Ghosts of Disinformation: How Tunisian Islamists Contribute to Democratic Woes

• In Event: Islamism and Islamist Politics in the Middle East

Abstract

In early 2023, it has become increasingly clear that Tunisia has embarked on a journey of democratic backsliding following the election of Kais Saied as president in 2019. However, Saied’s transformation to a leader with obvious undemocratic tendencies and inconspicuous authoritarian ambitions, did not come about undemocratically. Instead, he was elected to office as an ‘outsider’ of the political system and received substantial support especially from young Tunisians (Zaki 2022).

This paper will turn to one of Saied’s biggest competitors, Tunisian Islamists affiliated with Ennahda. There is burgeoning consensus in the literature that many Tunisians had come to believe that political parties -of all shades of the ideological spectrum- are both uninterested and uninvested into Tunisia’s structural problems, such as a weak economy, related inequality, pervasive corruption, and continuous police violence. The political system created after the 2011 Revolution disappointed as it failed to adequately address the mentioned issues. As a result, the election of Saied was interpreted as in and of itself a sign of widespread disenchantment with the entire political system of post-revolutionary Tunisia (Marks 2022, Marzouki 2022).

However, it is far less understood how and why opposition groups as well as the wider public, which is increasingly skeptical of the president, are disconcerted and hence little impactful in their push backs. This paper seeks to contribute to this lacuna by examining messaging by Ennahda affiliated accounts and arguing that pervasive disinformation in Ennahda’s messaging harms the movement’s standing. Consequently, one of the biggest opposition forces of Saied is discrediting itself in the eyes of potential, more liberal opposition allies.

Theoretically, the paper relies on existing research into the historical legacies of mis-, as well as disinformation in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region and contributes to two main sets of literature:
• Scholarly work that examines the impact of social media on democratic backsliding (Guriev and Treismann 2020, Nugent 2020), and
• Emerging literature on religious misinformation, which is establishing itself as a separate research strand next to political and health misinformation (Alimardani and Elswah 2020).

Methodologically, the paper relies on:
• Desk research using CrowdTangle (CT) for public pages on Facebook and Instagram (the two most popular platforms in Tunisia),
• Qualitative data collection with CT,
• Mixed methods utilizing different keywords to collect samples of public posts and categorizing them, such as top ten posts of specific profiles, and
• NVivo to identify codes and sub-codes clustering the collected data thematically.
Preliminary results for the timeframe of November 2019 – December 2022 indicate that religious sources and texts are marginally employed by the examined accounts. Instead, disinformation with regard to political events is prevalent. Furthermore, information manipulation via relational organizing can be traced amongst the collected data. Understanding these dynamics is crucial for researchers interested in deciphering the importance of (online) messages and the negative impacts of mis-, and disinformation on democracy. Finally, the paper also aims to innovate misinformation scholarship by providing data and analysis that spans religious and political misinformation and outlines the difficulties of differentiating between the two – particularly in the Middle East.


Authors: Inga Trauthig (University of Texas at Austin) and Amine Ghoulidi (King’s College London)

Authors

• Inga Kristina Trauthig, University of Texas at Austin

• Amine Ghoulidi