Arab activists had long dreamed of revolt, but to dislodge their decades-old autocracies, and amid a widespread crackdown on street protests, they needed a tool and a space to organise. Enter Facebook.
After years of sporadic anti-regime protests that were quickly quashed, activists from Tunisia to Egypt to Libya and Bahrain found a speedy, anonymous and efficient engine in Facebook and other internet social networking sites.
“Social networks for the first time provided activists with an opportunity to quickly disseminate information while bypassing government restrictions,” said Hussein Amin, professor of mass communications at the American University in Cairo.
Cyber-activists argue that it takes more than Facebook to topple a dictator, but most agree that social media helped keep up the momentum of the protests that began in Tunisia, toppled two more dictators in Egypt and Libya, and continue to shake the region.
Shortly after Tunisian strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali was ousted on January 14, 2011, graffiti appeared on the iconic Avenue Bourguiba in the capital Tunis. It read simply: “Facebook thanks!”
In Egypt, a protester joining rallies demanding the ouster of the military council that took power when veteran president Hosni Mubarak was ousted last February held up a sign that wished “Facebook on all oppressors”.
In Tunisia, where the self-immolation of a street vendor sparked the first protests in December 2010, news of further rallies quickly spread on the internet, with Facebook statuses updated constantly.
In Egypt, activists used pre-existing Facebook pages to call for the anti-regime protests on January 25, 2010 – such as the April 6 page in support of workers and the “We are all Khaled Said” page, named after a man killed by police who would come to symbolise the fight against state brutality.
The region’s iron-fisted regimes quickly understood the threat posed by the social networking sites and moved to block the internet in Egypt, Libya and Syria.
But the social networking site’s founder Mark Zuckerberg last year downplayed its revolutionary role.
“Facebook was neither necessary nor sufficient for any of those things to happen,” the 27-year-old New Yorker told the e-G8 gathering of internet bosses in Paris in May.
“It would be extremely arrogant for any specific technology company to claim credit” for protest movements in the Arab world, he said.
Nonetheless, in the context of the Arab Spring, social media have played two primary functions – as a tool and a space.
“The main contribution of social media to the Arab revolutions is this virtual space, where people – beyond the small number of hardened activists – began to find their revolutionary voices, were em-powered to speak out and test-drive their defiance of authority,” said Ihab el-Sakkout, Oxfam’s Middle East Media Adviser.
“In its mobilising capacity it was a very important tool, but not a key driver.
“Let us not forget that the internet in Egypt, for example, was cut off in the critical early days of the revolution, which had no effect on its success.
“More significant and more neglected is the issue of civic space, especially in the build-up to revolution.”
Today, the very regimes that once feared the impact of social media have begun to see its potential for their own benefit.
In Egypt, one of the most visited Facebook pages is that of the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, the military junta that took power after Mr Mubarak’s ouster. It has nearly 1.7 million members.