WHEN emotive pictures of violence in Tunisia and its were posted online, they spread rapidly and helped to catalyse months of revolutions throughout 2011. The western world was quick to celebrate the success of new media, and the idea of the as a "Facebook Revolution" spread as fast as the tweets. One Egyptian couple even .
Was social media a vital component that stirred long-brewing resentment into action, or did it merely speed inevitable revolutions on their way? A year on, as researchers continue to sift the evidence, .
Kathleen Carley of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, carried out the latest analysis with intelligent software she developed to comb though media articles from the archive LexisNexis. Carley's team looked for articles and social media posts about the Arab Spring in 18 countries over a period of 10 months.
The program identified terms that occurred together in the same article, such as "Egypt" and "Twitter", and rapidly built a picture of the most important by looking at the relationship between them in all 400,000 articles it analysed. When the team carried out a statistical analysis on these results, only terms related to human rights and international relations came up as significant causes of the revolutions. While social media correlated with uprisings in some countries, the link wasn't universal.
The conclusion? While Facebook, Twitter and YouTube certainly played a role in the way the Arab Spring unfolded, their influence was far less critical than many had suggested. "Social media was not causal. It told people to go here, to do this, but the reason was social influence, not social networking," says Carley, who presented her results at the AAAS meeting in Vancouver, Canada, in February. "Social influencers tend to act across all media, regardless."
Some believe that is an obvious conclusion. "Social media wasn't a catalyst. The events it describes were the catalyst," says computer scientist Huan Liu of Arizona State University in Tuscon. Filippo Menczer of Indiana University in Bloomington agrees. "We have a history of thousands of uprisings without social media," he says.
Philip Howard of the University of Washington in Seattle, who has that found a strong link between social media and the Arab Spring isn't so sure. "In each of those other revolutions, there is some sort of media that is new and not controlled by the state. Even newspapers at one point caught dictators off guard."
And Egypt and Tunisia, he points out, had been having problems for many years before shocking photos and stories of abuse by government agencies went viral. "The individual risk assessments [before people go out] to face rubber bullets and tear gas are informed by digital stories," he says.
When you consider that the protesters tended to be young, tech-savvy and included women, that's a strong argument for social media as a cause, Howard says. Few of the traditional players - terrorist groups and the urban poor - were involved, an observation Carley's study supports. The debate is sure to continue as researchers refine their models. "Big data is very hard, and social media is very big data," Liu says.
