It seems that Facebook and Twitter’s revolutionary impact goes beyond wasting the time of millions of teens. Just in the last month, it has contributed to the fall of two of the Middle East’s autocracies, including one, Egypt, where the dictator has been in power for 3 decades. Last summer, it almost toppled Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and even Ayatollah Khamenei (heads up to Google auto-complete for the spelling) from their perches of power. These social media-led instabilities have rulers throughout the Middle East on edge for any signs of discontent, especially in a literal sense.

However, social media obviously doesn’t work everywhere. For example, Iran still has Ahmadinejad at the helm, and China has a long record of stamping out social media dissidents without instigating revolts. Therefore, whether you’re a CIA analyst, a bearded dictator who wants to have more staying power than a tenured teacher, or just like to predict the news for fun, you’d probably like to know in what cases social media can cause revolutions/rebellions. I have some hypotheses:

First is how closely allied a nation’s military and police is with the autocracy in question. Let’s take a look at the diverging paths that Egypt and Iran took. Iran’s social media-supported protests garnered much attention, but failed to achieve its purpose because the Iranian government effectively cracked down on it. Every protest was shadowed by men in military outfits and guns, and undercover police called the Basij were instrumental in arresting many unsuspecting demonstrators. There was never any question which side the military was on, so fear of it dampened the effect that protests could achieve. In Egypt, however, the police wavered almost as soon as the protests began, as they could sympathize with the cause. The military’s declaration 1-2 weeks later that they wouldn’t intervene with protests effectively spelled the death knell for Mubarak’s regime as protests escalated after that. Lesson: it’s great that you can mobilize the citizenry and attract worldwide sympathy, but as long as the other side has most of the guns, you’re screwed.

Secondly, the size of the country matters when discussing social media’s effect on revolutions. China is a perfect demonstration of how hard social media-led mass protests can be in a large country. Since China has a population of 1.3 billion- about 16 times the size of Egypt’s- social media must influence an exponentially larger population to have a proportionate effect on the Chinese government. In other words, to duplicate a “million man march’s” effect on Egypt, China needs to have a “16 million man march”. That’s four times the population of Los Angeles. By the time a Facebook event invitation to the protest reaches even a fraction of 16 million people (not to mention the traffic a protest four times the size of the LA population will cause), even the most inept of Chinese government officials would have closed down the event and arrested its planners. Of course, if the military’s weak, this may not matter- Egypt does have the largest population in the Middle East.

So before you start hawking getaway vacation resorts to Middle Eastern rulers, remember that there are a lot of factors influencing the success or failure of a social media-led revolution, of which the two above are only a small part. A Twitter frenzy in Egypt is not going to have the same effect as one in Iran. So if you’re the ruler of a large country with a strong, loyal military like, say, Turkey or Saudi Arabia, you don’t need to transfer your bank accounts to Swiss safe havens yet (although there’s no guarantee they’ll let you use it). If you’re a democracy activist in one of these countries, maybe you should start with a less ambitious target. Might I suggest Lebanon? (oh wait…)


(Photo: neotint)