Week 6: Blog Post #8: Participatory Journalism: The Arabs Springs

Citizen Journalism is a great way of getting people involved and tells the whole world the truth rather than selective viewings the media tend to show on their news outlets. 2011 in Tunisia, the Arab Springs began as rage broke out when Mohammed Bouazizi burnt himself and people reported it rather than the media. People went against the hierarchy and began anti government protests, the government retaliated. Tunisia’s government began to close all social media accounts across all platforms until an anonymous group hacked into government organizations and crashed the stock market too. What was this unidentified group called? Anonymous. The ‘anonymous’ and ‘sidibouzid’ hashtag went viral following their activities. It shows the power of social media, the government did not know what hit them. Egypt also followed suit as the Arab nations began to come together with Tunisia and journalists who were at the scene began to be captured with their articles being removed. Twitter allowed others to keep updates on those who were detained, without social media the world would have been unaware of this. There were no media companies showing what was happening as they all remained silent. People though didn’t care and posted everything they saw, this was the honest truth. This was Citizen Journalism. 

Recently we saw a similar situation occur with the Alton Sterling and Philando Castile were killed by the police within 24 hours because of their ethnicity. The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter went viral across social media and made people go against the police leading to the shootings of policemen in Dallas. So it sparked a horrible debate of ‘Black Lives’ was being punished and police brutality. All this began due to raw footage of both victims being killed and it was posted on social media becoming viral. This raised many questions such as the topic of gun laws, the police occupation and African Americans being treated a different way. All these topics would not have been talked about if the videos weren’t posted... this is the power of social media and Citizen Journalism.