Duality of SNS as Change and Stability Mechanisms: Case of Twitter Revolution in Egypt

Twitter revolutions, which are political events characterized with heavy use of social media, showed that information technology might not only bring friends together, but also provoke the dreadful offline events with high-impact outcomes up to major political changes in the region. However, the conclusions and opinions about the role of Social Networking Sites in modern revolutions remained controversial, so we have analysed the case of Egypt Twitter Revolution in order to understand the different opinions on roles of SNS in it. We have adopted Duality-Dualism framework as a theoretical lens and concluded that in mass media coverage, social networking sites are portrayed as having several roles during the revolution period. The application of the framework demonstrated the duality of views on SNS and resulted in 4 identified roles of SNS during the revolution periods.