Inevitably these applications are being increasingly used to host discussions, videos, pictures, cartoons, and newsfeeds that criticise ruling families, highlight corruption in governments, and emphasise the need for significant political reform or even revolution in the Persian Gulf. Leading opposition figures are now attracting as many followers on these applications (often anonymous Gulf nationals) as members of ruling families. While there have been some attempts by regimes to counterattack against this cyber opposition, often by deploying fake social media profiles so as to threaten genuine users, or by establishing ‘honey pot’ websites to lure in activists and help reveal their identity, for the most part the applications are effectively bypassing censorship controls and the mechanisms used to control earlier modernising forces. As such they are facilitating an unprecedented set of horizontal connections forming between Gulf nationals and between Gulf nationals and outside parties — connections which are crucially now beyond the jurisdiction or interference of the ruling families and their security services.
The exact role played by Web 2.0 applications, social media, and other such modernising forces in the 2011 Arab Spring revolutions is still not clear, as at present it is unknown what proportion of the populations of North Africa, Yemen, and Syria actually had access to the internet or were using it for revolutionary purposes. Indeed, some have argued that Web 2.0 applications did not lead to ‘Revolutions 2.0’ as not everybody was internet-savvy in these countries and that the abtal al-keyboard or ‘keyboard heroes’ of the Arab world may have posted many angry messages online but did not necessarily take part in street protests.[818] Nevertheless, many observers do hold the view that the very recent internet-led expansion of the Arab youth’s public sphere has been of enormous consequence and was certainly an ‘important instrument added to the protest toolbox’.[819] In January 2011, for example, the newly installed Tunisian minister for Youth and Sports claimed that ‘…in reality we have been ready, we people of the internet, for a revolution to start anywhere in the Arab World’. Stressing the interconnectedness made possible by the Web 2.0 applications, he stated that ‘we’ve been supporting each other and trying hard since a long time, and you know how important the internet was for the revolution’.[820] Indeed, in both Tunisia and Egypt human rights defenders and activists were believed to be using social media and proxy websites, often hosted in other countries, to keep track of the repression taking place and to keep countering inaccuracies reported by the state-backed media.
In many ways claims of a direct link between opposition activity and Web 2.0 applications in the Gulf monarchies appear much stronger than in North Africa, as the considerably higher internet and smart phone penetration and usage rates in these relatively more developed states indicate that most Gulf nationals — and the overwhelming majority of the younger generation — not only have the necessary access to such technologies, but are also well acquainted with their capabilities. As regards internet-enabled phones, for example, four of the Gulf monarchies now have the highest per capita penetration rates in the world, with 1030 for every 1000 persons in Bahrain, 1000 per 1000 in the UAE, 939 per 1000 in Kuwait, and 882 per 1000 in Qatar. This compares with an OECD average of only 785 per 1000.[821] In 2011 it was also reported that high speed broadband internet subscriptions had risen massively in the region, with 50,000 new subscribers over the first half of the year in the UAE alone, taking the country’s total number of internet-enabled households to about 1.3 million. Over the next few years the penetration rate will continue to increase, as will the quality of access, with many of the Gulf monarchies having invested heavily in fibre optic networks. Interviewed in summer 2011, the chairman[822] of the UAE’s largest state-backed telecommunications provider[823] even claimed that the UAE was going to be ‘one of the top five connected countries in the world’ following government investments of more than $15 billion in such networks.[824]
Web 2.0 and social media usage in the region is a little harder to measure, nevertheless most indications are that it is increasingly rapidly. An April 2011 report published by the Governance and Innovation Program at the Dubai School of Government claimed that the total number of Arab Facebook users had increased by 30 per cent in the first quarter of that year, bringing the total to over 27 million.[825] Only a year later, in May 2012, Facebook’s operating company announced that it had reached 45 million users in the region, with a penetration rate of about 67 per cent, and had decided to open a regional office in Dubai.[826] Significantly, the 2011 report claimed that over 70 per cent of Arab users were in the age bracket of fifteen to twenty-nine years of age. It also estimated that there were over 1 million active Twitter users in the Arab world, who had collectively posted over 22 million tweets during the first quarter of 2011. Significantly the report claimed that the UAE, Qatar, Bahrain, and Kuwait, together with the Lebanon were the five leading countries in the region in terms of the proportion of their population using social media, with over 400,000 Twitter users in Saudi Arabia and 200,000 Twitter users in the UAE. It was also estimated that there were about 4 million Facebook users in Saudi Arabia, and that over 50 per cent of the UAE’s population was using Facebook, while 36 per cent and 30 per cent of Qatar and Bahrains’ populations were using Facebook. Claims were also made in the 2011 that there had been a ‘substantial shift in the use of social media from social purposes towards civic and political action’ in the region, with social media usage being perceived by many of the report’s interviewees as being ‘mainly for organising people, disseminating information and raising awareness about… social movements’. Interestingly, the majority of Tunisian and Egyptian interviewees also argued that their ousted regimes’ attempts to block social media access ‘…actually provided a boost to the [opposition] movements, spurring protesters to more decisive and creative action’.[827]
Countering the Arab Spring: the wrong side of history
During the first Arab Spring revolutions in Tunisia and Egypt most of the Gulf monarchies quickly and instinctively positioned themselves on the side of the region’s remaining autocracies. Perhaps assuming that the revolutions would fail, or that American and other Western interests in the area would ultimately deny the opposition movement’s sufficient international support, a number of the Gulf monarchies’ governments and advisors seemingly misunderstood or underestimated the scale of these uprisings. Consequently they chose to portray their states as being bastions of authoritarianism and — collectively — as something of a counter-revolutionary bloc. Although the full impact of this stance is not yet clear, it is likely that the new post-revolutionary electorates and governments in the Arab world will not view the Gulf monarchies favourably, even if they remain open to Gulf investments and development assistance. Moreover, and arguably more significantly, it is likely that many of the younger and more idealistic Gulf nationals will also view their governments and ruling families with distrust or as being ‘on the wrong side of history’, especially as more and more of these nationals study the Arab Spring and correspond and interact with fellow Arabs from post-revolutionary states. In early February 2011, for example, at the height of the Egyptian revolution, a new region-wide group of Gulf nationals including academics, journalists, and human rights activists gathered to ‘urge the conservative monarchies which have ruled the region for centuries to embrace democracy and freedom of expression’. Referring to itself as the Gulf Civil Society Forum, the group issued a statement calling for ‘…the ruling families in the Gulf to realise the importance of democratic transformation to which our people aspire’, and warned the Gulf monarchies not to crack down on activists planning to stage peaceful protests. Significantly, the statement also called for the ruling families to ‘understand that it is time to free all political detainees and prisoners of conscience and issue constitutions that meet modern day demands’ and claimed that ‘the Gulf peoples look forward for their countries to be among nations supporting freedom, the rule of law, and civil and democratic rule which have become a part of peoples’ basic rights’.[828]
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29.