Was the role of social media in the so-called the Arab Spring exaggerated?

Social media has received a considerable amount of attention in recent years especially after the breakout of Arab revolutions. Whether in Tunis, Cairo, or Damascus, activists took the advantage of the new means of communication offered by ICT, and lobbied people against governments, and informed the world about what was happening in the streets of the Arab capitals. If it was not for Youtube and Facebook, many of the hair-raising crimes committed by al-Assad would not have been heard at all. It should be also mentioned that in Egypt, Facebook was an important platform for organizing the demonstrations that had eventually led to toppling down Egypt's former president Hosni Mubarak.

Nevertheless, it is an overstatement to assume that social media played a central role in these events. The notable Arab intellectual Dr. Azmi Bishara rejects to label the Tunisian demonstrations as ‘’Facebook revolution’’. He contends that if all Tunisians were really sitting by their computers, no one would have taken to the street. In fact, protests in Tunisia were initiated in rural places by ordinary people who had no clue about online activism. It was later, in the last stage of the protests, when the mass demonstrations had already reached the capital, the organized click-and-post society started to emerge.In Egypt too, it would be a mistake to honor the owners of Twitter and Google as the real heroes of the Tahrir Square. It is an uncontested truth that activists have organized and designed their revolution through Facebook, but to say that the latter was decisive in ousting Mubarak, that is actually poetic hallucination. It was actually the intensive coverage of the events in Egypt by the traditional media outlets which had created political pressure on the ruling class, and forced it eventually to make historic concessions.