Social Media Won't Free Us

A fter losing the presidential elections in Iran in 2009, candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi and his supporters claimed electoral fraud and confronted the regime forces in bloody clashes. In January 2011, president Zine El Abidine Ben Ali (in office since 1987) fled Tunisia after massive demonstrations spread through the country. After that, a number of Arab countries experienced their own demonstrations, seeking political change. The Arab Spring was born. All of these events captured the attention and imagination of Westerners, not because of the prospect of democracy arising in those countries, but because of the presumed role played by Western-made technologies — namely, social media platforms. According to journalists, Iran experienced a “Twitter revolution,” while Egypt’s was a “Facebook revolution.” We were told that social media was crucial for dissenters to organize themselves, plan their actions, and publicize their agendas both in their own countries and abroad. The hype reached such a point that Twitter was asked to delay a scheduled outage to allow the protest in Iran go on undisturbed, and some officials even suggested that its founders deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. Those glossy portrayals unfortunately were wrong: the Arab Spring was as much a social media revolution as the Mexican Revolution was a Leica (a brand of camera) revolution.1 Certainly, social media played a role but only for a minority of protesters and, to be honest, it turned out quite badly for some of them — at least in Iran.