Blogs and Bullets II: New Media and Conflict after the Arab Spring

New media technologies and social sharing have been credited with a large role in mobilizing the popular protests that brought down regimes in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 and sparked bloody struggles throughout the Arab world. This analysis reveals more nuanced levels of impact than that indicated by anecdotal reporting. Twitter and Facebook data from the 2011 Arab revolutions show that new media informed international audiences and mainstream media reporting, but they provide little evidence of a direct role in organizing protests or allowing local audiences to share self-generated news directly with one another. This report investigates the role of social media in the Arab Spring protests of 2011–12, using USIP’s five-level framework for studying and understanding the role of new media in political movements. Analyzing unique dataset from bit.ly—the URL shortener commonly associated with Twitter and used by other digital media such as Facebook—the authors test the claims of “cyberoptimists” and “cyberskeptics” about the role of new media in bringing down autocratic regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya and in spurring protests in other parts of the Arab World, such as Bahrain. Key findings include the following: • New media—at least that which uses bit.ly linkages—did not appear to play a significant role in either in-country collective action or regional diffusion during the Arab Spring political protests. • Data using bit.ly links to track information sharing does not show strong support for claims of significant new media impact. • New media outlets that use bit.ly are more likely to spread information outside the region than inside it, potentially bringing international pressure to bear on autocratic regimes, or helping reduce a regime’s tendency to crack down violently on protests. • In the Arab Spring, new media and old media were not easy to separate and should be understood as part of a wider information arena. • Of the four major Arab Spring protests analyzed—Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, and Bahrain— large differences were found across the four in the amount of information consumed via social media. • The protests in Egypt and Libya attracted more attention than those in other countries and also focused that attention on a more delimited set of content. • The trends also suggest very sharp peaks of attention pegged to dramatic events, such as the departure of Ben Ali in Tunisia, the Pearl Roundabout raid in Bahrain, and several key days during the protest in Egypt—especially the “Friday of departure,” when Mubarak resigned. • Hashtags particular to each conflict are helpful in tracking social media attention.