From Morocco to Yemen, the Arab world is burning, and fuelling this fire of change is the 21st century panacea, i.e. ‘the social networks’. These agents of change helped the Arab civilisation achieve what they could not for decades in just a few days or weeks. Be it Facebook, Twitter, Google or the blogosphere, they have found themselves central to the action in an unprecedented way. Let us take a look at how some of these new found tools have spurred the actions on the ground.
#Sidibouzid, a Twitter hashtag, gave rise to a movement that toppled not only the Ben Ali regime but also inspired a dozen other mutinies. The picture of Mohammed Bouazizi, the youth who set himself on fire in the Tunisian town of Sidi Bouzid in protest against unemployment and official harassment spread like wildfire on YouTube and other social media. This was for the first time that the internet spawned a feeling of enough is enough among the Tunisians.
Soon after Tunisia happened, Egypt was getting ready to herald in a new dawn of democracy, the first salvo being the “We are all Khaled Said” Facebook page. Khaled Said was the young Egyptian man who was beaten to death by the police in June 2010. The online activists began protest groups with Khaled as their ‘martyr’. Some anonymous activist also came up with the Arabic version of the Facebook page, who was later revealed as Google executive Wael Ghonim. #Jan25 made its presence felt on Twitter, the day Wael called for young Egyptians to take to the streets. Twitter was abuzz with videos, pictures, data and links tagged with #Jan25, which became an effective way to group together online information about the protest. The influence of social networking was such that an Egyptian man named his newly born child “Facebook”. By now one thing was very clear: the social networking websites had become a force to reckon with.
The events in Tunisia and Egypt inspired a whole generation and Yemen was no different. The “Yemeni Anger Revolution” group has almost 20,000 members on Facebook; those who were not bitten by the social network bug were encouraged to pass on the word via traditional methods like SMS and cards. After the Yemeni government cracked down on the internet, many Yemenis settled outside Yemen shared their contact numbers with their friends and relatives in Yemen in the wake of the internet shutdown to help them share news about Yemen. They tweeted and re-tweeted news and links with the international media.
The hashtag #Feb17 has categorised the Libyan movement and given a fresh identity to the Libyan protest amid unrest across the Arab world. February 17 is the date when the Libyan protest against Colonel Gaddafi began. Information — what little is accessible from the country — has been pouring in on Twitter and YouTube, where activists are uploading news the minute they are able to get online. A dedicated Facebook page for the Libyan Revolution has more than 82,000 members and another key Facebook page by the name of ‘RNN Libya’ has 22,000 members. Libya has caught the fever of internet-driven dissent passed on from their friends in Tunisia and Egypt, as young Libyans are being exposed to the power of YouTube, Facebook, Twitter to voice their opposition to the Gaddafi regime.
Just like the #Feb17 Libyan protest, the Bahraini activists have #Feb14 as their identity on Twitter. Internet providers were shut down and Facebook accounts were deleted across Algeria as thousands of pro-democracy demonstrators were arrested in violent street demonstrations. President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s government first cracked down on the internet to nip the protest in the bud.
In Morocco, the Facebook group “Movement of freedom and democracy” has attracted more than 90,000 members. The Iraqis had their own Twitter tag as #iq4c but many of them tagged news of protest in Iraq with #Feb25 so as to reach a larger audience of the internet by linking their cause with other popular revolts.
In Syria, the case is a bit different; people are still learning about the Arab revolution through Facebook, media, Twitter, newspapers and blogs. The Facebook page “Syrian Revolution 2011” has received more than 25,000 followers. People in Syria have slowly started to come out in the open against the Syrian authorities.
As the crusade for democracy and basic human rights rages on, today’s youth have a lot of tools at their disposal which the earlier crusaders did not possess. The internet has become a conduit for disseminating the idea of democracy, which was till now alien to the Arab civilisation. For a change the internet is applauded for its power to influence and change history for the better.
The writer is the National Service Scheme (NSS) leader of KC College and an IT graduate from Mumbai University