Social Media as a Springboard to Social Reform: Egypt and the Arab Spring

Many countries in the Middle East and North Africa have a revolution characterized by effectiveness, speed, and organization, but all of these factors are attributable to social networks. In order to understand why social media sites (SNS) play such an important role in Arab Spring, first of all, understand the reasons for constructing social media sites, the reason behind protests, and how to use SNS need to do it. Only after these basics are covered will the importance of these utilities begin to appear in today and in the near future.

Arab Spring Uprising uses social media as a means of covering important events such as protests and providing a platform for commenting on such events. With the hashtags # egypt, # liby, and # Jan25, campaigns can "mediate the practice of broad political engagement among various social media users" (Bruns et al.). It was Facebook that played the biggest role in the campaign. Governments are not happy, they even even launched a comprehensive attack on the social media platform to limit publicly released information. Blogging is also a way to educate the general public and expand the coverage of the uprising, but this is not seen in traditional media. As a punishment, officials will torture and imprison the bloggers. Social media is an important tool when users are censored to spread the truth about the status of their country.

Social media is widely used in the Arab Spring Revolution, but social media is not caused only by the revolution itself. Since their country restricted the flow of information on other turbulent regimes and was concerned about their own safety, some people received news through social media during this period. The success of the revolution was brought about by the votes of the people of different cities. Millions of people gathered on the streets of the Arab world as a whole to seek the change that is causing the change. Organizing these protest actions via social media has been more rationalized, but still shows such power with the will of people. As regime became increasingly desperate, the news that they tried to fail also began to spread. In Egypt, the quest for changes in political situation increased from 230 to 230,000 per day (O'Donnell). Social media has influenced Arab Spring and helped spread consciousness, but it is not a catalyst for the revolution.