Online and traditional forms of protest mobilization: Morocco’s rif protests and beyond
Lorch, Jasmin / Jonas BurkhardExternal Publications (2017)
Washington D.C.: Middle East Institute
Since the 2011 Arab Spring suprisings, research on informal civic activism, and civil society more broadly, has often focused on the role of the Internet. Specifically, Facebook and other social media facilitated both the organization and the spread of the Arab Spring protests, which initially led to widespread enthusiasm about their alleged role for the mobilization of democratic resistance in current times.[1] Newer research, however, has increasingly pointed to ways in which such overly positive assessments about the role of the Internet in the mobilization of popular protests must be further differentiated and diversified. For instance, studies by both the United States Institute for Peace (USIP) and the Pew Research Center have indicated that social media might have played a bigger role in communicating the Arab Spring protests to the outside world than in causing these uprisings in the first place.[2] Similarly, Cavatorta has noted that while online activism indeed played a crucial role in the Arab Spring protests, the latter were “not ‘Twitter revolutions’ insofar as street mobilization and face-to-face social networks were crucial” in their mobilization.[3]
