Twitter by Dhiraj Murthy

Author:Dhiraj Murthy
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781509512539
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2018-01-22T00:00:00+00:00

Tweeting Information from #Syria and #Egypt to the World?

In the case of the “Arab Spring,” weak ties played an important role both because of cost and a need to disseminate information from the MENA region to the West. Many of these movements were not looking for Twitter to bring feet to, for example, Tahrir Square, but rather to transmit up-to-the-minute updates to Western media in the face of telephone and other communication outages. Many MENA governments have banned or severely restricted social media in recent years. Interestingly, in February 2011, Syria decided to remove a ban on social media sites, including Facebook and YouTube, which had been instituted in 2007 (Mroue 2011). However, as Tomlinson (2011) notes, shortly afterwards the government was reported to have kidnapped and tortured civilian activists to obtain their Facebook passwords, in order to target other suspected activists or scupper their planned actions. Twitter was used in MENA revolutions both by anti-government activists to transmit updates and by governments to find and detain activists. Also, several MENA states created “phantom” Twitter accounts (i.e., automated spam-generating accounts), using these to post banal information with a trending hashtag to dilute activist messages (e.g., this was done in Syria, with tweets about falafels and the weather, to dilute the #syria hashtag). These types of state-sponsored hashtag spam continue today on Twitter and other social media platforms. Twitter and Facebook, Comninos (2011) believes, lend themselves to being used by authorities to “spy” on activists and to uncover their identities to make arrests. Christensen (2011: 156) observes that the Iranian government uses new media to monitor internet users and argues that “it [new media] served to simplify surveillance, disinformation, and repression.” Another issue with Twitter is that of information integrity. The platform has been used to successfully spread rumors and misinformation (via both image and text) to wide audiences (see chapter 4 for a fuller discussion). Fearn-Banks (2010: 58) argues that “Citizen journalists have nothing and no one preventing them from disseminating misinformation to a global audience in seconds.” Esfandiari (2010) gives the example of rumors being spread on Twitter during the Iran unrest of “police helicopters pouring acid and boiling water on protesters [, but … a] year later it remains just that: a rumor.” As a medium, Twitter’s skill in propagating information can just as easily be turned to campaigns of misinformation. Additionally, as Lotan et al. (2011: 1380) argue, rumors on Twitter are often difficult to detect as misinformation. As was the case in Iran in 2009, social media can be highly effective as a mode of facilitating “impromptu social networks” (Morán et al. 2010) for activism, but the corporeal violence deployed by some dictators is being used to counter digital dissent. In addition, state-sponsored propaganda on Twitter is becoming more noticeable in many global contexts.

But, even if the efficacy of digital dissent is being curbed by repression, the fact of the matter is that tweets got out of MENA countries even when mobile networks were shut down (Idle and Nunns 2011: 65).

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