Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

"Facebook To Mobilize, Twitter To Coordinate Protests, And Youtube To Tell The World": New Media, Cyberactivism, And The Arab Spring, Mohamed Arafa, Crystal Armstrong

Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective

Research on media and contentious politics in the Arab world point to the vital role that social media played in the Arab Spring. For the purposes of this article, the Arab Spring is defined as a series of demonstrations and democratic uprisings—and in the cases of Libya, Syria, and Yemen armed rebel movements—that arose independently and spread across the Arab world from Tunisia and Egypt to Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria in 2010-2011 and beyond. This article advances the theoretical assumption that while not causing the Arab uprisings, New Media (defined here as all forms of digital communication technology including …