Ten years ago this spring, two million Tunisians came together on Facebook to transform their pent-up fury at their country’s authoritarian government into a four-week revolution that toppled the longtime dictatorship of Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. All other media were heavily censored, but the government couldn’t silence Facebook, where a video was posted of angry crowds gathering after a young fruit vendor had set himself on fire.
Within a week, 90,000 Egyptians began their own revolution on Facebook, sparking anti-government uprisings in four other Arab countries. Activists and international media alike hailed Facebook and Twitter as the catalysts of the Arab Spring. The New York Times enthusiastically reported that “there is little doubt that [social media] provided a new means for ordinary people to connect with human rights advocates trying to amass support. Facebook and YouTube also offered a way for the discontented to organize and mobilize and allowed secular-minded young people to seize the momentum.”
Those were the days when social media, and Facebook in particular, were seen as antidotes to totalitarianism and beacons of democracy.
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