8/10/2023 0 Comments Middle eastern countries in revolt"Thank you Facebook," read one graffiti sprayed on Tunisian walls, long before the social media giant drew increasing fire for spreading not just calls for freedom but also fake news and hate speech. With head-spinning speed, Tunisia's ruler of more than two decades, President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, was gone in less than a month. "We had no other platform to broadcast videos." "International media like Al-Jazeera covered the uprising directly from Facebook," Kaloutcha said. Online platforms also formed a bridge with traditional global media, further accelerating the regional revolt. If previously dissent could only be whispered, some of the citizens' fear and apathy lifted as online users saw their networks of family and friends speak out in the virtual space. Either they censored everything that circulated, or they censored nothing." "Information could be published right under the regime's nose," he said. "The role of Facebook was decisive," recalled a blogger using the name Hamadi Kaloutcha, who had studied in Belgium and back in 2008 launched a Facebook forum called "I have a dream. Smartphones with their cameras became citizens' weapons in the information war that allowed almost everyone to bear witness, and to organise, in a trend that has been dubbed "mass mobile-isation".Ĭlips were shared especially on Facebook, a medium outside the control of police states that had for decades tightly controlled print and broadcast media. Long simmering discontent among the less privileged was harnessed and multiplied by tech-savvy and often middle-class activists into a mass movement that would spread from Morocco to Iran.īouazizi's self-immolation was not caught on video - but the subsequent street protests were, along with the police violence that aimed to suppress them through fear but instead sparked more anger. If his desperate act on Decemexpressed a real-world fury shared by millions, it was the virtual universe of online communications that spread the anger and hope for change like wildfire. The spark that set off the Arab Spring was the tragic suicide of Tunisian street vendor Mohammed Bouazizi, 26, who, having long been cheated and humiliated by state officials, set himself on fire. While the heavy lid of state censorship has come down once more in many places, that free spirit has also brought change for the better, especially in the small Mediterranean country where it all started, Tunisia. Today, say Arab cyber-activists, states have lost much of their control over what citizens can see, know and say, as evidenced by a later wave of protests that rocked Algeria, Sudan, Iraq and Lebanon in 20. "They were a formidable weapon of communication."
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