Tunisia, Egypt, the Social Media and Political Activism

Abstract

The social media like facebook, twitter, flicker, blogs, MySpace, YouTube etc, has played a major part in starting and sustaining revolutions that finally led to the overthrow of régimes. This article looks at the events in north Africa, particularly Tunisia and Egypt, in the Arab awakening, with the object of ascertaining how the social media have been very critical in political activism. It concludes that in the two countries, Tunisia and Egypt, the revolutions that took place there, saw the social media establishing themselves as veritable instruments of protest and mass mobilization. Although the traditional or conventional media were also able to broadcast news, there was a big contrast between the news the traditional state media put out and the news the ordinary citizen put out on the social media networks. For the first time, the world watched first hand as the ordinary citizens brought down long standing autocratic regimes by simply utilizing the social media to call out their citizens using their "smart phones' and new electronic gadgets they were able to bring down repressive regimes.