This article was the cover feature in the Times’ Technology Sunday Supplement on the 30th of January 2011 under the name ‘A Mobile call to Arms” . The name on the front page was “Smoke and Screen, how the Internet mobilised the Tunisia Revolt.”

The internet in and of itself does not cause revolt. However, when you couple an oppressive state,  a disgruntled population, and the efficiency and immediacy of the internet to spread information, an environment for dissent starts to form. When facts such as a son in law of the President owning a tiger as a pet are revealed it serves to stoke the flames of unrest. This can be seen nowhere better than in the recent happenings of Tunisia.

By now, the story is probably old news, but for three weeks of buildup, the increasingly volatile situation was barely reported. Tunisia erupted into revolt on Friday January 14th. While the revolts were most probably not caused entirely due to the web and it is a disservice to dub the events a ‘Twitter Revolution’, they were certainly bolstered by the internet.

Many have said that the revolution in Tunisia is owed to the Internet, while others argue that it’s an exaggeration to say so, and that the events are another instance of a ‘people revolution’. One could be hesitant to join either camp, and prefer to simply list the ways the internet was instrumental and central to the Tunisian uprising. Certainly unemployment, inequality and other social issues were key to the displeasure, however, the censorship and systematic silencing of dissent must also have played a major role.

One could argue the internet helped bolster the revolts in three ways. The first was the continued persecution and censorship of any dissenting voices, especially bloggers, which was admitted to publicly by the incumbent President after the revolts. This was the first admission of censorship in 20 years.

Despite being a small country of just over 10 million, Tunisia has imprisoned more journalists than any other Arab country since 2000. The country has been described as a police state and an oppressor of mainstream media as it fell from 154th place to 164th worldwide in the World Press Freedom Index.

For a country that is so stifling of human freedoms, Tunisia certainly straddles the technological fence quite ably. 18% of Tunisians have a Facebook profile, a percentage much higher than its neighbouring North African countries. However, as pointed out by US Ambassador Robert Godec in a leaked cable from 2009, Tunisia’s flaws were apparent, especially to its own citizens. Godec said of Ben Ali, the abdicated president, that ‘he and his regime have lost touch with the Tunisian people. They tolerate no advice or criticism, whether domestic or international. Increasingly, they rely on the police for control and focus on preserving power.’ Tunisia was an enigma of sorts – a country with a strong women’s rights record but no freedom of expression, a state with a secularist, modernist outlook, but no tolerance for dissent.

Although often ignored by the more mainstream press, the oppressive environment in Tunisia is well recorded. The Maghreb country was listed on Reporters’ Without Borders 15 Enemies of the Internet, which also noted that “All opposition publications are blocked, along with many other news sites. The regime also tries to discourage use of webmail because it is harder to spy on than standard mail programmes that use Outlook. The Reporters Without Borders site cannot be seen inside Tunisia.”

As early as May 2009, Global Voices Online reported that that a Tunisian blog had been hit by the Tunisian government once again. The blog has been censored for republishing screen shots of a Canadian newspaper showing a real estate transaction in which the Tunisian President’s son-in-law Mohamed Sakhr El Matri bought a villa in Canada for a large amount of money.

The government wanted to hide this information from its people and ordered the Tunisian Internet Agency (ATI) to block access of this website. This was so common that the page you were taken to if a site was blocked had its own name “Ammar 404”, as ATI used Internet Explorer’s “404 page” as a blockpage. Other sites that fell victim to Ammar were YouTube, Dailymotion, Al Jazeera, Al Arabiya, afaat.org and nawaat.org and hundreds more.

Facebook also fell victim to the government’s internet spies, first as it was blocked and allowed intermittently for lengths of time, and second by injection of Java script onto the login page. By doing so, the ATI was able to obtain the usernames and passwords of thousands of users as they typed them in. The method was also replicated on many Gmail accounts. In mockery of the revolts, these hacked profiles had their display picture changed to a pirate ship.

This did not go unnoticed by Anonymous, the rag tag group of hackers made infamous by their defence of Wikileaks, which retaliated by defacing and disabling scores of Tunisian government websites, one of which had a message to the Tunisian government placed on the homepage. (http://i.imgur.com/SL92U.png).

Anonymous also helped a number of Tunisian bloggers and journalists to mask their locations and protect their sites better, so as to defend them from attack by the Tunisian censors. This allowed many to continue voicing their opinions in the run up to the revolts while several newspapers and magazines were being confiscated.

Many journalists, bloggers and reporters were arrested for disagreeing with the Government. These include blogger Azyz Amamy, Soufiane Chourabi a reporter working for the opposition weekly Al-Tariq al-Jadid, Ammar Amroussia, who covered events in Sidi Bouzid for the banned newspaper Al-Badil, Mouldi Zouabi, journalist for the online magazine Kalima and rapper El Général- real name Hamada Ben Aoun, for his lyrics, ‘Tunis ya Bladne’ (Tunis our Homeland).

On the 13th of January, the PEN International’s Writers in Prison Committee (WiPC) issued a strong condemnation of “the killing, mass arrests and disappearances of civilians including several journalists, bloggers, writers , lawyers and other activists across Tunisian cities in the course of protests that are currently taking place.” Tunisia was accused of ordering the abduction of citizens by the Special Unit of the Presidential Security.

Instances of censorship and arrests for dissent spread like wildfire between Tunisian citizens, especially through Facebook and Twitter. The displeasure turned to despair when Wikileaks came along.

The second pillar of the internet’s importance in the Tunisian revolt was the revelations made public by Wikileaks. The leaks from the US embassy in Tunisia have been of particular interest to many, as they intimately describe the relationship the US has with North African countries. However, this was certainly not the most enraging of cables to the Tunisian public.

Released on the 7th of December, the most inflaming cable is entitled DINNER WITH SAKHER EL MATERI, who is the son in law of ex-President Ben Ali. At 28 years of age, Materi owns a shipping cruise line, concessions for Audi, Volkswagen, Porsche and Renault, a pharmaceutical manufacturing firm, and real estate companies. The cable describes the opulent villa, the enormous meal provided, and Materi’s interest “to assist McDonald’s to enter Tunisia” as well as the household’s large tiger, named Pasha, living in a cage and which consumes four chickens a day.

The cable concluded by saying that the opulence in which members of Ben Ali’s family live in explains why they are disliked and even hated by some Tunisians.

Needess to say, Tunisia blocked access to Wikileaks but Lebanese news sites published the cable and it was seen in Tunisia prior to being blocked too. Many of the websites which published the cables were attacked or hacked, among which was the Lebanese daily Al-Akhbar. However the cable made the rounds rapidly and certainly inflamed Tunisians, who had to deal with unemployment, food price rises and corruption. Candid confirmation of the brazen luxury the elite enjoyed further enraged the agitated mobs.

The third place where the Internet was of importance in the Tunisian revolts was the blow by blow updates of what was happening in Tunis and other cities through Facebook and Twitter.

Bechir Blagui, who runs the Free Tunisia website, stated that lacking traditional media due to government bans on reporting and the jailing of independent journalists, Tunisians resorted to their cell phones and going online to document the history of their nation in the past four weeks.

While Facebook was the source of communication for youths, Twitter excelled as a medium in getting the message out, in driving mainstream media coverage, and in connecting activists on the ground with multipliers in the West.

There was certainly a lot of Twitter chatter about the protests, especially under the hashtags  #tunisia, #benali and #sidibouzid, the name of the village where a young graduate set himself on fire in desperation against the confiscation of his only means, a vegetable cart.

Posterous also played a role, as the blogging collective Nawaat had been frenetically updating their Posterous with excellent videos and images of the protests.

Videos of street clashes in numerous Tunisian towns were uploaded on YouTube, minute-by-minute updates on the number of casualties were retweeted, and reports on the political situation as it unraveled kept Arab, and worldwide audiences mesmerized. Thousands of messages of encouragement and support were sent to the Tunisian bloggers and tweeters, not to mention the storm of dismay in the form of disappointed tweets from Saudi Arabia once citizens of the country  learned that Ben Ali was seeking refuge in Riyadh.

Bechir Blagui further said that social media such as Twitter were crucial to the flow of information and helped protesters gather and plan their demonstrations. Media theorist Clay Shirky said that “no one claims social media makes people angry enough to act [but] it helps angry people coordinate their actions.”

Tunisian revolts were further supported by other Arab countries. Egypt was particularly singled out by many, owing to the 30 year reign of Hosni Mubarak. Egyptian human rights activist Hossam Bahgat said “I feel like we are a giant step closer to our own liberation. What’s significant about Tunisia is that literally days ago the regime seemed unshakable, and then eventually democracy prevailed without a single western state lifting a finger.”

Whether or not the internet helped on the ground during the revolts remains to be seen, but one don’t deny that the Internet played a role in publicizing the protests. It most certainly helped in distributing information to the Tunisian people prior to and during the protest. Perhaps the Tunisian government hugely misjudged the power of the internet as a tool of mobilization, an error which proved to be costly indeed.