When a firewall blocking Facebook and YouTube was quietly lifted by the Syrian regime on February 8th, direct traffic to YouTube shot up.
This may appear to be the picture of four million Internet users scrambling to catch up on three years worth of viral videos. But in reality, Syrians have freely accessed these services through proxy servers for years.
When I was in Damascus in December, upscale cafes in the city center were filled with people on laptops openly looking at Facebook. I found a browser plugin that automatically accessed pages via https rather than plain old http, which made Facebook work fine even without a proxy. The Syrian President himself even has a popular Facebook fan page with over 100,000 followers.
Still, while calls for an Egypt-style “Day of Rage” protest in Damascus in early February garnered 15,000 Facebook supporters, UPI reported that only about a dozen protesters actually showed up, and were promptly beaten away by plainclothes police.
So how much does online freedom actually equate to freedom in the streets?
Ramy Mansour, a print and TV journalist who also edits the news website shukumaku.com says that government repression of information is minimal, and is mostly self-imposed.
“The government says that the red-line [of stories too controversial or critical of the government to publish] is here,” he says, holding his hand, palm-down at his forehead. “Most journalists, they only go to here” bringing his other hand well below his chin.
Dissident blogger Ayman Abdul Nour argues that the regime has been masterful in co-opting dissent and marketing itself to a tech-savvy younger generation.
“The President is the head of anti-corruption. He is the head of the IT association. He is using the iPod, digital camera, all of this stuff…this is what the young people want.”
Photo: Bootlegged software is sold openly in a Damascus neighborhood nicknamed "Silicone Valley". US sanctions bar export of technology to Syria, so software piracy is openly tolerated by the Syrian government.
When I visited the Information Ministry in Damascus myself, to register as a foreign journalist, I was expecting a sleek operation room filled with blinking monitors and agents busily searching for and shutting down dissident websites.
Instead, I saw a dingy office with a handful of ancient computers and tangles of wires. When my escort from the Ministry wanted to show me his favorite online Yoga forum (don’t ask — that’s a whole other story), he spent several minutes cursing the excruciatingly slow connection speed.
So what’s really keeping Syria from a people’s revolution like we saw in Egypt?
According to dissidents like Abdul Nour, it actually has less to do with technological repression, and much more to do with old fashioned intelligence: people spying on their neighbors and reporting subversive conversations they overhear in cafés to intelligence services.
Or maybe the country is just not fertile grounds for protest, because most Syrians are still happy under the 40-year dictatorship. After all, almost everyone I broached the subject with was quick to tell me how much they loved the government.
Pingback: Tweets that mention Syria Shows Facebook Doesn’t Automatically Equal Freedom -- Topsy.com
The final thoughts here get me thinking about the earlier post on Feb 17th about whether Egypt-style revolutions could happen in the US. I tend towards the side that social media was getting a little too much credit for what happened in Tunisia and Egypt and the example here of the failed Damascus protest illustrates that you need more than just Facebook to get people out on the streets.
If the majority of people are happy with the government, I don’t see much happening in Syria. You have to have something to rally around.
Tunisia and Egypt have undoubtedly changed the Middle East, and showed many that new communications technology are allowing people to share their thoughts, come together and bring their discontent offline, but Facebook and Twitter alone cannot fuel a society to revolution.
I’m pretty sure a lot of Syrians are pretty unhappy with the government — they were just too afraid to say so publicly, especially to a foreigner like me. That closing thought was meant to be a little sarcastic (still waiting for them to invent the sarcasm font!)
My takeaway from my time there is that the old fashioned security apparatus in Syria, the kind keeps people afraid to speak out through person to person surveillance, is strong enough to trump any access to the outside world or digital organizing tools they might have.
One aspect of Egypt and Tunisia that is fascinating is the percentage of people under the age of thirty. Is Syria similarly young? We often equate a generation gap with a technology gap and you allude to that in the Nour quote.
Nice article about a place that is opaque to most Westerners. Thanks Alex!
Yes, there are similar demographics. Median age in Syria is 21. But then Syrian President Bashar al-Assad is 46, where as Mubarak and Ben Ali were in their 70′s and 80′s.
You have more freedom in Syria that you do in the United States. You don’t have racial profiling in Syria. You don’t have high crime rates in Syria. You have great food to eat in Syria. You don’t get pulled over because of what you look like in Syria.
The People of the United States needs to overthrow the corrupt Government of the United States.
Obama is AGAINST his OWN people.
The Syrian President PROTECTS his people.
Lets see a revolution in the UNITED STATES.
After reading the art. and comments ,now from a very Syrian citizen point of view
Facebook or Tweeter never cause the revolt in Egypt ,but dignity and education ,(political education ) of the Egyptians and Tunisian where in Syria nobody knows what is inside the Syrian Constitution or who is the Prime minister of Syria or how long is the presidential period.
From a country that blocks FB and youtube, represses whatever information seems to challenge the government, including the Egypt revolution, I have to say, what the government have done is just deceiving themselves. I totally resonate with “government repression of information is minimal, and is mostly self-imposed.”
To me, freedom and democray are not something that bestowed by the government, but something that awared and reinforced by the people.
In China, what have been the hottest thing on web in the past decade? Yes, forums, Renren, kaixin001(Chinese Facebook), microblog(Chinese Twitter), and even Facebook (we use some programs to get access to it). And why? Set aside the entertainment factors, people are realizing that they can use these platforms to let out all their concerns and complaints towards the government. Our government has a strong hand on the information, BUT, they have to admit that creative netizens can think of all means to distribute the information, and I personally believe that the government even appreciate our creativity and ethusiasm, without which they would never know what we bear in mind and what they should improve.
I agree that “Facebook doesn’t equal freedom”, people who are not satisfactory with the government may not have the nerve to fight it like Egyptians, but we have our own way. In China, protest is strictly limited, but people would post online that “where, when, let’s ‘take a walk’.” This becomes a open secret code word. They are not protesting, they just get together and walk around. The police can keep an eye but they can do nothing about this “gentle dissent”, because apparently “walk” does not commit any crime.
My point is, even we don’t have the condition to do what Egyptians can do, but we can do what we can.
And time will tell.
government repression of information is minimal, and is mostly self-imposed.
Something any social media manager can tell you is that pure numbers don’t always tell the story. It’s about who is following you, who is making the comments and who is influential in that community. In a case like Syria, it sounds like by tacitly allowing access, they are cutting off the heat right before it gets to a boil. When I was in Iraq, many of the families I spoke with weren’t really for or against Saddam or the US. They just wanted electricity, clean water, telephones and peace. Who gave it to them didn’t really matter.
Never underestimate the power of “good enough”. The grass may be greener, but revolution is messy and dangerous. The spark has to be lit and must reach the tinder that is building. In Egypt and Tunisia there was a groundswell of support for revolution, but nothing to light it. Social media didn’t light the fire – but it was like wind during a forest fire spreading the sparks and starting fires all over the countryside.
In Syria, it sounds like the regime may not be “bad enough” to truly set the stage for revolution. Egypt had 30 years of dictatorship which gave revolutionaries generations to build support and plan for the opportune time.