The Role Of New Media And Communication Technologies In Arab Transitions

The pace of events in Tunisia, Egypt and Libya in early 2011 led analysts to identify Information and Communication Technologies as an important catalyst of the Arab spring. ICTs include mobile phones and Internet-based applications just as email, blogs, forums, social networking sites just as Facebook and Twitter, and Voice over Internet Protocol programmes just as Skype. Looking at the role of these tools in processes of political change, we distinguish two phases: firstly, their role in bringing down old regimes, and secondly, their significance in consolidating transitions to democracy once the revolutionary dust has settled. Whilst it is clear that ICTs made an essential contribution to the overthrow of Mubarak and Ben Ali, experiences from other parts of the world show that their role in sustaining the democratic transition process in the longer run is less certain.

While avoiding deterministic explanations regarding their 'liberatory' character, there is a broad consensus that new communication tools, which enable individuals broadly to share information played an important role as accelerators of the social protests that ended the Mubarak and Ben Ali regimes. Mobile phones, online forums, blogging platforms, video-sharing platforms like You Tube, and social network sites like Twitter and Facebook, have all been used increasingly by Arab activists to gather and spread information and weaken the regimes' control over the political narrative. These tools helped political change thanks to their dual ability to facilitate the organisation of protests and broadcast these, locally and globally, in real-time.

The Arab spring gave this development credit

International reporting on the Arab spring gave this development credit by coining catchy labels like 'Facebook-' and 'Twitter-revolutions'. The actual impact of SNS was more nuanced. On the one hand, the reach of SNS is limited to Internet users, which amount to 33.9 and 24.5 per cent of the population in Tunisia and Egypt, respectively. Even though these are among the highest penetration rates in Africa, total outreach remains limited. The spread of mobile phones is considerably higher, with 83.3 per cent among Tunisians and 50 per cent among Egyptians. Even more, different SNS had varying uses and impacts. Tunisia has over two million Facebook users, nevertheless estimates of active Twitter subscribers at that time of the revolution were as low as 200. An Egyptian activist stated that 'Facebook was used to schedule protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world'.

While the Arab spring became the most important and successful example of the use of ICTs for political mobilisation, it was not the first. Barack Obama's successful election campaign in 2008 highlighted the power of the Internet in political mobilisation. Soon thereafter political uprisings in Moldova and Iran - both following rigged elections - became the first 'Twitter revolutions'. The latter two provide a valuable lesson nevertheless, in that they proved to be less a reflection of the growing power of SNS than of the growing international attention paid to ICTs. In the context of the Arab spring, even though to external observers online discussions were some of the most visible components of the upheavals, they were truly not their main cause.

Popular mobilisation against autocratic regimes: Locally, ICTs were not decisive in triggering the Arab spring, nevertheless they helped activists simultaneously to organise protests and construct a bottom-up narrative against the regime. They enabled people on the streets to record the protests and the police's response, remain connected to other protesters, react flexibly to new developments, and broadcast live what happened on the ground to a global audience. This constituted a sufficient threat for Mubarak to shut down Internet connections for five days. This measure proved counterproductive for the regime as more people were forced onto the streets, which as well helped them to evade the state's online monitoring. This may have inspired the Syrian regime to end its initial Facebook blockage, as it realised that a total blackout was near impossible, and allowing access to Facebook proved more efficient to control dissent. Even though the radically new character of these technologies limits comparisons to developments in other countries, some parallels are pertinent.

The Philippines

In the Philippines, while the 2001 impeachment trial of President Joseph Estrada, loyalists in the Congress voted to set aside key evidence against him. Angry crowds reacted by calling for a mobilisation via text messages.

The popularisation of blogs and SNS has extended the group of potential targets from activists and journalists to any citizen politically active online. Together, the Internet has been used to circumvent government controls, access information and share it with a significant part of the population. Even though heavily monitored, online tools and spaces reproduce and amplify rumours, news and pieces of information that weaken regimes' control over information. Regimes fear the effects of contagion and 'waves' that feature prominently in democratisation theories. As a result, authoritarian regimes like China, Zimbabwe or Equatorial Guinea have blocked reporting on the Arab spring and have since increased web monitoring.

Unfortunately, harassment and control of the media is nevertheless intact even in post-revolutionary countries, to varying degrees, as remnants of the old regimes stay put and continue old practices. In Egypt, the arrest of blogger/journalist Alaa Abdel Fattah as a result of his critical reporting on the military council's rule has generated widespread protests and monitoring and harassment of SNS users continues. In Tunisia, in spite of the praised elections and the establishment of the National Instance for the Reform of Information and Communication, pre-revolutionary media laws remain in place and TV and radio licences are waiting to be granted. Strong links between media and politics have as well been brought to the centre stage through the businessman Hachemi Hamdi, leader of the Popular List party and owner of a TV station featuring him while his campaign. Hence, in both countries, faster progress on securing freedom of expression for both traditional and new media will be crucial to circumvent an undermining of revolutionary gains.

ICTs should be considered a facilitating to put it more exactly than a decisive factor, and hence not a new panacea for democracy. Through mobilisation, ICTs can effectively accelerate regime change, but their impact is dependent on factors just as an organised civil society, opposition movement or international backing. This is particularly relevant for countries facing a possible transition just as Syria and Yemen, where access to ICTs is not sufficient to provoke changes given the absence of all other factors. ICTs' role as a tool and channel for political participation and mobilisation will grow as mobile and Internet user rates increase. In the Arab world, this will intensify the battle over information and communication spaces, as both pro-democracy forces and spoilers will seek to employ them to their benefit.