Criminal Acts & Social Media

When Mark Zuckerberg first founded Facebook, I am sure he did not think that he would be giving a stage to Arab protestors so that they may express this anger with the starvation, unemployment and corruption going on in their countries. I also do not think that he intended for his social media website to become a battleground for authorities in Tunisia and web activists. But this is exactly what has happened! The results have been devastating and have been some of the most violent demonstration the country has ever seen!! 

We use Facebook to update our relationship status or to upload pictures of ourselves, they use Facebook to upload videos and Twitter feeds of the street demonstrations that are going on around them. 

“We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world.” 

There have been some outrageous pictures uploaded onto Facebook of police brutality and this has only angered people more. Social networking sites have become centre stage for the “marginalized Arab masses”. It has become a place for them to share their anger and to spread their message all across the world – the message against censorship. Thus it would seem as though social media has acted as an “important resource for popular mobilization against the regime of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali” (Todd Landman, 2012). 

Wael Ghonim: “I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg one day and thank him, actually. This revolution started - well, a lot of this revolution started on Facebook. If you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet. If you want to have a free society, just give them Internet”. 

 

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It is not just Tunisians who have taken political advantage of social networking sites. Algerians, Palestinians and Egyptians have too! In Egypt Twitter and Facebook, those tools were used to
coordinate and spread the word about the demonstrations that were scheduled for January 25, 2011. 

 

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 Facebook graffiti in Tahrir Square, Cairo 

However, it has been argued that social media and the internet in general is not enough to cause a revolution and overthrow a government. “Europeans and Americans were quick to label the uprising a ‘Twitter revolution’” says Doyle McManus in the Los Angeles Times, “But Tunisia's uprising was made possible not by the internet, but by widespread, pent-up anger at Ben Ali's family-run kleptocracy- feelings that extended to the military”. Nevertheless, it is obvious that social media did play a significant role in Arab revolutions! 

On a slightly different note, in Britain, recent reports have argued that social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter could help improve the overall security of this country. It has been argued that police forces should co-ordinate their forces online and ensure the 24-hour staffing of social media accounts. With the police keeping a close eye on different social networking sites, they may also be able to respond more quickly to active situations such as the 2011 riots by “crowd sourcing” events as they happen. 

 

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So maybe social networking sites could also be the key to stopping revolutions and rioting, and keeping governments safe??