Home > News & Events
A Conversation About Tunisia, Revolution... and Facebook
Rim Nour (PEPM ’08), an international development consultant in Tunisia, spoke about the role of social media in her country’s recent revolution.
What are the lessons of Tunisia’s revolution?
I guess one of the lessons is the power of free, uncensored Internet in grass-roots mobilization for democratic reform. The revolution has been made by two groups, mainly. One group fought for socioeconomic reasons and went to the streets and got killed and got shot at, and the other group fought for issues of democracy, political reform, Internet censorship, so it was like a parallel movement between the two. Computer literacy was very important for the Web community to get active.
How did Tunisians use social media under the Ben Ali regime?
The median age of Tunisians is 29 years old, so it’s a very young population. There were not places like community spaces or anywhere else where young people could meet other than cafes and Facebook, basically.
Facebook growth happened very quickly in Tunisia. As soon as Facebook existed, there were 2 million active users who actually connect once a week or more.
So, the growth happened much earlier than the revolution, whereas for Twitter, it never took off in Tunisia before the revolution.
Ninety-five percent of Tunisians were consuming information, sharing pictures and basically sharing about their daily lives. The other five percent, of course, used it for sharing ideas and opinions and what was going on in the world generally.
What role did social media play in the revolution?
What happened in the beginning was that every other video platform was censored. The only place people could upload the videos of the revolution happening down in south Tunisia was through Facebook. So they started sharing videos on Facebook and basically describing what was going on in those cities and sharing information.
And so what happened during the first weeks was basically people having a viral communication campaign, sharing those videos, sharing raw data like “two people were killed today, this is what happened, etc.” Now after January 14 they are sharing political opinions. For instance, after the first government was appointed, people were investigating the new ministers and giving their opinions basically on whether they should be kept in the government or not, and this is happening pretty much every day with all the positions, going from the president to the little district representative, as well as who should we vote for. People are basically sharing their opinions on everything political that’s going on in the country.
Did you ever think you would see a moment like this in Tunisia?
I didn't. Up until January 3, maybe, I didn't believe it was going to go this far. Sometimes I wake up and think: maybe this is huge manipulation by the system! But it's only my mind that has been manipulated for so long.
I attended my first political party rally and it was pretty surreal. This very action would have gotten me in jail, probably tortured. My mum was there too and it was the first time for her too, and she's 66 years old.
It was really great but at the same time I felt a sense of responsibility of remaining aware and critical and informing people of what was going on. So I was writing feeds on Facebook all the time.
Tim Shenk, February 8, 2011