Social Media Empowering Protest Movements
Young rebels in Sudan videotaped police hauling away Taj al-Sair, an activist who was arrested after telling a group of onlookers to vote against Sudan’s ruling party. That might have gone unnoticed a few years ago, but 15,000 YouTube viewers have watched the video in the past month.
A student-led group called Girifnam, which translates to “We are fed up,” used the video as the latest weapon against Sudan’s regime. Nearly 18,000 supporters of the group across Sudan and 6,000 Facebook fans of Girifam are drumming up "flash mobilizations" on the streets to oppose President Omar al-Bashir
From anti-government protests to truth squadding, social media is the new tool of the flustered and the oppressed in an increasing number of countries. Dictatorial governments across the globe are suddenly vulnerable to a new and powerful enemy.
Social media is more than Twitter and Facebook. It’s Myspace, it’s WordPress blogs, it’s YouTube and Vimeo. It’s regional and local copycat upstarts. It’s even mobile phones. In many nations, mobile phones are proving more powerful than Facebook.
In African nations such as Kenya, Sudan, Zimbabwe, Sierra Leone, and to a degree Egypt, SMS is more accessible than the Internet. Although Internet penetration is growing throughout these countries, usage is encumbered by high costs, government censoring and/or government monitoring. Further fueling the use of SMS is the ratio of mobile phones to land lines. Poor infrastructure means the wider population in these nations is armed with a mobile phone of some kind.
Via SMS, Zimbabweans can subscribe to SW Radio’s news feeds. The London-based radio station sends headlines three times a week to roughly 30,000 subscribers. A service they began in 2007 when the government started blocking their transmit signal. Nation Media Group in Kenya offers a similar service, and media outlets in Nigeria and Sudan are also embracing SMS as a broadcast tool.
The ability of SMS to circumvent media censorship is but one poisonous thorn in an oppressive government’s side. Rulers of any fashion have always sought to restrict the flow of information in some way. Intelligence, education, knowledge, is the power of the masses. Or as the Nigerian Network of Mobile Election Monitors states on their website, “Mobile phone serves communication. Communication serves humanity. Humanity serves change.”
Over the last several years a plethora of anti-government protests and election-monitoring initiatives utilize SMS and SNS to organize, mobilize and to inform. Some having greater degrees of success than others.
The Philippines (2001), Kenya, Burma, Australia (2007), Zimbabwe (2008), Sudan, Italy and Moldova (2009), France, Egypt and Kyrgyzstan (2010). And most famously perhaps the Iran protests of in the past year. Not to mention the 2009 and 2010 Tea Party movement rallies in the U.S.
Not all of these movements received equal coverage from the international mainstream media. The most recent protest is oddly the most under-reported. Kyrgyzstan’s revolution, which toppled the government, killed 78 people and injured over 1,600, received minimal attention in both the broadcast and print mediums. At least when compared to the constant coverage dedicated to the Iranian protests.
Some, including Evgeny Morozov, the “Net-Effect” blogger and contributing editor to Foreign Policy magazine, see this lack of buzz generation as a sign that the power of SNS and SMS is pure “hype”. Yet the two, Iran and Kyrgyzstan, are incomparable. Iranian protestors used social media tactics to not only send information out, but to mobilize their demonstrations. Kyrgyz protestors used social media solely to broadcast events in real time.
Measuring the power of social media by the amount of coverage an event receives from traditional media is perhaps a mistake. Mainstream media has never reported everything to everyone. Accessing information beyond “above the fold” has always taken at least minimal effort. Today, this effort translates to typing additional search terms in Facebook, Twitter or YouTube, or utilizing Google alerts.
If social media is but a passing trend, politicians in Malaysia would not be looking back in regret over their decision not to employ social media tools in their latest campaign. As reported by Mobileactive.org, Malaysian Prime Minister Abdullah Ahmad Badawi said, “It was a serious misjudgement. We made the biggest mistake in thinking that [new media] was not important.” If social media is not a threat, governments like China would not be forming a new agency called the Internet News Coordination Bureau. The INCB is charged with monitoring Chinese citizens’ use of social networking sites. Finally, if social media is “hype”, the United States Library of Congress would not be archiving every tweet ever tweeted.
The rapid embrace of social media is doing more than changing the how of reportage. It is dramatically changing the who. Putting into the hands of the masses and making the everyman a chronicler of history.
