Good evening, everyone. My name is Walter Armbrust. I'm a fellow Middle East centre and I'm hosting tonight's webinar.
The title of tonight's session is Counter-Revolution versus Counter Marginalisation
Movements revisiting the online tug of war a decade after the Arab Spring.
And we're fortunate to have two excellent speakers tonight.
I'll introduce them. The first is Dr. Inside Hymies,
who is associate professor in the Department of Communication and also an affiliate professor of women's studies at the University of Maryland.
She's an expert on Arab and Muslim media and has co-authored with Mohammed and now AWEA two books,
Islam Dot Com Contemporary Islamic Discourse in Cyberspace.
That was in 2009 and Egyptian Revolution 2.0, political blogging, civic engagement and citizen journalism.
That was in 2013, both published by Palgrave Macmillan.
And she's also co-editor with a medley of Arab Women's Activism and socio Political Transformation Unfinished Gendered Revolutions.
That was in 2018, again by Palgrave Macmillan.
She has authored and co-authored numerous book Jack Prison and Journal articles and confidence papers in both English and Arabic.
And she also works a great deal as a media commentator and analyst, as a public speaker,
a human rights commissioner in the Human Rights Commission in Montgomery County,
Maryland, and a radio host who presents a monthly radio show on U.S. Arab Radio,
which is the first Arab American radio station broadcasting in the United States and Canada.
Our second speaker is Mark Owen Jones, who did his pitch D in 2016 at Durham University,
where he wrote an interdisciplinary thesis on the history of political repression in Bahrain,
which won the 2016 Association for Gulf and Arab and Arabian Peninsula Studies PRISE.
Dr Jones spent much of his childhood in Bahrain and has also lived in various parts of the Middle East, including Saudi Arabia, the Sudan and Syria.
And he now teaches at the Hamad bin Halifa University in Qatar.
And before that, taught at Tubingen University's Institute for Political Science and also as a lecturer in the history
of the Gulf and Arabian Peninsula at Exeter University's Institute of Arab and Islamic Studies.
He's added to books and an upcoming monograph on political repression in Bahrain with Cambridge University Press.
I don't know what the title is, but perhaps you will tell us during the course of the lecture. In addition to his academic work,
Mark enjoys communicating his research to broader audience audiences and has bio lines in the Washington Post's New Statesman,
CNN, the Independent PEN International and several others.
And he's also appeared frequently on the BBC, Channel four News and Al Jazeera.
So we'll now move straight to our speakers. We'll have Sara first and then Mark, each will speak for 10 to 15 minutes and then we'll have Q&A.
So take it away, Tom. Thank you so much for this kind introduction and for the kind invitation, Walter.
It's really an honour and a pleasure to join you all today. It's an honour to college in Oxford.
The Middle East centre, this great intellectual, academic institution.
My talk today is going to focus on really what has been changing and shifting.
Ten years after the eruption of the so-called Arab Spring uprisings in the region,
what has been happening in terms of the shift of the role of social media?
Why these shifts have been happening and also some of the paradoxes that emerged out of these shifts?
And how can we understand the dynamics of the relationship between different political and social
players in the Arab political and media landscapes in light of all of these changes and paradoxes?
Let me first start by saying that when the Arab Spring uprisings and up to 10 years ago, there was this moment of euphoria.
I am an Egyptian American. So obviously, I was very euphoric about the eruption of the uprisings.
But as a communications scholar, we also had these moments of, quote unquote, technical euphoria.
We were delighted at what social media can do. The role of social media as amplifiers and catalysts and mobilisers and coordinators,
how they can bring people together or the needs that actions on the ground help them to mobilise through Facebook pages like,
you know, we are all inside that can draw hundreds of thousands of people, you know, followers on Twitter, you name it.
It was this moment of reckoning for ya.
Ten years later, we are looking at a completely different landscape, both politically and in terms of mediated communication in the region as well.
What we are seeing in a step is a rise in what we call digital authoritarianism,
this phenomenon whereby regimes are really jumping on these social media and digital media bandwagon.
They are publishing their own skills technically and digitally.
They're creating their own cyber armies, electronic armies, going after the opponents many times,
hacking, sabotaging, blogging, you know, and really sometimes even having more dire consequences,
like finding somebody whose IP address going after this person, arresting him or her or putting them in jail or,
you know, in some dire circumstances, even ending their lives altogether.
So this is a completely different picture now in terms of this rise of what we call digital authoritarianism,
which replaced this earlier movement of the tech new for you.
Why did that happen? How did it happen?
Well, it is really showing us some of the limitations of the social media that they can really play a dual role as a double role.
They can be instruments or tools for mobilisation and tools for liberation, but they can also be tools for repression.
This dual role of social media as both tools of liberation and repression is very important.
And we should, as communications, scholars, sociology scholars, political science scholars, really understand that,
investigate the reasons and the dynamics besides behind this kind of duality in the role of social media.
There's also other qualities that we should pay attention to.
For example, when you have a moment of the collective solidarity, people are all in Tahrir Square.
They have a common goal. They are always calling for Mubarak to go.
How come you have to go? You have to go.
People, regardless of gender, regardless of age, regardless of religion, regardless of their own personal leanings or orientations.
What do united in this wonderful, you know, historic moment of solidarity and unity?
If you have this kind of solidarity and unity, which is very rare, but when it happens,
social media becomes a very important tool for amplifying the voices of dissent.
And the voices of opposition and bringing people together and uniting them behind a common cause.
But once you start to have political divisions, fragmentation and polarisation,
which is pretty much what has been witnessed in a country like Egypt and many of the other Arab Spring countries that
witnessed the reversals and backlashes in terms of the journeys to democratisation and reform with the exception of Tunisia,
then this moment of unity and uniformity and solidarity is got to be replaced with divisions and fragmentation.
And once that happens, the more polarisation and fragmentation you have,
the more social media is going to be used as weapons to increase the distance between the self and the other,
to widen the gaps and to widen the distances between different groups and even the weaponization of social media,
meaning they're going to be used as tools and weapons to attack your own opponents and to come after them.
So that is the picture that you're witnessing now, unfortunately, in the so-called Arab Spring countries.
As I said, with a unique exception of Tunisia, which was able to have a much more smooth path towards democratisation and reform.
And the other countries, unfortunately, have had very dire outcomes.
You need to go into details because I'm sure everybody on this call knows about it.
In this particular case, on social media, I weaponized in two very dangerous directions in the hands of the regimes.
They become tools of repression and. Authoritarianism, as we explain. And also in the hands of opposing parties that are going after each other.
They will become with weaponized to go after your opponents and to try to attack them and smear them and stigmatise them online.
So that is not a pretty picture, unfortunately. Right. Why did this picture happen?
What's really caused all of this? I guess that we have over credited social media too much.
We have seen labels like the Facebook revolution in Egypt, the Twitter uprising in Tunisia, the YouTube uprising in Syria.
And I think we were really kind of taken away or kind of really pulled in this moment of euphoria over crediting social
media as if they are magical tools that can bring about reform and change and democratisation all by themselves.
Ten years forward now, we've spoken about a completely different picture.
So what are some of the limitations of the role of social media?
I talked about some of them already, but other things we have to take note of as well.
They can not fill the gap or the void, which is created by the vacuum of not having an active civil society.
In many of these countries, there was no active civil society,
no real action in terms of having engy OWS and oppositional groups and activism on the ground.
And when you have this kind of vacuum, you can not really rely on social media to come in as a magical tool and to fill this kind of vacuum.
It's not going to be able to do so. You need to have a coordinated effort at every level of society, politically, socially, economically,
in terms of media communication, to be able to really move forward towards a successful journey of democratisation.
And. And what we are witnessing now, these failures or these reversals in democratisation are telling us,
hey, wait a minute, there is only so much that social media can do.
After all, they're not magical tools. They're not going to bring about change and reform and democratisation all by themselves.
You need to have an active, vibrant, organised civil society to fill some of these vacuums and to create this kind of momentum on the ground first,
and that social media can come in as a supplementary and complementary factor or as a
catalyst that can speed up this process of reform and this process of transformation.
So that's, in my opinion, is a very important lesson and a very important take away from these reversals that we are witnessing.
Ten years after the Arab Spring.
Having said all of that, I want to also focus on the theme that we're talking about, which is counter-revolution, right.
And countering marginalisation when the Arab Spring uprisings erupted. People were like, yeah, you know, I used for real.
I'd like to make bread and freedom and social justice, which is like what people would asking for.
Would they ask for a change of regime and all of that? Well, that is true.
And it's also true that certain groups felt more marginalised more than others based on gender,
based on socio economic status, based on their own religious or political ideologies.
They felt like they don't have a place at the table.
And they felt that this would be a golden moment for them to really amplify their own voices or to make their
voices heard in another way and to meet the demands of interest taken into account and taken into consideration.
For example, if you look at women's movements, right? The feminist movements in the Arab world.
OK. After the initial success of the Egyptian revolution leading to the ousting of Mubarak from office.
Women's movements. That's a golden moments. Awesome. Let's try to capitalise on that.
Let's try to build on it. So on Women's International Day, which is, by the way, March 8th.
So just coming in a few days, right? March 8th, you said, OK.
Let's have million a year and million women's march in the heart of the square,
trying to mimic this whole thing of having about Junia or a million person march
in the square calling for reform and democratisation and political change.
Let's do this kind of a million women march in the square.
Unfortunately, only five hundred women showed up and they were shouted at with the very bad words like, you know,
basically putting them down and asking them to go to the hair salon and just use nail polish and look forward.
And that's their space. Well, that was a very disappointing moment because obviously women played a very,
very important and central role in the midst of the Arab Spring uprisings.
Many of them sacrificed. They were harassed. They were arrested. They were beaten.
Some of them even paid their own lives as a price. And they lost their lives as a result of this kind of resistance mechanism.
And being at the front lines, what is the takeaway here? What can we learn from this sad moment?
I think, like we can learn the domain of democracy that ousting a dictator from office is easy.
But figuring out what to do next is not the same thing could be said about the groups of women working in the area of feminist activism,
for example, in this particular case. You can also say organising a campaign online is easy.
Calling for a march is easy, but changing societal attitudes and changing society's mindset is not so unless and until
the society itself is prepared for this type of socio political or socio economic change.
We did not expect much success just based on tweeting or posting or blogging about it.
Let's have a great a million women march in the midst of Tahrir Square to capitalise on the revolution.
It's not going to happen and that shows the kind of work that needs to be done ahead of us.
The same thing is applicable to religious groups, Islamic groups.
Some of them also tried to make some kind of, you know, buzz about themselves as an activity and try to amplify their voices as we know.
Of course, the story of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, they just had this very brief golden moment during President Morsi's time.
They were banned. And they were harassed and persecuted before and after.
Right. So some of them are still trying to use some social media platforms to amplify their voices or to make the messages heard.
But it is not definitely creating the kind of change or the kinds of, you know, visibility that they really are looking for.
And sometimes visibility can even backfire against them because of their anti-government position.
It can be a double edged sword as well. Again, raising a flag that you can only do so much just using social media.
You need to have more structural and organised change if you really want to have actual change on the ground.
So let me now move to another part of my thought, which is the paradoxes.
What kind of paradoxes are we really witnessing and seeing in this post Arab Spring space 10 years after the eruption of the uprising?
I talked about some of them already. But I want to highlight others, which are equally very important.
One of them, for example, is this whole paradox of the anonymity versus visibility.
Right. If you are anonymous, in some cases, it can protect your own identity.
You can be more safe. The government is not going to go after. He was not going to harass you because you are anonymous.
Right. So some of the active, especially those who are belonging to certain, quote unquote,
marginalised groups such as, for example, certain opponents of the regime,
whether they are from this particular political ideology or another or sort of religious ideology,
some of them have resorted to this whole curtain of anonymity to protect themselves from regime harassment.
Also, for women in particular, in traditional and conservative societies,
anonymity becomes more important because they are also fighting a double battle.
Is a political battle against the disease. And there is also a social button.
Again, a certain, you know,
societal considerations and constraints and stigmas and traditions are pretty hampered that mobility and advancement and visibility.
So that could be helpful. But just like everything else also has its own downsides.
And the downsides are it can decrease the provability that impact their
visibility and the overall credibility as players in the socio political field.
So some of the activists I interviewed have been talking about. Yeah, I can protect myself by being anonymous.
But guess what?
CNN is never going to go and try to interview and you'll find out where I am and try to have a great interview with me because nobody will know why.
And anyway. So that's really one of the paradoxes.
Another paradox is a double edged sword of resistance in the diaspora in the midst of this very repressive environment we talked about.
There is no question that a lot of opponents of the regimes feel much safer.
You know, voicing their own concerns and opposition at a distance, many of them are in self-imposed exile.
They're living abroad in many different countries all over the world to try to
stay away from the regime of oppression and from the regimes going after them.
Again, that's a double edged sword in a way. It can give you a safe space where you try to voice your own, you know,
opposition to the regime without being put behind bars or trying to be arrested or killed.
But on the other hand, there's only so much you can do in the diaspora when you are away from your own home country,
because sometimes you will not have enough impact or enough effect on the dynamics of the socio political field inside your own country.
If you are just freed despite opposition online and you are not actually having real interaction with people at home,
it can also limit your own ability to have some kind of impact or or effective on your home country.
So that's another paradox. A third paradox, which is very interesting is this shift from what we call the state feminism or top down feminism,
quote, then called the first lady syndrome.
When the government tries to really kind of give you the impression or the image or the picture that it is really creating reform or change.
But in reality,
nothing is really happening in terms of affecting women's lives on the ground and really making changes in their own lives in a meaningful way.
And, of course, the shift, what we call grassroots activism at the grassroots level,
which means when women themselves start to take matters into their own hands and organise their own movements and mobilise on the ground,
as we have seen, for example, in the midst of the Arab Spring, the movements, unfortunately,
a lot of the so-called quote unquote, pop down forms of feminism have had very limited trickle down effect.
They did not really impact women's lives in meaningful ways. Whether you're talking about the appointing of many women ministers in Egypt,
whether you're talking about non Arab Spring countries like Saudi Arabia trying to give an image of reform and an image of change, it was reality.
Women's situation is still very constrained and still very much a negative reality on the ground.
So that's another interesting paradox that we have to be aware of.
And I end with one other candidate, which is very important, which is the fact that unfortunately, some of the quote unquote,
marginalised groups that we're talking about are trying to use social media to counter that on marginalisation.
Not all of them have necessarily been supportive of revolutions.
Some of them have actually turned into problems, the revolutionary movements themselves,
which is a very interesting but very sad but a box to talk about.
For example, you have seen some groups of women and other marginalised minorities that have been part of the quote unquote, a senior U.S.
Or Saudi Mr President movement that was supporting Mubarak. And some of them are also supporting the military dictatorship under Sisi.
And in other parts of the Arab world as well. I've seen some Islamist groups like the Salafis in Egypt, for example,
taking some positions that are pretty much in support of the the military coup
in Egypt and supporting it instead of trying to take a position against it.
So these are, quote unquote, marginalised groups that instead of being the, you know,
revolutionaries, they have taken the position of being counter revolutionaries.
I think the explanation could be an attempt on the part to try to counter that awful marginalisation by
trying to appease the regime or trying to make peace with the status quo rather than to go against it.
And finally, we could not turn a blind eye to the moment that we are all in right now, which is the pandemic movement,
which brought about a lot of constraints in terms of the activism in general and
social media activism in particular with the enacting of a lot of cyber crime laws.
Let's read a book. A lot of constraints on activists and journalists and people will try to get the word out
about anything that does not go along with the government's policy or the government's plans.
In many cases, these people find themselves there from TV silence. The websites are blocked.
They can be put behind bars. In some extreme cases, they can be arrested and killed.
Even these are very sad stories, but are very real ones.
And the future prediction is that this whole wave of digital authoritarianism is going to escalate.
Is what I get from bad to worse as both parties, the regimes on one hand and their opponents on the other hand,
try to master their own skills of cyber activism,
use them as weapons to attack the other and use them as weapons to just make their own stories heard while silencing others.
So that is the prediction moving forward in the post pandemic era. And 10 years after the Arab Spring.
Thank you so much. Thank you, sir. When I moved to Mark.
Thank you very much, Walter, for your introduction. I should really update my bio because the book I'm behind is out political repression, right?
No, it's my words. Thanks so much, Sahhaf.
Your your you've I think you've laid out the ground perfectly of this idea between digital euphoria or digital utopianism and digital dystopia.
As those who know me will know, I'm incredibly cynical. So I definitely situate myself on the digital dystopian side of things.
So I generally see things as going from bad to worse and a general level.
But today I want to talk. I want to give a few empirical examples of digital authoritarianism.
But what I want to do first is, is actually think about digital authoritarianism, not as a state century can enterprise.
And what I mean by that is it's increasing important to look at the various nodes that occur within digital authoritarianism that enable it to happen.
There's a tendency mostly within political science,
I think I ought to to focus on the role of the state and the role of the states specific role in terrorism.
But as we know, obviously, authoritarianism is a phenomenon.
And the resilience or authoritarianism is abetted by number of forces, including those of outside powers.
So I'll start with a brief anecdote.
And firstly, we have to accept that part of digital authoritarianism is this notion of disinformation and fake news,
propaganda, etc., etc, is an aspect of digital authoritarianism. And the where the anecdote is not yet my anecdote.
I'm not going to lie if we think about the role of a London PR firm that also
helped the Soviet party in power doing work promoting Mohammed bin Salman,
the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. Why is that the case?
Well, there's a market for whitewashing the reputation of dictators, and this has always been the case,
for example, in the Gulf, in Britain's relation and Britain's particular lectureship in the Gulf.
And it raises these questions of who profits from digital authoritarianism.
Why is digital authoritarianism happening? Because the problem when we talk about tools like Twitter, social media uncritically,
is that we have an almost an element of technological determinism where we assume these tools just exist.
And why do they just exist? But actually, these tools exist for specific reason.
If we look at why Twitter has proliferated around the world, where Facebook has proliferated around the world, we actually have to ask ourselves,
why has a product such as Facebook or Twitter been allowed to be distributed around the world without any due diligence,
for example, of the potential negative consequences of that product?
Now, I think that in these times, if you sold a car. Or our washing machine, and that washing machine or car was faulty.
It would be withdrawn and the manufacturer withdraw that product because there's a safety problem.
However, there's this normative assumption with technology, Anderson.
And this ties in with this notion of digital euphoria and techno utopianism.
This itself is an ontology, right? You know, if those of you have seen the social Delamar, I think on Netflix,
we'll see that there's this notion of these tech firms in Silicon Valley who
firmly believe that the technology that they are creating is doing a social good.
There's no particular malice there. However, there's this embedded ideology that technology solves problems.
And this idea that technology solves problems.
And specifically in the case of social media issues to do with authoritarianism and they enable free speech.
And democracy is embedded within this kind of North America centric notion that these technologies are going to do that.
And that's embedded within and created within a society or a country where there is a specific, you know, debates about or services, civic space.
Right. So this is the background for why these technologies are created.
And then they are distribute around the world without any, for example, due diligence of human rights.
If you are a technology company or a social media company or a Start-Up,
surely you need to be asking yourself, what will the impact of this product have on the market?
I'm going to send it to.
And we've seen countless examples of how technology has enables violence and authoritarianism when the most egregious examples is Facebook,
who even acknowledged that the role of that technology in Myanmar, for example, facilitated ethnic cleansing.
And so we know that social media is a cognitive device,
but very little seems to be done about exploring the relationship between the political economy of these countries and the way they benefit.
And I think this is increasingly important to study digital changes, just like we might study the arms trade.
We need to actually explore these avenues of connexions rather than seeing technologies as isolated, separate falls.
We need to understand technology as a a product that also has a great weight of incentives behind it, push it to market.
And I think this is particularly important. And when we're looking at, you know.
And this is key when it comes to companies, I think, like Twitter and Facebook.
How are they? Why is it so difficult, for example, as you know, so has discussed,
that with consent as academics and policy makers and NGOs arguing that the role of
technology is increasingly detrimental in places like the Gulf or certain countries.
It's being utilised as a tool of oppression, a tool of surveillance, and in many cases a tool of intimidation to troll and harass activists.
So why is it allowed to go? Why is it still existing if its use is simply to facilitate state repression?
Well, this is a big a big question. And again, it raises issues of revenue.
Is the Middle East market, the Arabic speaking market,
so great that these companies are benefiting not no longer from a product that allows it facilitates free speech.
But actually from a product that is being used simply as an extension of the security apparatus.
And is there an ethical issue that we need to raise it? Because when we talk about technology, again,
there's a tendency to forget about policy implications and those kind of things that that can change this.
And, you know, and we know, for example, in the Gulf that the Gulf is wealthy.
We know that that is the largest population centre in the Gulf region, high technology, penetration rates, high tech social media.
And, you know, this is this enables one specific state with an authoritarian framework to dominate the Arabic speaking online social media community.
So what that means is, is that if you look at content on Twitter and this is another important thing to bear in mind,
if you're looking for a discussion about foreign policy,
say, the war in Yemen on Twitter, if you look at the results when you search in Arabic, you're not going to be presented with,
you know, equal sides of the debate where every country in the region has the ability to express
the same amount of content about a specific topic on the on the country and the country,
the most resources, iPhone's population will be able to dominate that discussion.
So now, if you look at the topics around Yemen,
you will see that those conversations are entirely dominated by accounts representing foreign policy positions,
for example, of the UAE and Saudi Arabia. That's in Arabic. Right.
So what you have is a situation where a country can use its demographic power and it's relatively
advanced technological infrastructure to shape the social media sphere in the Arabic world.
And so we're seeing this kind of imbalance of voices within the region based on wealth and also an authoritarian tendency and
authoritarian tendency is the perceived importance of authoritarian regimes to actually need to dominate the information space,
which is a drive. And, you know, this is hugely problematic if we're talking about online civil society,
because when we talk about online civil society and on MySpace, it's more often,
especially in the Arabic speaking world,
we're talking about an Arabic speaking space as opposed to a state bound by national boundaries and that kind of thing.
And this is a, I think, particularly pertinent to see to see which countries are benefiting from this and who
then has a disproportionate amount of what I call digital hegemony or digital power,
who has the ability or the digital capital to dominate the digital space discursively and in other ways.
And this is a very important kind of thing we have to see because this power is not necessarily new.
If you look at the post-war Gulfstar post Gulf War structure. I mean, the 1990 Gulf War.
We'll see. For example, you know,
this the classic anecdote that people in the Gulf found out about the invasion of Iraq a few days after it happened by watching CNN.
And at that point, it was you know, we saw increasing investment in particular from Saudi Arabia in satellite TV channels,
in the infrastructure of satellite television.
The whole notion being that if the role of information was seen as important and you don't just try to, you know,
dominate your own national press, but you try to influence the informational infrastructure, the whole country.
And we see this now with Twitter in the same way. But what we're seeing is an increasingly aggressive attempt to do this.
So whilst you can buy out a satellite TV channel, you can't necessarily buy out Twitter.
Well, can you? There's actually been increasing worry about, for example, Saudi's public investment fund via Softbank investing in Silicon Valley.
We know that they aren't investing a lot of start-ups. We know, for example, that Saudi Arabia now or three,
two Saudi citizens are facing a criminal case from the FBI in the USA because high level
Saudis connected to who has been named as royal one infiltrated Twitter headquarters in 2016,
stole lots of personal data and then took this back to Saudi.
And we know we we know that there are people now are activists, Saudi activists,
who say that that data leak is directly responsible for the arrest of Saudi citizens.
Right. So what we're seeing here is this evidence of the perceived importance of the information ecology for the current,
for example, in this case, the Saudi regime.
And this is key because we're seeing attempts to drive and dominate the discourse and in reality, we're seeing it happen.
You know, I've been looking now at the digital space for the past 10 years,
and there is this trajectory of increasing or decreasing critical conversation and increasing dominance by pro-government voices,
mostly from the Gulf. And there's a couple of other aspects that I think are interesting in terms of where is this going?
But I want to mention well, firstly, what do you do if you can't summon enough resources to create the discussion you want?
Well, we're seeing an increased amount of automation here.
So a lot of my work has been on bots, which are automated accounts that can replicate content in huge amounts and huge volumes.
And the efficacy, or at least of all of these bots is quite astounding.
I did a study a couple of years ago looking at specific sectarian hate speech, anti Sunni and Shia hate speech, and found that, you know,
a large amount of this specific slurs at the sectarian slurs that we saw online were actually
being generated by bots which would belong to the satellite TV channel in Saudi Arabia.
So a lot of the discourse that we saw, the sectarian discourse online, was actually created essentially by Ottoman automatons.
Right. So it wasn't necessary, reflecting the real world of individual people, but these kind of fake accounts.
And so the other thing as a I and it's an artificial intelligence becomes better.
The whole notion of the adversaries and the people we're going to see online might change because theoretically it will be trivial
soon to have an online account or Twitter account or Facebook account that is advanced in terms of artificial intelligence,
that it can perfectly replicate government propaganda and appear real fool someone else, that they are real.
And this might sound farfetched, but I don't think it is.
I mean, to use, you know, another brief stir is that, you know, Saudi Arabia famously gave Sophia this robot that was created.
I can't remember the company who made it, but they gave this robot citizenship.
And there was something kind of symbolic about giving a robot citizenship because this robot is a robot.
It's fundamentally someone you can programme,
someone who you could ideally shape in such a way that they will never engage in dissent and will always praise the regime.
So they are giving a robot citizenship. You are sort of saying, well, this is the ideal citizen.
And in fact, that was a woman was even more striking.
And so the idea that we might have an autonomous civil online civil society dominated by bots and robots spreading propaganda already exists,
but in a very crude way. So I wonder where this is taking us.
And, you know, artificial intelligence now is one of the next avenues worth exploring in terms of
the technological dystopia and how that will be used by authoritarian regimes.
But just to go back to my original point to end on, this isn't just the remnants of authoritarian regimes.
Technology is often mentioned as a tool and how you use it tool is depending on its purpose.
I could have a video camera, I could make a wonderful movie, or I could use a video camera to spy on someone.
Yep. But we need to be also looking at who is making these tools and who is selling these
tools and who is benefiting financially from these tools and for what purpose.
And also, what's the ideology, ontology embedded within these tools themselves, you know?
And you know, and in terms of policy that what this matters for so many reasons, some of which I've just mentioned.
But if we take it again to this notion of digital orientalism,
where what happens in the Middle East in terms of the Arabic speaking world is seen as less important.
If we can go back to the Myanma incident, ethnic cleansing was facilitated because of disinformation spread on Facebook.
And one of the reasons that happened is because Facebook had invested so little and
having the appropriate language specialists who could moderate content in that region.
And the same is true in, I would say, even more true in the Arab speaking world.
The same kind of infractions of whatever Twitter policies or Facebook policies
that occur here are not dealt with in the same way as they are dealt with in,
say, North America or Europe. You know, it's seen as a bit of a backwater in the way it's dealt with.
So there's this kind of elements of sort of imperial sort of digital imperialism, the sense that whereas the market share here,
the advertising revenues generated from people using the products here are acceptable.
However, policing the use of that product. So it's not using authoritarian ways.
It's not incentivised because that would actually affect the bottom line.
And that's something we also need to consider when we're looking at technology and policy, because digital technology doesn't exist in a vacuum.
It comes from somewhere and it's some people profit off of it.
And that is part of the disinformation, the digital authoritarian network and supply chain and structure.
So it's not just a state centric enterprise, but it's a collection of different actors who for various reasons, benefit in specific ways.
And I think that's an important way to conceptualise digital authoritarianism.
And I'm going to end. So this type of questions. Thank you.
Thank you both for excellent and thought-Provoking presentations.
I'll begin by asking you both a couple of questions. Who will give the audience time to formulate their own questions for Soha?
I think the one word that didn't occur in your talk was surveillance.
You're still talking. You're talking about social media in terms of their capacity to join people together.
And you acknowledge, like the rest of us have. That didn't necessarily turn out the way so many people thought it would.
During that initial nominee of euphoria during the Arab revolutions.
But I'd like to hear your thoughts about.
Social, well, not just actually not just social media, but of all information technology as a means of surveillance by the state.
And of course, it goes beyond social media.
Every time we go onto the Internet and start clicking messages or clicking or clicking on Web sites, we can potentially be watched.
And we actually are being watched. And so I'd like to hear I mean, in a way, I'm asking you to give your take on Marc's dystopian ism.
But I was struck by by not having actually heard the word surveillance in your whole talk.
And for Mark, I want to ask you whether.
You are running a risk of just recreating the technological determinism that
we all found so dissatisfying in the initial days of the Arab revolutions.
And, you know, we had the many people had this sort of naive thought that social media had the capacity to put the truth out there.
And if the truth were out there, then eventually, of course, it would it would prevail over falsehood.
And now we know better. And social media seems to actually be having the opposite effect.
And so you mean you're saying that it's inseparable?
The technology is inseparable from the malign forces that are creating it and getting us all to use it.
But it's not going to go away. We're going to continue to live in a media saturated world.
And and I've. Is it your dystopian isn't so deep that the only thing we can do is stop using media and find ways to live our lives outside of it?
You want me to go first? Walter? Yes. You refer your question about surveillance.
Indeed. This is a very important point. Of course, we can never turn a blind eye to the amount of surveillance happening in cyberspace.
And I'll just buy this. Seems like you are right.
You mentioned even social media themselves have their own built in mechanisms of surveillance, which is very scary.
You know, issues related to personal security, issues related to national security.
Invasion of privacy. How much information you could or should share on social media.
All of this is becoming a really scary reality that we as consumers and users of social media have to grapple with day in and day out.
Think about how many times you use the Internet to buy something.
And then you were flooded with all of these e-mails asking you if you're also interested in buying X, Y, Z.
Or you watch a certain movie and you get all of these, you know,
e-mails or all these notifications from different social media platforms asking you that.
You'll also be interested maybe in watching this, this and that.
What that tells you is that you are really under closer monitoring from so many different groups and so many different agencies all at once.
The regimes are part of it. But there are also other entities. You know, let's kill these social media platforms themselves.
Not to mention, of course, when you have major scandals like what's happened on Facebook and the leaking of personal information of,
you know, thousands and thousands, hundreds of thousands or even sometimes millions of users of these different social media platforms.
But if you want to link this back to our discussion related to the platform or the images
we have now revealing in the Arab world 10 years after the eruption of the uprisings,
I think what I ended with in terms of the moment we are living in now, which is the pandemic movement,
brings in a much darker and even more scary image in terms of these Serbians techniques and mechanisms,
simply because a lot of regimes have now started to implement a certain apps and certain to exist on social media,
whereby they can actually do what is called contact tracing. They can trace who you have been talking with, who have been visiting with.
We have been seeing or places you've been going to your own location of that very sensitive person.
Information is now being under closer surveillance and the close watch of the regime is under.
Of course, the method of protecting your own personal safety and your health and the health of your family.
So we are entering into this new phase, if you will, a very dangerous degree of surveillance,
which is much more intrusive into everyone's life in this pandemic moment.
And my prediction is moving forward with the regimes publishing their own skills and their own
tools and their own learning curve in terms of mastering technological and technical skills.
We're going to see even a greater degree of surveillance and invasion of citizens privacy and
going after opponents and opposition movements using many of these modern tools and techniques.
As I mentioned, Deep Pandemic is bringing all of that now to the surface. And this is only the tip of the iceberg.
I think from here it's going to get from from bad to worse.
So we as consumers of social media have to be really much more alert and aware of all of these mechanisms.
Just very quickly, two things I want to quickly point to.
I forgot to mention them and my thoughts. One of them is the chicken and egg question in terms of what comes first.
Meanwhile, democratisation or having them active civil society.
You and I talked about, you know, the fact that you have a vacuum in terms of civil society and the social media can not fill this vacuum.
The question then becomes, then what comes first? Should you have a stable democracy in order to have an active and vibrant civil society?
Or do you need to have an active civil society and fill these these vacuums first in order to have a proper transition to democratisation?
Unfortunately, up till this moment in time, I cannot promise that I have an answer for this question.
It appears to be another paradox or another dilemma that we have to grapple with as scholars and as professionals
and as people working in the field of social media and cyber activism and also in political science.
What comes first is a chicken and egg question or dilemma that we have to grapple with.
And finally, this whole notion of cyber fortia that we talked about or cyber utopia,
we need to reach a middle ground to what we can call cyber realism, whereby we are not over crediting or either crediting social media.
We don't have this moment to afforded. We call it the Facebook revolution, Twitter uprising and all of that.
But at the same time, we don't want to turn a blind eye to the importance and the vitality of social media and the different roles they can play.
So we need to arrive at some kind of middle ground or some kind of balance that we can call cyber realism,
trying to weigh the pros and cons and the strengths and the limitations. I mean, I think that kind of leads what I said leads off nicely to two.
Walter, your question, because I think the notion of cyber realism. For me, it's it's it's not in the same value category is either utopianism.
Dystopian isn't one you type. This implies something good, positive dystopian, something negative.
Realism is reality, but reality can also be good or bad and it can go in one of those directions.
Right. So the question for me is, where are we now?
And I think, yes, I am certainly cynical.
Well, I think there is a risk of of of kind of, you know, having a teleology it's all gonna be bad and it's going to end terrible.
Right. And that's where we're going. And that could happen. It might not. But I think the moment we're in, we have to.
Look at the reality. I don't think anyone's his questioning. That's 10 years ago, there was a moment of euphoria and the point where it now,
certainly in the Arab world is one of less hope in the vote of technology.
And I think what's interesting about this in terms of connecting. Back again, back to where this technology originates.
We've seen the rise of fake news and disinformation. Recently, we've seen the rise of post truth politics,
which is the destruction of faith and trust in institutions, the denigration of the news media organisations,
the essential gaslighting of institutions to such an extent that people reduce
their trust in institutions that direct them on figures such as Donald Trump, Donald Trump.
And if we look at what happened in the 6th of January in the US, the Capital Hill, you know, this isn't just an unique event.
This has been building for some time. The role of technology, the role of fake news, the data, the eak,
the policy ecology that exists in the US that has allowed technology companies to
grow this big and grow this dominance without regulation has also allowed this.
So I think the trajectory we're on and that we've seen in the region and we've seen
in the US recently reflects a tendency towards going to an authoritarian place.
And some people might dismiss the word authoritarianism and just use a term liberal practises, right?
Well, I think the liberal practises are being enabled by the current digital information,
ecology and social media, whether that is surveillance or disinformation.
I think they're well connected. So was I don't dismiss the possibility of an alternative.
I still think that there's a real struggle that just as if I was a citizen,
an enforcer in regime structures that are very real and very authoritarian.
And in order to overcome, those certain conditions must be met.
And I think whilst there isn't a resistance against the direction that digital technology and digital governance is heading.
We're still at a point where we are resisting increasing illiberal practises within that realm.
So, yes, disconnect everything is what I'm saying, except for Zoom, obviously, because, you know, this is where we learn parenting.
Is a good use of technology, right? The questions from the audience will be curated by my colleague Eugene.
Thank you, Walter. It's a pleasure to see so many people of getting their questions in.
If you'd like to ask a question, this is to Glassboro and a beer Najara.
I see you've raised hands, but that function doesn't work on this platform.
So please go to the queue in a bar at the bottom and type of question in and rejection.
I've asked you to clarify your question.
Have a look at my message and see if you can refine your question a little bit so that I can ask it to our speakers.
But I'm going to start with one of our students future showcase who's posing the question to Sahar.
He says that you say that ousting a dictator is easy, but figuring out what to do next is hard.
And then you said that it depends on society.
If society is ready and I think culture wants to challenge, you're putting too much emphasis on the role of society, Sahar.
He goes on and says, is it really in the hands of society and not the military or the economic elites or
international backers like the US or the Saudis or the UAE in the case of Egypt,
who have a greater capacity to put pressure on the powers that be?
So have you put too much pressure on its own speakers? I need brief answers from you because we've got a lot of questions here over the use, Sahar.
Well, let me first start by saying this is an excellent and very thoughtful question, and I don't think we are really important for this agreement.
The chicken and egg dilemma that I posed at the end of the paradox of what comes first.
Right. You need to have these kinds of structural changes in society on different levels, socially,
politically, economically, before you can really have a successful transition to democratisation,
or do you need to have some kind of stable democratisation first in order to have
all of these structural changes and filling some of these vacuums and gaps?
Definitely. There's definitely a lot of good points here that you can not just rely on for the good society alone,
especially when you have all of these constraints.
You're not talking about some kind of, you know, Western democracy where you have freedom of expression, freedom of the press and freedom of speech.
And you can just go about and just put aside the highest office in the land and be safe and secure.
We're talking about very repressive regimes, very authoritarian regimes.
You're talking about consequences in terms of activism as all of these things have to be taken into consideration.
Of course, all the other points mentioned in the question as well in terms of foreign
interference and international influence and all of these other constraints,
the role of the military, all of these factors have to be taken into consideration.
And my whole point was there was this moment of euphoria in 2011 when we thought, yes, you want a shot, you need is putting this on.
The people want to overthrow the regime. And we thought that by Mubarak just leaving office or stepping down,
that if you were able to do this mission successfully, 10 years forward, we discovered that this was not the case.
And you need to have really,
really much more work and much more investment in building this active civil society and building this kinds of grassroots activism,
a mechanism which is very, very difficult to do when you have a repressive regime in place.
So this would be my answer to this question. Thank you so much, sir.
I've got a question for Mark next from Tom Perez, who clearly picking up on your work on Bortz,
wants to know what researching state sponsored exploitation of major Silicon Valley platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Google and Apple Inc.
What would such research look like? Well, I mean, I do engage in this work, and so what?
A lot of it does is involve monitoring, identifying and finding these kind of problems, such as bot networks and and exposing it.
And one of the reasons here is that companies like Facebook or Twitter generally
on that transparent in terms of the information operations they document.
So without civil society activist pushing back, then there is very little that has you know,
there's very little chance that that's going to be much change in this realm.
And I think this taps in briefly to another question, which is the power of these social media companies.
One of you asked, well, I think about Trump being banned. And I'll just answer this quickly because it's relevant.
I think it's a good thing. Trump was banned because he was generating hate speech.
And, you know, I think in terms of society doing no good.
The problem with him being banned, it reflected the power of social media companies in in intervening in discourse.
However, it also highlighted how there was a lack of transparency, public debate, public input in those decisions, who and who should not be banned.
And it really exposes that these companies, which can impact on the digital discussion and the civil society,
are not subject to the kind of democratic oversight that we we should probably have them doing.
Thank you very much, Mark. I've got a question from Hollywood, Joshua, for a start,
who would like to challenge the assertion you made that Tunisia is an exception to the way Arab Spring affected other countries?
He wants to know what internal and external factors in Tunisia rendered the country exceptional in this regard.
I know that some of Micronesia friends would even grapple with this term and sometimes even criticise that,
they would say, oh, you talk about the region exceptionalism too much.
We still have our own challenges, that we have our internal problems and we have economic challenges.
I mean, like. Yeah, you do. That's for sure. But at the same time, if you look at the stark partisan with other so-called, quote,
good Arab Spring countries that really had their own, you know, evolutions go completely in the opposite direction.
You know, the civil war in Syria, the war in Yemen, the Victorianism.
And, you know, this is a country of strife and violence in Libya that it turns out much more harsher military dictatorship in Egypt,
all of these very, very unfortunate outcomes that we've gotten an invisible, crushed revolution in in in Bahrain.
You look at this very bleak and very gloomy picture. I think Tunisia stands out as a very successful exemption for a number of reasons.
It's a much smaller country. It is a very high literacy rate of over 90 percent.
The women are very literate and educated that are very much part of the public sphere.
And I will say women are heads of society and they give birth to the second half.
So they're very important to be at the table. And it's very important for them to have their voices heard.
The judges, they're taking part in decision making. It was also this very important success in terms of building alliances.
Groups were able to get together and build successful alliances.
Some of them won the Nobel prise for this great work, which unfortunately we have not witnessed in the other so-called Arab Spring countries.
We have seen the fragmentation, polarisation and division, which I mentioned before.
We have not seen a successful experiment of alliance building and coalition
building that helps to really pave the way for a transition to democratisation.
Or did you just put out as an example and also the lack of international interference in the case of Tunisia was also another health affected.
So I think all of these factors coming together could lead to this. I still stand by my term in Tunisia, Tunisian exceptionalism until this moment.
Thank you. Thank you very much, sir. I've got a couple of questions, Sharmarke, about the Gulf region.
For one, I know there's been a lot of this is coming from called an aid writes.
I know there's been quite a bit about Saudi Boort activity detected in the UK surrounding the aborted purchase of the soccer club Newcastle United.
I wonder if we're seeing similar campaigns by Gulf actors online targeting spaces outside the MENA region?
And if not, why not before you jump to that one from bloodedness?
We have concerting Bahrain. We witnessed a situation using Internet and social media as a tool of political repression.
Dr Jones spoke about it in his latest book. So we're plugging your book here.
Mark, take note. Do you think this situation would change with the Biden administration?
So the goals that its near abroad or whatever they like?
I think the question about whether we see regimes targeting abroad are really important because, yes, they are.
And this shows increasing boldness of certain actors in the Gulf region, particularly the UAE and Saudi Arabia.
We see this with surveillance and in fact, antiperspirant.
But, well, you know, there is an increasing attempt, especially under the Trump administration,
from these regimes regimes to try to influence public opinion abroad. And to give one quick example.
Last year, we detected my colleague and I jennison that at least we detected a network of 25 fake journalists that had used artificial intelligence,
generated profile images and submitted heads, opinion articles to over forty five different international news outlets and had them published.
So this is this included The Washington Times, South China, Morning Post.
You know, Asia Times spiked in the U.K. These articles written by someone who wasn't who they were claiming
to be basically articulating Emirati foreign policy in these international news outlets.
And they successfully did about 95 oh, PED's. Right. So this is phenomenal.
And this kind of activity we see all the time. So, yes, these regimes are targeting abroad and they are trying to influence public opinion abroad.
And I think one of the reasons we saw this, particularly the past four, five years,
is that Trump was seen as, you know, a very strong candidate to be supported.
The goals of, say, I haven't been sound inside. So they were very much wants him to be re-elected.
And as such, put resources into that.
With regards to Biden and behind who the president of the U.S., his matches in terms of state repression in Bahrain.
As soon as Trump were elected, we saw more executions in Bahrain than we've seen since before 2011.
Biden will make a difference in terms of the plight of political prisoners in Bahrain,
but I don't think it will be significant difference difference in terms of the role.
Digital tools are being used the way digital tools are being used to to aid state repression.
Unfortunately. Thank you very much, Mark. I've got a question now from a beer, Nazar of your.
Glad you found your way to the queue in a bar.
This one's for Subha and a beer is asking, what examples can you cite of women finding bargaining power with liberal activists in Egypt,
Tunisia, Morocco and other countries where you might see a crack and current restrictions on the state of isolation of women?
Or just addressing of women's issues, presumably with social media technology?
Yeah. That's a. That's an excellent question.
It's very important to really understand why women's movement have multiple than gold succeeds in many parts of the Arab world up to this moment.
Even those that have resorted to using cyber cyber activism or cyber feminism
in this case to promote and advocate for women's issues and women's causes.
Because as we said before, social media are not magical tools and they're not going to bring about change and reform or in this case,
the social advancement for women all by themselves. We need to change inside that mindset.
And you need to have work on the ground, which is being done in collaboration between different groups.
And I'll go back again to the Tunisian example as one that really a strikingly positive example in this sense and in this regard,
we have seen that groups of women being able to bring about more public visibility for themselves,
working together across the board and bridging their differences,
groups of, you know, groups that have Islamist leading a liberal leaning secular right, left, you name it, all across the board,
being able to come together and to pass wonderful legislations and new laws
like the comprehensive law banning all forms of gender violence against women.
And they did not justifying violence as domestic violence.
They defined it as sexual, physical, emotional, economic, political violence of all different sorts.
It was a huge success and a huge breakthrough that would not have happened had
it not been for this kind of alliance and coalition building on the ground, not just online.
So that is really a lesson and a take away that I think other women's groups across
the region should learn from that they have to build alliances across the board,
come together despite the differences.
Use both online and offline and on the ground activism and coordination following this great example from Tunisia.
So thank you so much. I know you have time for one last question.
And I'm going to combine two questions here that are pushing back a little bit, Mark,
on the cyber dystopia that you present us with and are pushing you to think of a positive way forward.
Sareen quartiles. Was curious to know if they can render social media a more Democratic site where people can express themselves more freely.
And our colleague Osama Azami asks you, Mark,
what sort of regulatory frameworks could policymakers develop to bring greater transparency and democracy into the running of social media companies?
So if you could give us a hope for the future. Mark, before we bring this session to read.
All right. Well, I'm going to do a bait and switch, I think. But yeah, I think in terms of hope.
Yes. Let's let's talk about clubhouse, because I think I want to ask about this clubhouse as a new Sociably platform that's taking the east by storm.
And it's provoked, again, the same kind of debates we had about 10 years ago where people are being very optimistic.
People are saying, wow, we're having these discussions in the region about controversial issues that we never had before.
And I think this is. And I think this is a positive thing. There's a hot but there's a honeymoon period.
I said P g.
And they will approach it with this kind of optimism that enables them to have these very constructive and useful and important discussions.
My fear is that it's already been co-opted. I wrote an op ed in the Middle East by saying how we're already seeing trolling occurring in those spaces.
But it can occur, I think, in terms of, you know, again, I'm cynical, but that can stand up in terms of regulation.
We need to look at whether regulation is being made right. Because if a lot of these companies exist in the U.S. or North American Europe,
then the regulatory framework that allows them to be democratic spaces include issues of moderation, content, control, cetera.
So the kind of pressure that we need to see again exists.
And, you know, we need civil society groups to put pressure on these companies.
We need people within those countries which the companies exist to put pressure on them to create terms or condition.
Rules and regulations within the platform themselves actually facilitate a non-toxic behaviours and facilitate democratic interactions.
As a quick example. For example, Twitter is inundated with bots and fake accounts.
Palsson fake accounts are perfectly exploited by 13 regimes to intimidate and harass.
They should have no place in the platform, but they do. So that's an example of how regulation could try to get rid of it.
That's not necessarily so optimistic. But yeah, I can't.
I can't. I'm sorry, Eugene. Well, thank you for this question.
There are great questions. We'll try. I regret we're out of time.
So I want to wrap up with several things. First of all, on behalf of Eugene was carrying the questions,
I want to apologise to those of you who ask questions that we couldn't get to where they were.
There always too many questions for us to get through in the allotted time.
Secondly, I want to thank our speakers, Starr and Mark, for excellent presentations.
It's been it's been a great session. We've all enjoyed it very much.
And finally, I want to put in a plug for next week's lecture, which is the Iraqi Army's Diyar MIL Jalali annual lecture,
which is sponsored by the founder and chair of the Russian Cultural Heritage Institute.
And the title of that event will be Iran and the Arab Uprisings Opportunity Grasped or Squandered.
The speaker for that will be a new show at the Shammy from Durham University, and it will be chaired by our colleague Stephanie Cronin.
That takes place next week, Friday, March 12th, that same time, five o'clock.
So on behalf of Middle East Centre and again with thanks to our guests, I want to say goodbye to all.