The Peninsula Newspaper
Wednesday, 29 February 2012 00:23
The social networking sites have proved their effectiveness and contributed to overthrowing the repressive regimes. Facebook was one of the most important instruments adopted by rebellious youth in the Arab countries and Twitter offers new ways and means to continue the ideas, concepts and values in the world.
One phrase which came from some Arab countries at the beginning of the explosion on Arab streets says: The state which was established with the help of the sword will never be toppled by Face. The sword means the method of government that relied on the tensile, strength and firmness in state-building and depriving people of their political rights in decision making, economic rights in equitable distribution of wealth and social ones such as advantages and equal opportunities. The face means the regime will never be toppled through the social networking sites like Facebok, which was one of the most important tools, adopted by young rebels in the Arab countries and changed the authoritarian military dictatorships after nearly half a century of repression and abuse.
The fear of social networking sites and their influence is not limited to Arab countries and their regimes, but it extends to other countries which today stand united in preventing the revolution tide to spread. The social networking sites proved their effectiveness and contributed to overthrowing the regimes in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya, Yemen and the battle is still raging in Syria, Lebanon, Algeria and other Arab countries. The tide is now facing strong countries like Russia and China, which support the bloody and authoritarian Syrian regime.
Facebook is still banned in China and about half a billion of the Chinese internet users are deprived to access it. According to the latest statics, the Facebook network has about 800 million active users in the world. It is expected that the number of Facebook users will touch one billion users, which means that 14 per cent of the world population will visit the site once a month at least.
Facebook also aims to develop new things that keep people coming back and participate in more activities. The website’s latest function has turned a corner of the profile page of the person to a scrapbook on the internet, where the users can record by some clicks every dish they eat or every song they listen to.
The number of users on Twitter has exceeded three hundred million. The capital of the company is to the tune of $ 8.4bn. Saudi Prince Al Waleed bin Talal invested $300m in Twitter at the end of 2011. The expansion of Twitter led to a dramatic increase in the volume of available information and spending a long time in browsing that does not always lead to the desired result, especially if we know that over 200 million tweets are generated every day.
This led some web-developers to solve this problem. Twitter also has a newsroom that allows the users to search for what they want, as much as they need, and quickly. Browsing on Twitter has become a quick and easy way to get a lot of information about issues and people on the spot.
Britain-based daily The Guardian joined US-based The Washington Post to remove the last barrier between the reporter and the user by allowing the readers to communicate with correspondents and provide them with information to allow the reader understand the subject from his own viewpoint and that of the reporter.
The British newspaper decided to publish on its website a list of news stories including the articles written by the journalists in order to communicate with the readers on the social networking site Twitter. The Washington Post changed the traditional image of the journalist who used to report from his office with the help of his laptop and allowed the users and readers to rewrite its reports published on its website and correct the wrong information. The newspaper’s website also has a link which allows the users to visit the personal accounts of journalists on Twitter in order to provide comments or suggestions.
Do we live in the phase of confrontation by preventing the access to the content of information and providing alternatives to reduce the influence and impact and spread of free information and news in social networking sites? Some social networking websites have been prohibited and blocked and there are fatwas calling people not to participate in these sites. These are baseless arguments and unconvincing for many people and lead to questions over the real reason behind the launch of such warnings against Twitter, Facebook and other websites or forums.
On the other hand a group of businessmen in some Islamic countries announced the establishment of a social networking site for Muslims to compete with current social networking websites. The organisers of the new site said that it would be a comprehensive alternative to the traditional social networks with the name of “Salam World”, a world of social peace which will be headquartered in the Turkish city of Istanbul. The project managers point out that the new social networking website will break down the ideological, linguistic and geographical barriers among the Muslims. It will enable young Muslims to know their identity, discover thesmselves, enrich the world culture with heritage and achievements of Islamic civilisation and support and develop the Halal market.
According to the available information on the project, there are about 300m Muslims users of the internet. The founders of the “Islamic Facebook” aim to communicate with 50 million users in the first three years of the project. There were many attempts at another option, like Arab and Islamic websites as alternative to the global websites, but all had failed and became bankrupt due to lack of supporters or even users who used to visit the global websites.
But if these attempts survived and succeeded in attracting the public as did the social networking sites and their significant role in facilitating the communication during the Arab revolts, will such sites be allowed to play the same role or caveats, excuses and justifications will be raised in the pretext of fighting the internal aggression backed by the external power? Or there will be calls for unity and prevention of sedition and other terms that appear when there is a real test of slogans and principles. These are the most important problems that led people not to rely on Arab social sites and head for international websites.
Any step to increase the space of freedom and promote the cultural dialogue is required and every attempt to restrict them and crush them will be useless. This is the most important lesson we have learned from the international social networking sites in the midst of Arab revolts.
So will Arab social networking websites learn the lesson and succeed in providing better services?
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