Media Disruption Exacerbates Revolutionary Unrest? Notes.

In the New York Times today, there's a piece about a conference paper by Navid Hassanpour, "Media Disruption Exacerbates Revolutionary Unrest: Evidence from Mubarak's Natural Experiment" {link}. I took a look: here's some immediate reactions.

The theoretical part of the paper is yet another cascade model of protest, a kind of Granovetter++, which comes down to this:

• Individuals are nodes in a network, and face a decision of protesting or not. Each has a personal threshold for action (in terms of the activity of their neighbours) and some small portion have a zero threshold, acting as seeds for the dynamics.
• Individuals update their threshold based on the level of activity among their neighbours; the more their neighbours are protesting, the more likely they are to join in.

The dynamics of the model is the spread of action through the network, a cascade caused by each actor becoming first more prone to action as those around them take up action, and then joining in themselves.

A "media disruption" reshapes the network – different media lend themselves to different network structures – and the dynamics of this reshaped network will be different, leading to different regions of activity and inactivity.

For many networks, one equilibrium is for almost everyone to be inactive, as each actor has a high threshold for action absorbed from their inactive neighbours. A set of dense connections can freeze regions of a network in states of inactivity: each individual may come in contact with active individuals, but the numerous connections to inactive individuals keeps them mute.

Individuals in a less dense network have a greater possibility of becoming active in response to a population of activists because they are less restrained by the inactive people around them, and this is the basic mechanism for the "media disruption exacerbates unrest" thesis.

So it's a bit like an Ising model of magnetism with ferromagnetic coupling: ions can be spin Up or Down, and their orientation depends on the orientation of their neighbours. One difference: ions don't come with different tendencies to choose Spin Up. It's a simple model – it doesn't try to model the availability of information itself, or have anything to say about political preferences or economic situation beyond the threshold for action. But it does bring in the relationship between network structure and outcome.

There is an empirical part to the paper as well. There is a survey of past revolutions and their relationship to media penetration, which does not convince one way or another (it seems to me there is a conflation of social media and mass media that extends throughout the paper). More interestingly, Hassanpour looks at the progress of the Egyptian uprising and contends that when the government shut down the Internet and phone networks on January 28 it produced, instead of the single gathering at Tahrir Square that had been in progress for several days, eight separate protests in different parts of Cairo. He quotes Peter Bouckaert of Human Rights Watch: "It's clear that the very extensive police force in Egypt is no longer able to control these crowds. There are too many protests in too many places." In the absence of a broadly unifying social media that focused attention on the single winner-take-all protest at Tahrir, people were driven out onto the street to see what was happening and generated local protests instead.

Hassanpour suggests three effects of the disruption of the Internet and of the more widely used cell phone networks:

• it upset apolitical citizens, turning them against the government;
• it forced more face-to-face contact;
• it decentralized the rebellion.

The facts on the ground are open to many interpretations, of which Hassanpour's is one. He doesn't convince me  (I don't have the expertise to judge his empirical evidence) but it's a possibility, and I found it a valuable read.

Despite the title, the main interest is not whether social media increases or decreases the net level of activity, but that it reshapes it. There is overlap with Kieran Healy's just-posted work-in-progress, The Performativity of Networks, {link} where he argues that network algorithms, when implemented in social media products, "reorganize the phenomena they purport to describe" (social networks in this case). Facebook is a performance of a theory of friendship.

Digital technologies have been given credit for an almost endless list of roles in uprisings in authoritarian states. Digital technologies help activist circles to better communicate (blogs, IRC chat, and encrypted communications of various levels of security). They build a broader and deeper public sphere by being a space for open discussion (Facebook and Twitter). They give voice to citizens to speak to the outside world and witness the actions of their government (YouTube videos, Twitter, and blogs). They are a stark contrast to mass media. But they also complement Al Jazeera, who can draw from citizen videos. And they complement offline collaboration and offline organizing as well. Hassanpour points out that digital organizing activities are mainly Internet based while SMS is a medium more suited for on-the-fly information (SMS). In short, there is little that can't be attributed to social media in one form or another.

Hassanpour at least makes a specific claim, that a disruption of digital technologies produced an immediate and tangible reshaping of political activity, and he has a mechanism for his claim. I'm sure others will interrogate the evidence. There have been many calls to go beyond "duelling anecdotes" in looking at the role of social media, and this paper is an attempt to do that. It's flawed, but if you ask me it's going in the right direction.