Publication

In this report, a team of scholars from George Washington University and American University analyze the role of social media in the Arab Spring protests of 2011–12. It builds on a previous report titled Blogs and Bullets: New Media in Contentious Politics, and applies its five-level framework for studying and understanding the role of new media in political movements. The authors want to test empirically the claims of “cyberoptimists” and “cyberskeptics” about the role of new media in bringing down autocratic regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, and Libya and in spurring protests in other parts of the Arab World.