Narratives of Good and Evil: Framing Social Media Use in the Arab World in 2011 and 2014

• In Event: Mediating the Caliphate: Global, Regional and Digital Dimensions of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria

Abstract

In the wake of the ‘Arab Spring’ in 2011, global news narratives celebrated social media for enabling pro-democracy activists to mobilize revolutions against dictatorships. In 2014, with the rise of ISIS, news narratives returned to anxious post-9/11 discourses about the dangers of social media in the hands of Arabs. I argue that during 2011 and 2014, narratives about social media concealed the political and social complexity of the spaces in which they were used, and gave Arab political actors the opportunity to take advantage of the anxious hopes and fears of Western news audiences. The ways that secular Arabs framed their activism as social media savviness mirror the manner in which ISIS uses social media to capture Western attention. This paper explores the meanings of this oscillation between binaries of good and evil when it comes to expectations about the political impact of social media in the Arab world.

Author

• Omar Al-Ghazzi, University of Pennsylvania