IB History Role of Social Media Notes

Social Media: Amplifier of Revolution, Not Its Cause

1. When Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire on December 17, 2010, the Tunisian state tried to suppress news of what had happened.
   1. What followed was a test of whether digital tools could outrun government censorship.
   2. They could, but only because Tunisians had been building the infrastructure for that moment for over a decade.

Tunisia's Cyber-Activist Tradition

1. Long before 2010, Tunisian dissidents were building digital spaces that the state could not fully control.
   1. Takriz was founded in 1998 as an online forum where Tunisian youth could share uncensored political commentary.
   2. It became one of the earliest examples of organized cyber-activism in the Arab world.
2. Other platforms followed.
   1. TuneZine offered an independent e-zine covering topics the state press ignored.
   2. Nawaat.org, founded by Tunisian activists living abroad, became a hub for investigative blogging and political analysis.
   3. Together, these platforms created an alternative information ecosystem that existed in parallel to state media.
3. The state did not ignore this.
   1. The Agence Tunisienne d'Internet (ATI) operated as the government's digital surveillance arm.
   2. It harvested users' passwords through fake login pages, deleted Facebook accounts critical of Ben Ali, and blocked access to dozens of websites.
   3. Tunisian bloggers were operating in a contested digital space, not a free one.
4. In late November 2010, Nawaat.org launched TuniLeaks (November 28), publishing US diplomatic cables from WikiLeaks that described Ben Ali's regime in damaging detail.
   1. Tunisians could now read, in official American diplomatic language, what many already knew: that the ruling family was corrupt, greedy, and widely resented.
5. This context matters.
   1. When the revolution began in December 2010, Tunisia did not suddenly discover online activism.
   2. A generation of bloggers already knew how to document, distribute, and evade censorship.
   3. The revolution gave that network a cause that reached far beyond the activist community.

The Social Media Timeline of the Revolution

1. The digital response to Bouazizi's self-immolation moved quickly.
2. December 17: A Facebook post by Ali Bouazizi (a cousin who witnessed the event) began circulating the story.
   1. The Tunisian state media said nothing.
3. December 18: The hashtag #Sidibouzid appeared on Twitter, becoming the organizing tag for protests spreading across the interior.
4. December 19: Blogger Lina Ben Mhenni published the first on-the-ground reports from Sidi Bouzid.
   1. No mainstream journalist had gone there.
   2. Her posts, with photographs, were among the only primary documentation of what protesters were experiencing.
5. December 20: Al Jazeera English began broadcasting footage that Tunisians had uploaded to YouTube.
   1. The state media blackout had been broken, not by foreign correspondents, but by people with phones and an internet connection.
6. Each step in this four-day sequence filled a gap left by official silence.
   1. Social media did not create the protests.
   2. It made them visible, first to other Tunisians, then to the world.

Key Digital Actors

1. A small number of individuals and groups became central to the digital side of the revolution.
   1. Their choices shaped what information reached the outside world and at what speed.

1. The hacker collective Anonymous launched "Operation Tunisia" on January 2, 2011.
   1. They carried out distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against Tunisian government websites and sent activists a digital "care package" containing tools to circumvent censorship and protect their online identities.
   2. Their involvement was external, but it gave Tunisian activists additional cover at a dangerous moment.

The 'Facebook Revolution' Debate

1. Western journalists and commentators quickly labelled what happened in Tunisia a "Facebook Revolution." Many Tunisians rejected this framing.
   1. The name they preferred was the "Revolution of Dignity and Freedom."
2. The numbers help explain why the label is misleading.
   1. By September 2011, Tunisia had roughly 2.5 million Facebook users, with 42% of them aged 18 to 24.
   2. In a country of around 10 million people, that is a significant base, but it also describes a specific demographic: urban, young, and connected.
3. The revolution actually ran on two distinct strands.
   1. The offline strand consisted of unemployed youth, trade union members, and ordinary citizens in the interior towns of Sidi Bouzid, Kasserine, and Thala, many of whom had limited or no internet access.
   2. The online strand consisted of urban, middle-class cyber-activists in Tunis and abroad who amplified protests, documented abuses, and coordinated messaging.
4. Social media helped organize, mobilize, and broadcast what was happening, but it did not cause decades of economic inequality, unemployment, or political repression: those conditions built the revolution, and social media simply helped it move faster and spread further.

Digital Evidence and Its Limits

1. Authorship and timing matter when using a social-media post because reposting can detach footage from its original creator, place, and date.
2. Al Jazeera amplified online footage for audiences beyond Tunisia, turning local documentation into regional news.
3. The UGTT and street networks remained essential because online visibility did not replace strikes, demonstrations, or face-to-face organisation.