February 2011 was the month of the domino effect. Following on from the popular uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt, social media was flooded with calls for protests in Middle Eastern counties including Yemen, Algeria, Bahrain and Libya.
The internet’s influence was evidenced by the increasing reliance of mainstream news upon Twitter and Facebook. On 4 February Al Jazeera reported that calls for action were spreading online – citing the Syrian Revolution Facebook page which was liked by 13,000 people.
Bypassing a state ban on Facebook, Syrian protesters used proxy servers to communicate. Fidaa Aldin Issa, a Syrian living in Sweden, told Al Jazeera that he and other activists had found each other through social networking sites such as Facrbook.
“We’re trying through Facebook to break this fear, encouraging them [Syrians] to stage peaceful protests, without violence, even without badmouthing the president.”
Throughout the month, social media not only enabled protesters to coordinate rebellions across the Arab world, but it provided a channel for publicising the protests in action. The popularity of uprisings – and the reactions of ruling regimes – were broadcast to the world through Youtube. Mainstream media faced new challenges as it battled to sift through a wealth of amateur film content, interpreting its significance and veracity before publishing it to a wider audience. As journalists were banned from countries such as Libya, it became the norm for mainstream news sites to publish amateur footage.
As Peter Beaumont wrote in The truth about Twitter, Facebook and the uprisings in the Arab world: “…with state censorship rife in many of these countries, Facebook has functioned in the way the media should – as a source of information.”