Social Media as a Tool for Protest. La cyberrésistance marque des points. Les jeunes Tunisiens ont enfin trouvé un moyen de faire entendre leur voix grâce aux réseaux sociaux. Le régime de Ben Ali n’arrive plus à les faire taire. Pour le président Ben Ali, au pouvoir depuis vingt-trois ans, la dernière quinzaine de décembre 2010 et les débuts de janvier 2011 n’ont pas été de tout repos. La Tunisie, volontiers comparée à un zoo dont les pensionnaires en cage seraient plus ou moins bien nourris et logés par leurs gardiens, a totalement disjoncté. Tout a commencé le 17 décembre dernier quand un jeune chômeur diplômé de 26 ans, Mohamed Bouaziz, s’est immolé par le feu à Sidi Bouzid, chef-lieu du Centre-Ouest, région des plus déshéritées. “C’est la révolte sur Facebook”, affirme un jeune manifestant.
Commentaire d’un internaute : “C’étaient comme des Zoulous qui font hou, hou… hou, hou…” Sur la page Facebook de Slah Hnid, on peut constater le désastre. Une génération d’émeutiers L’offensive des guérilléros du Net. First thoughts on Tunisia and the role of the Internet. 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! 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.
How does it fare historically? This is not to deny that many of us were watching the Tunisian events unfold via Twitter. I'm curious to see more data about the role that social media have played in the mobilization of protesters. Tunisia, social media and the politics of attention. Over Twitter, Sami ben Gharbia - who, I hope, will finally get a chance to return to Tunisia after his long exile - pointed out that social media did play an important role in "feeding" information to Al-Jazeera and France 24, conceding that at the same time it didn't have much of an impact on the coverage of the protests in the US. Sami's remark made me think about my earlier blog post a bit more.
My argument isn't really about the efficacy of social media in improving the coverage of the protests in the mainstream media (i.e. their venue, schedule, leaders, etc). Rather, my argument is in the vein of Ethan Zuckerman's reflections on media attention patterns - and ways of shifting them. But while Ethan's work is focused mostly on getting ordinary Americans to care about foreign affairs, my interest here is on a somewhat different, more pragmatic level: getting Americans to care is likely to push Washington to care as well. There were good grounds for believing this hype. What if Tunisia's revolution ended up like Iran's. (I am not a big fan of counterfactual thinking, but in this particular case it does help to generate new insights.) So let's assume that the protests in Tunisia had eventually gone the way of the Green Revolution in Iran: the government stayed in power, regrouped, and began a massive crackdown on its opponents.
As we know from the post-protest crackdown in Iran, the Internet has proved a very rich source of incriminating details about activists; the police scrutinized Facebook groups, tweets, and even email groups very closely. Furthermore, the Iran government may have also analyzed Internet traffic and phone communications related to the opposition. Now, Tunisia is no in Iran. Its long-ruling dictator is now gone and the new government is unlikely to engage in repressions on the same scale. Yet if Ben Ali's regime didn't fall, it appears certain to that the authorities would be brutally going after anyone who has ever posted a damning Facebook post or an angry email.
P.S. Quel impact d'internet sur la révolution tunisienne? Quel a été l’impact des médias en ligne, et notamment des réseaux sociaux, dans la «révolution de jasmin» tunisienne, qui s’est traduite le 14 janvier par la fuite du pays de Ben Ali? Comme pour d’autres mouvement de protestation, en Iran par exemple, la question est posée par les médias, l’AFP décrivant par exemple Twitter et Facebook comme «des caisses de résonance de la révolte des Tunisiens», dans «un flux ininterrompu que le régime n'est pas parvenu à contenir». Un flux qui s’est traduit, également, par de nombreuses vidéos postées sur YouTube sous l’intitulé Sidi Bouzid (la ville d’où est partie le mouvement) ainsi que, dans une autre perspective, par les informations publiées par Wikileaks, selon lesquelles les diplomates américains voyaient l’entourage de Ben Ali comme une «quasi-mafia» et le régime comme «sclérosé».
«Joyeux prophètes des nouvelles technologies» Dans un post publié le 15 janvier, le blog Meilcour dresse lui un bilan nuancé de l'impact d'internet sur l'évènement. Le Blogging en Tunisie : une révolution ou une évolution? Le Blogging en Tunisie : une révolution ou une évolution? Les tunisiens ont compris depuis quelques années que les skyblogs n’ont pas leur place sur la toile tunisienne et nous avons assisté à une émergence des blogs à caractère professionnel, des blogs qui traitent de sujets beaucoup plus importants que les anciens “tiens c’est moi et mes amis sur la photo…”, des blogs qui sont devenus une source d’informations à ne pas négliger, même pour les journalistes classiques qui viennent désormais dénicher quelques scoops sur ces blogs web.
Qui sont ces jeunes blogueurs tunisiens passionnés par les médias-web, pourquoi les blogs ? La plupart de ces jeunes appartiennent à une tranche d’âge de 20 à 35 ans, des étudiants, des jeunes diplômés, des jeunes cadres et chefs d’entreprises qui ont trouvé un moyen plus rapide, plus facile d’accès et moins coûteux pour toucher une population à l’affût des nouvelles sur Internet. Q: Depuis quand avez vous commencé à blogguer? Lebanon: Bloggers Support Tunisian Protests against “Arab Pinochet” This post is part of our special coverage of Tunisia Revolution 2011.
Lebanese bloggers have joined the chorus of concern over the Tunisian riots that have thus far claimed 24 lives. Sympathy and support is extended to the Tunisian youth protesting the authoritarianism, corruption, and poor economic management of President Zine el Abidine ben Ali, dubbed the “Arab Pinochet” by Lebanese blogger, the Angry Arab. The protests began after the self-immolation attempt of 24-year-old, Mohamed Bouazizi, in frustration at the country's high unemployment, soaring food prices and government corruption.
The Arab world is following attentively Tunisia's worst internal crisis in decades, as many Arabs empathise with the desperation felt by the Tunisian protestors. Rita Chemaly wrote a powerful blog post in support of the protestors: It's a horror, The images run non-stop, I watch Al Jazeera, I switch, to watch CNN, Euronews, then France 1, 2, 3 and M6, I watch the Lebanese channels, as well … Tunisians Document Protests Online. Nawaat.orgAn image from a Tunisian blog of students in the capital, Tunis, who arranged themselves to spell out the words “No to Murder” in Arabic on Monday. Updated | 10:55 p.m. As my colleague David Kirkpatrick reports from Tunisia, protesters there have been using the Web to organize demonstrations and spread news of violent clashes with the security forces in recent weeks.
Last week, one activist and blogger, Slim Amamou, even managed to alert the world to the fact that he had been arrested by apparently turning on his phone and using Google Latitude to reveal his location: inside an interior ministry building in the capital, Tunis.* Nawaat.orgA screenshot from Google Latitude showing a Tunisian blogger’s last known location: in a government building. Some of the most evocative, and disturbing, images of the protests and clashes have appeared in video clips posted on YouTube. (Note that this clip of the crowd singing the anthem also shows someone recording it on a mobile phone camera.) The First Twitter Revolution? - By Ethan Zuckerman. Friday evening, Tunisian President Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali boarded a jet for Malta, leaving his prime minister to face streets filled with protesters demanding a change of government in the North African country.
The protests began weeks earlier in the central city of Sidi Bouzid, sparked by the suicide of Mohamed Bouazizi, an unemployed university graduate whose informal vegetable stall was shuttered by the police. His despair exemplified the frustration that many Tunisians felt with their contracting economy, high levels of unemployment and inequality, censored media and Internet, and widespread corruption. Protests spread from city to city, with trade unions, lawyers, and countless unemployed Tunisian youth demanding a change to an economic system that appeared to benefit a small number of families close to power and leave ordinary citizens behind. As the protests intensified, Ben Ali offered concessions to his people: 23 years into his reign, he agreed to step down in 2014. Tunisia: Can We Please Stop Talking About ?Twitter Revolutions? - Radio Free Europe / Radio Liberty ? 2011.
While the tear gas was still hanging in the streets of Tunis, many pundits were quick to christen Tunisia’s revolution. Andrew Sullivan has asked (again) whether it’s a Twitter Revolution. Elizabeth Dickinson, among others, speculated in “Foreign Policy” that it might be a “WikiLeaks revolution.” Anonymous, the online activists who recently attacked targets perceived to be against WikiLeaks, claimed it as their own after their DDOS attacks on various government targets. For cyber-utopians, the unfolding events in Tunisia and the role of social media, was a cause célèbre, a knockdown to the naysayer Malcolm Gladwell. First off, it looks like social media did have an important role to play here. Revolutions, of course, are notoriously slippery customers to evaluate. The problem is that we so desperately want there to be a Twitter revolution.
More than that, Twitter revolution narratives are popular because rather than being about Tunisia, they are often really about ourselves.