Twitter can empower opposition in authoritarian countries
Dec 3, 2016 13:22:01 GMT
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Post by ck4829 on Dec 3, 2016 13:22:01 GMT
The United States is grappling with the impact social media had on this year’s presidential election. This is something the countries in the Middle East and North Africa have been dealing with for years. After an initial hype as “liberation technology” in the aftermath of the popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa, more recent case studies point out social media’s destructive impact on society and politics in the region.
Neither view is necessarily wrong. In fact, our own research based on three case studies of Twitter debates in the Middle East and North Africa — sexual violence on Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2014, anti-fracking protests in southern Algeria and Saudi Arabia’s military intervention in Yemen in 2015 — affirms that the impact of social media on political and social processes may vary strongly across different local contexts and depending on the user networks engaged in a particular debate.
The impacts range from mobilization, amplifying events in social and geographic peripheries otherwise not in the international spotlight to deepening social divisions and promoting narratives of authoritarian and radical actors.
www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/12/02/the-ambiguous-roles-of-social-media-in-the-middle-east-and-north-africa/?utm_term=.e963c72f69e9
Neither view is necessarily wrong. In fact, our own research based on three case studies of Twitter debates in the Middle East and North Africa — sexual violence on Cairo’s Tahrir Square in 2014, anti-fracking protests in southern Algeria and Saudi Arabia’s military intervention in Yemen in 2015 — affirms that the impact of social media on political and social processes may vary strongly across different local contexts and depending on the user networks engaged in a particular debate.
The impacts range from mobilization, amplifying events in social and geographic peripheries otherwise not in the international spotlight to deepening social divisions and promoting narratives of authoritarian and radical actors.
www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2016/12/02/the-ambiguous-roles-of-social-media-in-the-middle-east-and-north-africa/?utm_term=.e963c72f69e9