From Revolution to Participation: Social Media and the Democratic Decision-Making Process

“Egypt is offline”. At the time when this news came over the ticker on 2011-01-28, the so-called “Facebook revolution” had already reached a new high. According to Hosni Mubarak, who was still president of Egypt to that time, and according to his regime, it was no longer sufficient to sporadically shut off cellular networks and social media services, such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. Instead, the entire Internet seemed to become an incontrollable threat to the governmental machinery of power which made it necessary to take this drastic step for the first time ever (Kremp 2011). What had happened? The phenomenon of disseminating information via social media services against the will of regimes of totalitarian states was not new. Subsequent to the presidential elections in Iran, for instance, in 2009 news concerning the opponent’s protests almost exclusively reached the foreign public via the micro-blogging platform Twitter and the video website Youtube (Meller 2011). While in Tunisia the video website Youtube had already been shut down in the end of the year 2007, in 2010 the population’s displeasure was increasingly channeled into the social network Facebook (Lobo 2011). Thereby at the beginning mainly information on the deplorable state of affairs within the country, which had been run down by the corrupt regime of Zine el-Abdine Ben Ali, was shared (e.g., on the social inequality, the huge number of (especially young) unemployed, the officials’ wide spread arbitrariness). In the course of time also protest meetings were specifically organized via social media services and news on their progress was spread. Thus Facebook became the central communication platform of the protests, with more than 300,000 Tunisians registering within two months (Lobo 2011). This represents an enormous number regarding the just four million people having Internet access in the country. Even while the regime was still attempting to stem the tide by stealing Facebook passwords and spreading targeted disinformation (Madrigal 2011), Tunisia’s president Zine el-Abidine Ben Ali finally felt forced to flee on January 14th, 2011. Although social media services like Facebook are mainly ascribed the role of a catalyst for piledup public displeasure (Lobo 2011), it was precisely these that drew the accumulated attention of the traditional media like radio broadcast and television to these events. The subsequent wide dissemination of the news about the protest within the Arabic world was especially expedited by the Arabic news channel Al Jazeera (Meller 2011). Few weeks later, on February 11th, 2011, also Egypt’s president Hosni Mubarak resigned as a consequence. With about 5.7 million registered Facebook users (n.a. 2011c) and a variety of other intensively used social media services like Twitter or Windows Live Messenger (formerly MSN), here again the digital networking played a decisive role (Meller 2011). For fear of the events in North Africa and the Middle East recurring, governments in many places react with preventive counteractions or try to exploit social media services for their own purposes. In analogy to China, where numerous social media services have been restricted or shut off for several years, shortly after the eruption of the protests the social network LinkedIn, which mainly aims at business contacts, was – among others – shut off in fear of the search item “Jasmine Revolution” (n.a. 2011a). Simultaneously several states focused on setting up such services themselves as usually such services can be more easily controlled and censored (Morozov 2011, p. 13). Examples for such services can be found, e.g., in Russia and several former GUS states (e.g., http://vkontakte.ru) as well as in Vietnam (e.g., http://go.vn). In contrast, the government of Bahrain tried to manipulate existing social media services, for example by flooding Twitter with pro-governmental news shortly after the first protest within the own country in order to undermine the credibility of this news service (Morozov 2011, p. 13). These arrangements demonstrate the immense respect of especially authoritarian regimes regarding a shift of power within society, away from individual information providers towards a close-knit and dynamic network composed of an arbitrary number of consumers and providers. These developments provide the possibility