From Arab Street to Social Movements: Re-theorizing Collective Action and the Role of Social Media in the Arab Spring
Bibliographic record
Abstract
On 10 February 2010, Wael Ghonim, a prominent figure of Egypt’s 25 January movement, tweeted ‘mission accomplished. Thanks to all the brave young Egyptians.’ The message became viral, not only on the micro-blogging and other social media platforms, but throughout mainstream media outlets. Western media reports were all keen on highlighting Ghonim’s job as Google executive, and the pivotal role of digital media, from the Google search engine to social media, in bringing about this ‘happy ending’ to the first ‘Twitter’ and ‘Facebook’ revolutions. Of course the mission was far from accomplished; nearly one year after Mubarak was forced to step down, Egyptian militants are still trying to keep the flame of the revolution alive and burning by reoccupying Tahrir Square in Cairo in their pitched battles against the military junta running the country. Criticizing the overzealous praise of the role of social media in the Arab spring, Harvard professor Tarak Barkawi (2011) pointed out that these grotesque claims smack of eurocentricism because they credit the revolutions to ‘western’ technology rather than to the peoples of Egypt and Tunisia:
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".