Social Media and Social Mobilisation in the Middle East: A Survey of Research on the Arab Spring

Abstract

The role of the media, and especially the social media, in the Arab Spring has been extensively debated in academia. This study presents a survey of studies published in scholarly journals on the subject since 2011. We find that the bulk of the research contends that social media enabled or facilitated the protests by providing voice to people in societies with mostly government-controlled legacy media; helping people connect, mobilise and organise demonstrations; and broadcasting protests to the world at large and gaining global support. Some scholars, however, argue that social media played only a limited or secondary role, which ought to be viewed alongside other social, political, economic and historical factors. We also identify the spatial and temporal focus of the research and preferred theoretical and methodological approaches and draw attention to several blind spots that require further investigation.