Last March, I was in Bahrain covering the protests that had engulfed the Pearl Monument in the capital of Manama. The protest site had all the hallmarks of a traditional social uprising, with one difference. Almost all the protesters I spoke to – especially the legions of young, starry-eyed Bahrainis with dreams of enacting the same sort of change they’d seen occur in Egypt, Tunisia and around the region – cited Facebook and similar social media sites as a key element in spurring them to finally stand up and make their voices heard.

The revolutionary zeal that has enveloped the Middle East and fascinated the world since early 2011 echoes 1968’s Prague Spring, the wave of changes born on the back of the Polish Solidarity movement in the early 90s, and the Orange Revolution that brought about change in Ukraine in 2004.

Unlike those mass-political movements, however, organisation and rallying has become a much easier process thanks to the use of the internet – and social networking in particular.  Cable news channel Al Jazeera – a traditional media outlet – has a daily tweet counter that clocks up tweets from Bahrain, Egypt, Libya, Syria and Lebanon – with tens of thousands of tweets coming in each day. Facebook pages like “Arab Spring - Syrian Uprising” have generated thousands of ‘likes’ and keep supporters informed about future actions and media coverage of their protest actions.

Ahmed Zaki, Synovate’s Business Development Account Manager based in Egypt, witnessed firsthand the historic scenes in Cairo’s Tahir Square. He says there is little doubt that his country’s revolution was facilitated by young Egyptians’ ease and familiarity with social media.

“Setting and updating a Facebook profile with all the content on ‘the wall’ gave a way to express many views on politics, religion and general interests,” he says. “In this sea of content, users saw uncensored news and interpretations of current affairs in Egypt. Examples of government brutality, economic corruption, and violation of basic human rights became known to millions in a matter of seconds. All of that with the backdrop of youth unemployment, frustration and social anxieties gave way to a flood of tension that was waiting for a sign to open its floodgates.”

The modern revolution is digitally-supported for a number of reasons. Social networking tools like Facebook and Twitter can bring together otherwise remote and disparate groups. As no one ‘owns’ the internet and censorship is notoriously difficult, even for the most censorious regime, these sites, along with video-sharing platforms like YouTube and blogs, create channels to bypass traditional state control of the media, allowing the outside world to witness and, in some sense, participate in revolutions based overseas, also allowing messages and motivational support to flow in from distant corners of the globe.

An Arab Media Forum session on the role of social media, held this past May, examined this phenomenon. Tunisian journalist and blogger Zeid Al Heni said that new media has risen to fill the gaps of censored traditional media, which has been subject to restrictions placed on it by ruling regimes. Young Arabs, who rely more on the internet and non-traditional news outlets, gravitate towards this new dissemination of information, shunning the traditional models.

Shadi Hamid, Director of Research at the Brookings Doha Centre and a fellow participant at the session, noted that social media helped disseminate updates about uprisings in the Arab world in ways that could not have been possible before. "No one is saying social media is required [for revolutions to succeed] but there is no doubt that it helps," he said.

At the start of this year, Sultan al-Qassemi's Twitter account @SultanAlQassemi had around 7,000 followers, but at the time of writing he had almost 72,000 followers, all due to the UAE-based writer’s ability to translate – figuratively and literally – Arab news for a western audience. Tens of thousands of people became enthralled with this frontline reporting and at the height of the revolution in Egypt he was tweeting sometimes as often as every 45 seconds.

It was his coverage that led him to be included in Time magazine’s 140 best Twitter feeds and was a key tool for a larger, global audience to understand the subtleties of politics in the Arab world. "This will sound vain but I find there are a lot of people I influenced positively," Qassemi says. "Wherever I go, people come up to me and say, I have been following you and you helped me to understand."

Whether social media led to the revolutions in the Arab world or facilitated them, it played a major role in mobilising populations. But, as Synovate’s Zaki says, there is more to a revolution than removing a corrupt or brutal regime. “Revolutions are not only about defeating an old regime, but about rebuilding new and free nations. Social media will continue to play a role in rallying people around purposes and initiatives. I now see initiatives to support the economy, support tourism, or simply to adopt more civil behaviour in traffic. People now have a way to express themselves, and now have living proof that they can also move mountains.”

For more information, please contact Ahmed Zaki, Business Development Account Manager for Synovate Middle East at ahmed.zaki@synovate.com