Facebook and Twitter Revolutionize The Way We Do Revolutions

-In the tiny North African republic of Tunisia, President Ben Ali, who grasped power from the previous dictator in 1987, has ruled this officially democratic nation for almost 24 years. On the last election, held on 25 October 2009, Ali was reelected for a fifth five year term, allegedly by 89.6% of the electorate.

-Egypt has been ruled by President Mohamed Hosni Mubarak since the assassination of former President Mohammed Anwar El-Sadat in 1981. Like Tunisia’s President Ali, Mubarak is currently serving his fifth term in office.

-The tiny Southwest Asian Republic of Yemen is also officially democratic. President Ali Abdullah Saleh has been the elected head of state since the country was unified in 1990. Before this, Saleh was President of North Yemen since 1978.

What do these three nations have in common?

1.    They are all officially democratic republics, with Presidents who have been re-elected for multiple terms in dubiously legal elections.

2.    They all have populations who are dissatisfied with current leadership.

3.    They all have widespread unemployment and unstable economies.

4.    They have all attempted to block social networking internet sites like Twitter  and Facebook, and the video-sharing websites YouTube and Dailymotion.

And:

5.    They are all currently undergoing revolutions organized with the aid of Facebook and Twitter.

Can Borders Keep Facebook Out?

There are several nations which have attempted, with varying degrees of success, to block the influx of social networking sites. In August of 2008, the government of Tunisia blocked access to the networking website Facebook.  They had already blocked the video-sharing websites YouTube and Dailymotion.

“This is an important phenomenon,” Internet users told Reporters Without Borders. “Many blogs had been closed down but bloggers have been able to debate by creating personal pages on Facebook.” There are six groups on the site, involving just over 5,000 Internet users, where Facebook’s closure in Tunisia is being discussed.

Then on 22 January 2011, the BBC’s Alexandra Mackenzie reported that police had joined thousands of protesters on the streets of Tunis demanding the cabinet to resign. Until a week previous, the police had been defending the now-ousted government of Mr. Ben Ali, but the officers said they too were victims of the former regime.

Iran has been more successful at squashing dissidents. They just hanged two activists for distributing video footage on the Internet from the country’s 2009 “Twitter Revolution.”

Evgeny Morozov posted an article “The dark side of Internet for Egyptian and Tunisian protesters (WASHINGTON- From Saturday’s Globe and Mail, Published Friday, Jan.28, 2011) which included this warning:

“The contrast between Tunisia and Iran couldn’t be starker: The former has just installed a dissident blogger as a government minister while the latter is still persecuting those who dared to challenge the regime of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, 18 months after the elections. Fortunately for Tunisian dissident bloggers, their army refused to shoot the protesters, the country’s much-hated ruler Zine El Abidine Ben Ali fled to Saudi Arabia and the new government has shown no intention of going after the protesters, many of whom are now celebrated as heroes. However, had the events in Tunisia turned otherwise – with Mr. Ben Ali staying in office after a bloody crackdown – it is likely that his secret police would now be acting very much like Iran’s, turning to social-networking sites to identify his opponents.”

Cross-Border  “Contagion”

Reporters have labeled the phenomena that we are witnessing this month as a cross-border contagion. Joanne Bladd, in her posting “Egypt, Jordan at risk of Tunisia contagion, says S&P” wrote “Although we don’t expect a wave of regional political instability, we see Egypt, Algeria, and Jordan, and to a lesser degree Morocco as most vulnerable in this respect.”

We are in fact seeing this cross-border contagion starting to spread. Egypt and Yemen have been affected so far, and sympathy rallies are happening all over the world, including Canada and the United States.

Tunisia, Egypt, and Yemen all have governments that are supposed to be democracies. But as a CBC viewer commented, “When people fear the government – there is fascism. When the government fears the people – there is democracy.”