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Tunisia's revolution isn't a product of Twitter or WikiLeaks. But they do help

This article is more than 13 years old
Timothy Garton Ash
The internet alone won't set anyone free. Between north Africa and Belarus, we are learning just what it can and can't do

'The Kleenex Revolution"? Somehow I think not. Unless, that is, you follow Libyan president Muammar Gaddafi. In a televised denunciation of the popular uprising that has deposed his friendly neighbouring dictator, he ranted: "Even you, my Tunisian brothers, you may be reading this Kleenex and empty talk on the internet." (Kleenex is how Gaddafi refers to WikiLeaks.) "Any useless person, any liar, any drunkard, anyone under the influence, anyone high on drugs can talk on the internet, and you read what he writes and you believe it. This is talk which is for free. Shall we become the victims of Facebook and Kleenex and YouTube?" To which, since the speaker is another dictator, I devoutly hope that the answer is "Yes". Let Kleenex wipe them away, one after another, like blobs of phlegm.

But will it? What contribution do websites, social networks and mobile phones make to popular protest movements? Is there any justification for labelling the Tunisian events, as some have done, a "Twitter Revolution" or a "WikiLeaks Revolution"?

A remarkable young Belarussian activist-analyst, Evgeny Morozov, has just challenged the lazy assumptions behind such politico-journalistic tags in a book called The Net Delusion, which went to press before the Tunisian rising. The subtitle of the British edition is "How Not to Liberate the World". Morozov has fun deriding and demolishing the naively optimistic visions which, particularly in the United States, seem to accompany the emergence of every new communications technology. (I remember an article a quarter-century ago entitled "The fax will set you free".)

He shows that claims for the contribution of Twitter and Facebook to Iran's green movement were exaggerated. These new technologies can also be used by dictators to watch, entrap and persecute their opponents. Above all, he insists that the internet does not suspend the usual workings of power politics. It is politics that decides whether the dictator will be toppled, as in Tunisia, or the bloggers beaten and locked up, as in Morozov's native Belarus.

His challenge is salutary but, like most revisionists, Morozov exaggerates in the opposite direction. Tunisia offers a timely corrective to his corrective. For it seems that here the internet did play a significant role in spreading news of the suicide which sparked the protests, and then in multiplying those protests. An estimated 18% of the Tunisian population is on Facebook, and the dictator neglected to block it in time.

Among the educated young who came out in force, we can be sure that the level of online (and mobile phone) participation was higher. The scholar Noureddine Miladi quotes an estimate that half the Tunisian television audience watches satellite TV, and he notes: "Al-Jazeera heavily relied on referencing Facebook pages and YouTube in reporting the raw events." So professional satellite TV fed off online citizen journalism.

Moreover, these media leap frontiers. A leading British scholar of the Maghreb showed me his Facebook page, which has many of his Maghrebian former students as Facebook friends. Several of the Moroccans had turned their Facebook icons to the Tunisian flag, or a Tunisia-Morocco love-heart, to show their enthusiasm for the first people-power toppling of an Arab dictator in more than 45 years. That's a tiny group, to be sure – but elites matter, in opposition movements as in everything else.

Before Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali's fall, his regime had struck back against the netizens, mounting "phishing" attacks on Gmail and Facebook accounts, harvesting passwords and email lists of presumed opponents, and then arresting prominent bloggers such as Slim Amamou. This reinforces Morozov's point that the internet is a double-edged sword: yet it is also a back-handed tribute to the importance of these new media. As I write, the formerly imprisoned Amamou has become a member of a new, interim coalition government.

Nobody knows what will happen tomorrow, but thus far the Tunisian rising has been a hugely heartening development – especially because it was an authentic, homegrown, largely spontaneous movement, with little active support from western powers. (Sometimes quite the reverse: France was, until the very last minute, offering its security expertise to keep Tunisia's Louis XVI in power. For shame, Madame Liberté, for shame.)

The transformed information and communications technologies of our time played a role in enabling this rising to succeed. They did not cause it, but they helped. Specialists argue that Tunisia, with its small, relatively homogenous, urban, educated population, and (for now) moderate, peaceful, largely exiled Islamists, can become a beacon of change in the Maghreb. If things go well, the internet and satellite TV will spread that news across the Arab world.

So yes, the internet furnishes weapons for the oppressors as well as the oppressed – but not, as Morozov seems to imply, in equal measure. On balance it offers more weapons to the oppressed. I think Hillary Clinton is therefore right to identify global information freedom in general, and internet freedom in particular, as one of the defining opportunities of our time. But there are also dangers here, which Morozov usefully points out.

If the struggle for internet freedom is too closely identified with US foreign policy, and in turn with US companies such as Google, Facebook and Twitter – which in personnel terms are beginning to have something of a "revolving door" relationship with the US government – this can end up damaging the purpose it is meant to serve. Authoritarian regimes everywhere will redouble their efforts to censor and monitor those American platforms that, not accidentally, among the best and most open we have. Instead, these regimes will promote their own, more restricted native alternatives, such as Baidu in China.

The US government as a whole is also deeply inconsistent in its approach to internet freedom. It berates China and Iran for covert monitoring of opponents while doing the same itself against those it defines as threats to national security. It lauds global information freedom while denouncing WikiLeaks as, in Clinton's extraordinary words, "a threat to the international community".

Again, Tunisia is instructive. Talk of a "WikiLeaks revolution" is as absurd as that of a "Twitter revolution", but WikiLeaks revelations about what the US knew of the Ben Ali regime's rampant corruption did contribute something to the pot of misery boiling over. There was even a special website to disseminate and discuss the Tunisia-related US cables (tunileaks.org). Obviously, Tunisians did not need WikiLeaks to tell them that their presidential family was a goon-protected self-enrichment cartel; but having detailed chapter and verse, with the authority of the US state department, and seeing how much the publicly regime-friendly American superpower privately disliked it, and knowing that other Tunisians must know that too, since the American reports were there online for all to see – all this surely had an impact.

So if Clinton wishes to argue, as I believe she legitimately can, that the American-pioneered infrastructure of global information exchange has contributed to the fragile rebirth of freedom in Tunisia, then she should really put in a word of appreciation for WikiLeaks – or for Kleenex, if you prefer the Gaddafi version. But do not hold your breath.

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