce would be adversely affected if the Internet was cut off.

As for the poor and unemployed who started the protests, let’s not forget, the man whose suicide attempt sparked the uprising may have been poor and unemployed, but he also had a university degree in computer science.

The question of social mobilization is a difficult one, and we should continue asking it. We should not, of course, forget the structural conditions -- especially the worsening economic situation in Tunisia -- as one factor that may have made the conditions for such a revolution more likely. Now, let me ask something really wild: Would this revolution have happened if there were no Facebook and Twitter? I think this is a key question to ask. If the answer is "yes," then the contribution that the Internet has made was minor; there is no way around it. On this logic, we shouldn't expect similar outcomes in other countries just because they also have vibrant communities of cyberactivists.

Yes, of course the uprising was sparked by rising food prices, unemployment and corruption. No one will deny that. As for the question of social mobilisation, while it may be difficult one, it is not impossible to answer.

The outside observers who came late to the party needed to follow Posterous and Facebook rather than Twitter --- a quick look at Alexa would show you that Facebook is the most popular site in Tunisia and Twitter ranks at 18. Those two sites were the most widely used by Tunisians to report on the uprising and to encourage people to join protests. Had analysts looked at postings there --- and had they used social media effectively, following @SBZ_news, @nawaat, @monaeltahawy, @weddady, @Hisham_G, @Brian_Whit, and many, many others --- they would have better data to answer Morozov's question. More importantly, because Morozov seems to have no cognisance of what was on Facebook and Posterous, he does have to meet his own challenge: he can just put the artificial speculation, separating social movement and social media, of "Yes". And he can imply, if you can't prove the negative, then I win.

Allow me to rework Morozov's slanted challenge: "Would this revolution have happened if there were no Facebook, Posterous, and Twitter? I think this is a key question to ask. If the answer is 'no' or at least 'not in the form or the scale that it assumed', then the contribution that the Internet made to social activism has to be considered with more than a simplistic dismissal."

Finally, I think we shouldn't lose sight of the broader political and social impact of the Internet prior to mobilization (or, as some would put it, the "revolutionary situation"). Part of the argument that I'm making in The Net Delusion is that it's wrong to assess the political power of the Internet solely based on its contribution to social mobilization: We should also consider how it empowers the government via surveillance, how it disempowers citizens via entertainment, how it transforms the nature of dissent by shifting it into a more virtual realm, how it enables governments to produce better and more effective propaganda, and so forth. All of this might decrease the likelihood that the revolutionary situation like the one in Tunisia actually happens --- even if the Internet might be of tremendous help in social mobilization.

So now it is not only that the Internet is not contributing to protest but that it is probably going to stop that protest. What I see in this assertion is the blind assumption that perhaps people living in oppressive regimes like Belarus, Tunisia, Iran, Egypt, Algeria, China and the likes do not yearn for change. Perhaps democracy, freedom, and human rights are not things that oppressed masses living under dictators, shahs, and ayatollahs want. By flooding the Internet with porn sites, music, movies, and/or propaganda, the regimes disempower  the people.

If that were true, then, why is it tha,t even though broadcast and print media in Tunisia is tightly controlled by the government, Tunisians still yearn for basic human rights? Should they have not been kept busy by the propaganda, music and movies and trivial pursuits by those media?

Yes, “the Internet is 98% BS and 1% child porn,” as a friend of mine once said, but the remaining 1% is important. In a world where we order food, clothes, cars, and houses online, where we study, work and get paid online, find love online, where get married online and are even starting to attend church online, is it too much of a stretch to accept that we can also mobilise dissent online?

The point here is that while the Internet could make the next revolution more effective, it could also make it less likely. (And yes, I know that other factors --- primarily economic and political ones --- are probably way more influential than the Internet in influencing the odds of the revolutionary situation either way).

The author finally concedes that the internet actually might have a constructive role to play after all. Of course, Morozov immediately jumps to the negative effects that strangle uprisings at birth --- after all, that is the basis of his reputation as an expert. But in making that jump for a case like Tunisia, he is going to have to provide some evidence for his blanket assertion.

This, in part, is a lesson that I draw from events in Belarus in December: There was plenty of activity on Twitter and there was potential for mobilization -- but to focus on this at the expense of understanding the more sinister ways in which the Belarusian authorities exploit the Internet and in which their citizens become less politicized because of it would be to miss a much more important role that the Internet has been playing in the country.  

Notice how conveniently Morozov omits the fact that within hours of the protests, the Belarusian government cut off access to Facebook, Twitter, LiveJournal, GChat, and a multitude of email providers and then proceeded to arrest hundreds of protesters, ransacked offices of media sympathetic to the opposition, and curtailed the Internet severely. The citizens of Belarus did not become "less politicised"; the regime, in its efforts to maintain authority, had to deal with a "more politicised" populace

Let us not bunch all uprisings, revolutions and mobilizations together simply because the internet played a minimal or maximal role. Belarus is not Iran. Iran is not Tunisia. And Tunisia is definitely not the only country that is going to rise up against its dictator.

While the Internet helped spread the news about Iran internationally, it helped, people on the ground in Tunisia to learn about what was happening in their own country. In Belarus, it did not get that chance, at least for now. But even in that case, the level of fear it has sparked in autocratic governments is a victory for online activism.

Nevertheless, I do hope that the events in Tunisia serve as an inspiration to people in Belarus and elsewhere.

As do I.