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What’s Fueling Mideast Protests? It’s More Than Twitter
January 27, 2011
Don’t call it a Twitter revolution just yet. Sure, protesters in the Middle East are using the short-messaging service — and other social media tools — to organize. And yes, there are sporadic reports coming out of Egypt that the Mubarak regime has shut off internet access [ http://www.arabist.net/blog/2011/1/28/urgent-egypt-has-shut-off-the-internet.html (not available as I make this post)] — despite Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s call [ http://blogs.state.gov/index.php/site/entry/clinton_jordan_judeh ] “not to prevent peaceful protests or block communications, including social media.”
But don’t confuse tools with root causes, or means with ends. The protests in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen are against dictators who’ve held power — and clamped down on their people — for decades. That’s the fuel for the engine of dissent. The dozen or more protesters that self-immolated in Egypt didn’t do it for the tweets.
“It’s about years of repression and dictatorship. Revolutions existed before Twitter and Facebook,” Issandr el-Amrani, a Cairo writer and activist [ http://www.arabist.net/ (not available as I make this post)], said in a telephone interview from Tunisia. “It’s really not much more complicated than this.”
Only about a quarter of the Egyptian populace is online, el-Amrani estimated. So street protests have grown the old-fashioned way: by leaflets [ http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/jan/27/egypt-protest-leaflets-mass-action ] and spontaneous amalgamation.
“I’ve seen a lot of small groups of people wandering the streets and people spontaneously joining them. At every house, they would yell, ‘Come down,’” said an expert on Middle Eastern censorship in an interview from Cairo.
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http://www.wired.com/dangerroom/2011/01/social-media-oppression/ [with comments]