This attitude changed when the same social media firms helped to distribute WikiLeaks’s revelations. The Obama administration maintained close links with Silicon Valley, seeing the internet as a means to inconvenience America’s political enemies. The phrase “Twitter revolution” was coined by the US State Department, which was lobbying Twitter to keep the service up and running during the Iranian Green Movement in 2009. It also allowed transient collectives to be formed, lightning-fast, around slogans from the Egyptian Revolution’s “We Are All Khalid Said” – commemorating a young man beaten to death by security forces – to “Occupy Wall Street”. Social media broke the monopoly on truth enjoyed by repressive regimes. Launched in July 2006, Twitter resembled TXTmob in its basic conception and political activists quickly seized on its possibilities. Not long after hearing a presentation on TXTmob’s success, the bosses of Odeo brainstormed a new SMS-based app: Twitter. One of those who had worked on TXTmob, Evan Henshaw-Plath, had gone on to work at a small tech firm named Odeo. Venture capital, however, was ahead of the state. Not until 2008 did lawyers working for the city of New York figure out what had happened and issue subpoenas demanding to see information held by the app’s creators. Activists outmanoeuvred police and federal crackdowns, improvised tactics at short notice, organised medical help for the injured and connected with supporters observing the live stream from afar. Science and Technical Research and Development.Infrastructure Management - Transport, Utilities.Information Services, Statistics, Records, Archives.Information and Communications Technology.HR, Training and Organisational Development.Health - Medical and Nursing Management.Facility / Grounds Management and Maintenance.Events and Offers Sign up to receive information regarding NS events, subscription offers & product updates. Ideas and Letters A newsletter showcasing the finest writing from the ideas section and the NS archive, covering political ideas, philosophy, criticism and intellectual history - sent every Wednesday. Weekly Highlights A weekly round-up of some of the best articles featured in the most recent issue of the New Statesman, sent each Saturday. The Culture Edit Our weekly culture newsletter – from books and art to pop culture and memes – sent every Friday. Green Times The New Statesman’s weekly environment email on the politics, business and culture of the climate and nature crises - in your inbox every Thursday. The New Statesman Daily The best of the New Statesman, delivered to your inbox every weekday morning. World Review The New Statesman’s global affairs newsletter, every Monday and Friday. The Crash A weekly newsletter helping you fit together the pieces of the global economic slowdown.
Select and enter your email address Morning Call Quick and essential guide to domestic and global politics from the New Statesman's politics team. The true “Twitter revolution” came with black flags and beheadings. Social media is now a form of communication that is taken for granted, while Twitter and Facebook have become associated with darker political developments: Islamic State self-consciously deployed social media in sophisticated recruitment and messaging campaigns, building a global theocratic army out of it.
One reason that the phrase “Twitter revolution” is heard less today is that the novelty and lustre of social media have worn off. As one protester there put it, the absence of the internet forced insurgents “to organise better”. Activists reverted to neighbourhood meetings, SMS groups and phone calls. The regime of Omar al-Bashir blacked out the internet, to no avail. The same has been true, more recently, of the uprising in Sudan that began in December 2018. Despite rapturous newspaper coverage declaring that Twitter was pivotal to the Arab Spring, social media actually proved less useful to protesters than SMS texting and face-to-face meetings. Though social media was helpful for some activists who participated in those movements, the majority had no access to these platforms.
Once, the term was gushingly applied to uprisings against regimes in Iran (2009), Egypt (2011) and Tunisia (2011). The myth of “Twitter revolutions” is dying.