Tootfinder

"…we, in the #Arabworld, have known for a while that these #socialmedia platforms are a threat to #democracy. For far too long,

The social media myth about the Arab Spring
Social media networks did not trigger the Arab revolutions, but they did contribute to the counter-revolutions.

Cross-Language Evolution of Divergent Collective Memory Around the Arab Spring
H. Laurie Jones, Brian C. Keegan
https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.10706 https://…

Cross-Language Evolution of Divergent Collective Memory Around the Arab Spring
The Arab Spring was a historic set of protests beginning in 2011 that toppled governments and led to major conflicts. Collective memories of events like these can vary significantly across social contexts in response to political, cultural, and linguistic factors. While Wikipedia plays an important role in documenting both historic and current events, little attention has been given to how Wikipedia articles, created in the aftermath of major events, continue to evolve over years or decades. Us…

✊ Why a Decade of Protests Didn’t Lead to Revolution
https://jacobin.com/2024/01/vincent-bevins-interview-mass-protests-2010s-arab-spring-euromaidan/

Why a Decade of Protests Didn’t Lead to Revolution
Between 2010 and 2020, a wave of protests erupted around the world. In some cases, these movements strengthened socialist forces. In others, they opened the door to the Right. Vincent Bevins spoke to Jacobin to explain the causes of this divergence.

This is an interesting article, but I don't get what he says about Masto:
"The open-source Mastodon’s norms don’t lend themselves well to news". WTF? Why not?
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/reddit-real-time-news-twitter-substitute.php

The most civilized place to look at news online? It might be Reddit 
Twitter had been our place. Where journalists gathered and pored over news in as near to real time as possible. Its peak was, perhaps, the Arab Spring in 2011—a time when we all had a rosier view of social media’s impact on democracy. (It was easier when it was happening in other people’s nations.) Then […]

How Reddit, after the catastrophic online manhunt to find the Boston Marathon bomber, quietly became a civilized place to discuss news, due to strong moderation (James Ball/Columbia Journalism Review)
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/reddit-real-time-news-twi…

The most civilized place to look at news online? It might be Reddit 
Twitter had been our place. Where journalists gathered and pored over news in as near to real time as possible. Its peak was, perhaps, the Arab Spring in 2011—a time when we all had a rosier view of social media’s impact on democracy. (It was easier when it was happening in other people’s nations.) Then […]

Review of "If we burn" by Vincent Bevins.
The book makes a simple observation: why didn't the Occupy movement, the Arab Spring, the 2013 Brazil protests, 2019 Turkey etc lead to as better world? So many of us joined those protests, but in the end, reactionary forces seemed to have taken over in those.
The reason is simple: more often than not the protests were not accompanied by a formulated alternative, by people willing to lead, or created by people willing to fo…