The active role of Social Networks in the Middle East Mobilizations

Social media has maintained a high profile in the last week’s revolutions, becoming one of the principle factors on those. Facebook has decided not to talk about the increasing importance that its platform is taking in the uprisings that are affecting different countries of Magreb and Middle East. The direction of the company pretends to avoid that the prominence acquired in the recent mobilizations ends up becoming a subversive tool; and also evade that in consequence the government ends up with the commercial growth that has recently had in that area.

The fact that the organization of many of those revolutions is happening via Facebook is a matter that has recently created a great controversy. Besides, as a group of young Tunisians said; "This is how we tell the world what's happening," "We are photographing ourselves. Our revolution. And then, we put it on Facebook."

According to recent sources, the social network will still require their users to register with their authentic identity, as that is indispensable to avoid frauds and safeguard the set of users. However, Facebook disregards the demands of some organizations of human rights that encourage them to provide higher protection to its users, after some activists used Facebook to organize themselves.

As we can see on the image below, thousands of pages have been created in Facebook in order to defend or reject the activism in those countries:

By the way, the vice president of Facebook’s Communication and Marketing segment, Elliot Schrage, has declined the offers of making public pronouncements about the leadership of the social network in the revolutions of the last weeks in Tunis and Egypt. Facebook has been the most used social network in the multiple manifestations in Algeria, Morocco, Iran, Yemen, Syria and Bahrain, above Twitter or Google. All those companies helped the egyptian activists to mock the blocking of the authorities on the internet.

After those happenings, several organizations of politic activism and human rights’ defence have encouraged Facebook to join the Global Network Initiative, a voluntary code for technological enterprises that was created in 2008.

References:

http://www.periodismociudadano.com/2011/03/02/facebook-y-twitter-en-las-revueltas-del-norte-de-africa/
http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2011/feb/25/twitter-facebook-uprisings-arab-libya
http://www.culsans.com.ar/?p=21523
http://www.lavanguardia.es/internet/205510216/5411550/facebook-se-desmarca-del-papel-de-las-redes-sociales-en-las-revueltas-arabes.html