The Jasmine Revolution

TunisiaTwitting out the tyrrant

Legal culture- presentationBrook Bekele 2014

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Facebook Victory and Twitter Revolution

The ‘Spark’ That Started it All 

• December 17, 2011, a young Tunisian street vendor, Mohamed Bouazizi, set himself on fire

• when protests reached the capital, Tunis, the government responded with even more brutality, arresting demonstrators, activists, and shutting down the Internet.

• Lastly, the President, Zine el-Abedin Ben Ali, shuffled his cabinet and promised to create 300,000 jobs

• On January 14, Ben Ali and his family fled the country taking refuge in Saudi Arabia.

Where does that bring us…

• This act marked the end of one of the Arab world's most repressive regimes.

• the first time ever in history that an Arab dictator has been removed by a revolution rather than a coup d'État.

Easy to say but hard to do…the cause?

• Mohamed Bouazizi, a young, college-educated Tunisian man from Sidi Bou Zid, set himself on fire in front of a municipal office??

• 20 years dictatorship??

Protest for what

• Dissatisfaction with the rule of local governments

• Wide gaps in income levels

• Dictatorship or absolute monarchy

• Human rights and democracy

• Political corruption

•  Unemployment, decline of economy

The means to an end desired

• Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world.

• social media and networking as a tool for political mobilisation towards regime change and pro-democracy movements

• democracy is just a tweet away

• If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet.

• on one side are government thugs firing bullets and on the other side are young protesters firing ‘tweets

A media revolution in the making

• The Tunisian state-owned television shockingly showed animal documentaries while the country was revolting against a dictator

• Dégage Facebook event

• In the absence of real journalism its a hub of information

The usage of it

• The analysis is based on a dataset acquired during the height of the Tunisian uprising. I used the Twitter application programming interface (API) to query for the most recent Twitter posts every 5 minutes, requesting the last 100 publicly posted tweets containing specific chosen keywords.

• The first dataset includes 168,663 tweets posted January 12–19, 2011, containing the keywords “#sidibouzid” or “tunisia.”

• identified 39,696 distinct users in the Tunisia dataset.

The Uprising Goes Viral

• Within two weeks, and ominously for the government, protests began to spread to the more prosperous parts of the country, including the cities of Sfax and Tunis.

• It was then that the movement became almost a viral phenomenon, and as it drew more and more people, the center of online action moved to Facebook

• A much more popular medium in Tunisia than Twitter, it was also a more visual one — photos and videos posted on Facebook made the protesters’ case in a visceral way as they spread through people’s online social circles.

From twitting to open activism

•  Nour said that it was an online video that provoked “a physical response” that persuaded her to make the jump into open activism

• when in-country Tunisians slept, the outside world took over the role of sharing information and persuading.

•  the Netherlands-based organization would post videos originating on Facebook (and no doubt mostly shot with cell phones) to its posterous blog, where activists would find them and spread them through every online channel imaginable.

From twitting to open activism CTD

• this amplification effect went far beyond the extended Tunisian community itself, with activists in many countries and from many backgrounds helping to promote the cause.

• The satellite/cable channel Al Jazeera in particular began taking videos posted to the web and broadcasting them to a mass audience,

• crucial in spreading the revolution beyond a younger demographic: as long as anti-government messages were restricted to personal internet channels, the protesters’ parents and grandparents could ignore or dismiss them. But once they started showing up on television, they became real.

From twitting to open activism CTD

• When video of a counter-protest in favor of President Ben Ali was shown on television, for instance, activists could post their own footage of the same event that showed that very few people had actually attended — the television cameras had been carefully placed to give the illusion of a large crowd 

•  they posted videos of people killed by police only minutes after the president declared that the government would no longer respond with violence, including one of a young woman shot in the head as she came back from the market with a carton of milk — she had wrongly trusted that it was safe to go out.

From twitting to open activism CTD

• Throughout the last days of the street protests, social channels also helped people come to consensus quickly as the situation changed from hour to hour

• When bloggers, activists and musicians were rounded up and taken into custody, protesters could switch their emphasis to arguing for their release.

• Every time the president spoke, people would write in mass numbers and reach an agreement that demonstrations need to continue.

From twitting to open activism CTD

• And when the country’s Prime Minister attempted to invoke the country’s constitution on January 14, lawyers and others were able to show that he was citing the wrong part of the document and hence was trying to act illegally, a move that backfired.

Self-Organizing Against Chaos

• the president prepared to flee the country and the police began to pull out of the streets, simple chaos became the greatest danger.

• Here again, social media channels gave people a way to organize themselves to protect their neighborhoods and stop the spread of destabilizing rumors.

• Some gathered on Facebook to form teams to clean up streets and shops, others organized to ration out food and bread.

• Meanwhile, neighborhood watch groups relayed information on snipers and armed militia groups or spread the word about looters so that they could be intercepted and thwarted.

Self-Organizing Against Chaos

• Rumors and disinformation

• Facebook and text messages let people pass along the truth.

• Overall, online social tools helped activists counter those who were trying to terrorize the population, helping to calm the entire situation down — they spread the message that people were helping to keep things in control.

What’s Next

• After the Revolution comes the hard part: creating a new society.

• And as Tunisians use social media (and the newly freed mass media channels) to communicate amongst themselves and collectively write the next chapter of their history, it seems clear the internet’s ability to make anyone a publisher played some role in what may be the first of a wave of revolutions in North Africa and the Middle East.

Bottom line

• social media didn’t cause the Tunisian Revolution, but they enabled it — without the ability of a small number of activists to pass along shocking news and imagery from the first wave of protests, they might have fizzled out as so many street demonstrations in so many countries have in the past.

• It helped to keep the rhythm, of the revolution by the revolutionaries

Post Revolution