Why Facebook Is Not a Revolutionaries Tool

Many a pundit has put forward that Facebook  played a vital role in the Arab Spring and in 2009 in the failed Iranian revolution, that it will increasingly play an important role in organizing revolutions in repressed regimes and developing nations. We beg to differ on that point and here’s why.

Facebook is Not the Hub of the Online Protest
Contrary to popular perception by pundits et al, Facebook plays a lesser role than other social networks and social technologies from our research. When we looked at the Arab Spring and the tools used in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Libya and Bahrain…it was Ning networks, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and blogs that drove more traffic and were used for reporting and organizing over 78% more than Facebook.

Why Other Channels?
One of the conclusions we’ve drawn from why so many other tools take the majority of traffic and engagement is that there are always a number of different groups involved for different reasons. Coordinated groups in any uprising is rare. There may be a lead interest group and eventually one does come out on top, but in the early phases and during the depths of an uprising, there are multiple parties involved with different priorities. Hence a number of different tools and channels are used.

The Visibility Factor of Facebook = Liability
As easy as it is for a group to organize and protest on Facebook, so it is for the group in power to search and view that information and who is involved. Today, as Iranian students studying abroad go home to visit family in Iran, the security forces check their Facebook profiles for who they are connected to. A hostile government can quickly determine key players through Facebook. With blogs, Twitter accounts and private Ning groups, this becomes harder.

Online Information Warfare Tactics
Expanding on the visibility factor of Facebook issue, at the start of a drive for societal change, the fomenting groups can push an agenda and ideas into the social web while gaining some degree of anonymity or at least protecting their families and themselves. Using a tool like Ning affords some level of security by enabling the group administrator(s) to vet any requesting members. As an issue progresses, the government under attack my also deploy tactics to create counter-messages on the social web. This is quite easy with Facebook, a little harder with blogging and Twitter and how these engagements can be countered by the protestors or antagonists. Egypt chose to shut down the Web, as did al-Assad in Syria, but then Syria started engaging online and countering the claims made by protestors – information warfare in social media then escalates.

Conclusion
While Facebook is a valuable tool in planning a revolution and communicating, it actually becomes a liability as a protest action escalates. Anti-government organizers understand this. In the case of Egypt, Syria and Bahrain, Facebook became less and less popular for the revolutionaries. We found use of Facebook by organizers in a country in question dropped over 90% once the protest spilled into the real-world through actions. For observers and westerners, they used Facebook to share information, views and opinions and content pushed out onto YouTube, Flickr and Twitter, but the revolutionaries were rarely there. So Facebook is a liability for the revolutionaries and a news and opinion channel for the non-participants.

What “Rick-Rolling” & “Cone-ing” Really Tells Us

Rick-Rolling was quite a fad for a while; playing “Never Gonna Give You Up” by Rick Astley (from the 80′s) at an event and people dancing while videoing and then placing it on YouTube. This harmless, seemingly daft activity was carried out all over North America and even across Europe. Now there’s “cone-ing” in which a guy goes through a drive-through window having ordered soft-cone ice cream and does inane things when handed the cone..videoed and put on YouTube. Or the Coke & Mentos experiment. We shake our heads and wonder why? For what purpose?

We Are Exploring Our Culture
With well over 200 social media research projects under our belt and three years plumbing the deep depths of Cyburbia and its social alleyways, we’ve garnered some pretty interesting stats and insights. One conclusion we’ve started to come to is the “cultural exploration” of social media…ok another fancy label, but as humans, labeling things helps us frame an understanding. Pop psychology 101. So what do we mean here?

From the time we are infants, as individuals, we strive to understand the world around us. We learn language to express to our parents when we are hungry, what hurts and what we like. We do this in varying degrees all our lives. So with social medias, we are simply expanding our desire to explore the world around us as individuals and as a group and culture.

Communication is A Fundamental Trait
As humans, we must communicate to survive. We do better by communicating and working together. You cannot build a hospital and serve all the sick people by yourself. A government needs a bureaucracy to make a society work. Our very nature is to work together.

Social Media Is An Exploration of Defining Our World
We’ve never been able, as humans, to communicate and explore and attempt to understand the world we live in like we can today. One can argue that it is our fundamental drive to communicate that drives ICT technologies forward. Social Medias are so popular and driving the Web and mobile devices today because we must communicate to survive as a species (I mean survival in more ways than just finding food and shelter.)

Individual & Group Behaviours in Social Media
The example or Rick Rolling indicates group behaviours whereas cone-ing is the act of an individual that in like Rick-Rolling gets the attention of large or small groups of people. If you pitched BBC, NBC, CBC on having a camera crew attend random events and broadcast them live at your whim, they’d laugh you out of the executive suite. But because of social media tools, we don’t need their permission and thus we are free to explore how we communicate and engage with people.

How We Are Adapting Social Technologies
But we are adapting through these behaviours. Today, people will rarely answer their mobile phone during a meal; if they do, it is seen as rude and disrespectful. Similarly, where it was “cool” and gave you “social rank” to walk around with a phone glued to your ear, that is no longer the case. Wearing a phone on your hip is not cool anymore. Hopefully one day it won’t be cool to have a little black thing with a flashing blue light stuck in your ear either…

Summary
Actions like coneing and Rick Rolling seen individually and by some may seem inane and irrelevant. But they are how we as people, are exploring our world. They are all simply experiments. Sometimes they work and sometimes they flop. Badly. But that is what we do as humans. Taken together, looked at over time and seen for what they are, these actions can help us better understand our modern way of life and the society we live in. For us as researchers they are valuable clues in sociology, cultural anthropology, marketing and governments.