Social Media and Protest Mobilization: Evidence from the Tunisian Revolution Anita Breuer German Development Institute Deutsches Institut für Entwicklungspolitik German Development Institute Tulpenfeld 6 D - 53113 Bonn www.die-gdi.de
[email protected] Todd Landman Institute for Democracy and Conflict Resolution, University of Essex University of Essex Wivenhoe Park Colchester, Essex CO4 3SQ United Kingdom www.idcr.org.uk
[email protected] Dorothea Farquhar Institute for Democracy and Conflict Resolution, University of Essex University of Essex Wivenhoe Park Colchester, Essex CO4 3SQ United Kingdom www.idcr.org.uk
[email protected] Paper prepared for the 4th European Communication Conference for the European Communication Research and Education Association (ECREA), Istanbul, Turkey, 24-27 October 2012. DRAFT ONLY: DO NOT CITE WITHOUT THE AUTHORS’ PERMISSION Abstract One of the hallmarks of the Arab Spring uprisings has been the role of social media in articulating demands of the popular protesters and broadcasting dramatic events as they unfolded, but it is less clear whether social media acted as a catalyst for many of the movements in the region. Using evidence from the popular protests in Tunisia between December 2010 and January 2011, this paper argues that social media acted as an important resource for popular mobilization against the regime of President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali. Drawing on the insights from ‘resource mobilization theory’ (RMT), we show that social media (1) allowed a ‘digital elite’ to break the national media blackout through brokering information for mainstream media; (2) provided the basis for intergroup collaboration that facilitated a large ‘cycle of protest’ to develop; (3) overcame the collective action problem through reporting event magnitudes that raised the perception of success for potential free riders, and (4) led to an additional element of ‘emotional mobilization’ through depicting the worst atrocities associated with the regime’s response to the protests.