Journal of Communication ISSN 0021-9916
ORIGINAL ARTICLE
Social Media and the Decision to Participate in Political Protest: Observations From Tahrir Square Zeynep Tufekci1 & Christopher Wilson2 1 School of Information and Library Science and Department of Sociology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27516, USA 2 The Engine Room
Based on a survey of participants in Egypt’s Tahrir Square protests, we demonstrate that social media in general, and Facebook in particular, provided new sources of information the regime could not easily control and were crucial in shaping how citizens made individual decisions about participating in protests, the logistics of protest, and the likelihood of success. We demonstrate that people learned about the protests primarily through interpersonal communication using Facebook, phone contact, or face-to-face conversation. Controlling for other factors, social media use greatly increased the odds that a respondent attended protests on the first day. Half of those surveyed produced and disseminated visuals from the demonstrations, mainly through Facebook. doi:10.1111/j.1460-2466.2012.01629.x
Since the ‘‘Arab Spring’’ burst forth in uprisings in Tunisia and in Egypt in early 2011, scholars have sought to understand how the Internet and social media contribute to political change in authoritarian regimes. Perspectives range across the full spectrum from those who view the Internet as potentially disruptive (Aday et al., 2010; Howard, 2010) to those who argue that it may even support authoritarian regimes (Morozov, 2011). What has been missing from these assessments and what this project sought to provide were evidence of how social media and the Internet were being used by protesters as events unfolded in real time. We examined social media use among participants in the Tahrir Square protests in Egypt through surveys conducted in late January and February, 2011. Our central research questions were: Did social media use shape how they learned about the protests, how they planned their involvement, and how they documented their involvement? As much of the debate regarding the role of online activity in political change had been focused on Western democracies, we offer a new theoretical perspective on the Corresponding author: Zeynep Tufekci; e-mail:
[email protected] Journal of Communication 62 (2012) 363–379 © 2012 International Communication Association
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Social Media and Political Protest in Egypt
Z. Tufekci & C. Wilson
role of the Internet and social media in authoritarian regimes. First, we will briefly recount key events linking online activity to political protests in Egypt. Social media and political protest in Egypt
The Tahrir Square protests were set in a media co