Which came first—your interest in digital technology or your interest in the Muslim world?
My primary focus has been how political elites use digital media to manipulate people. My first major project was a study of the 2000 election in the U.S. Then I got interested in how some of the same tricks were being used in developing countries. The book published last September (The Digital Origins of Dictatorship and Democracy: Information Technology and Political Islam) was a study of 75 Muslim countries in which digital media seemed to be making a difference in political discourse, changing the way political conversations happened.
Your timing was incredible.
It was great being relevant. People beyond my mother were interested. It was wonderful. A very lucky moment.
Does Tunisia figure prominently in the book?
At the end of the book, I write about a couple of countries with enormous blogging communities, lots of Twitter users, and tough authoritarian regimes. I comment that, with that combination, things can’t continue as they have for long. At the top of the list of examples were several countries that within three months had these major political upheavals, including Egypt and Tunisia.
How does social media lead to political change?
One of the consistent themes across countries like Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Bahrain and, to some degree, even Syria is that there is a young, tech savvy, activist community that uses media in ways that let them outmaneuver their dictators. Dictators are strong and powerful and have a lot of resources, but authoritarian regimes are not creative, and they’re not desperate the way activists are. The activists do creative things in media. They do great storytelling on YouTube, they work with hackers to get workarounds when they need to publish something out of the country, and they work with journalists in those other countries. I think dictators have a tougher time controlling and managing journalists today than they did even ten years ago, in large part because of social media.
In your research, you’ve tracked millions of Facebook posts and Twitter tweets. How much are you able to glean about their content?
One recent project was a look at the Tunisian blogosphere. Tunisia has an enormous number of bloggers, and did even before the revolution. You can track their key words. We started looking for words like “revolution” and “liberty” and “economy” and the name of the president. You could see revolution words, change words, start coming up more. We noticed a large increase a few days before things happened in the streets.
After following Tunisia via blogs and tweets, it must have been exciting to travel there as an election observer.
It was great. I was an observer with the official mission of the National Democratic Institute, a U.S. think tank—loosely associated with the Democratic Party—that does international policy work. We worked in teams of 15 or 20, tasked with watching and taking notes. A team always includes two or three folks who are particularly high profile; we had a former president of Bolivia and a former president of Peru.
The day of the election was a very long day for us. I got to my first polling station at 5:30 or 6 am for a 7 am opening, and then continued observing at various stations straight through to the counting of the results. I was there until 2 am. Two days later, the whole team met to draft a memo describing the mood of the country.
And what was the mood?
People were ecstatic, yet patient. You could feel the excitement. It’s not a country where people join lines and stay in lines. But on election day, the line ups for voting were orderly.
How did this election compare with past Tunisian elections?
In the past, there was only one party. There was some official opposition, but that opposition was always relegated to a few seats. Everyone was required to vote, but the best estimates suggest that 15 to 20 percent actually showed up to vote. Most of those were the male head of household, though sometimes males who were party members were allowed to collect ballots from wives and family members and submit them together. This time the rules changed to one person, one ballot. You couldn’t have somebody bring the ballot for you.
How did that affect turnout?
The stations I observed had 95 percent voluntary turnout. That’s amazing. In the last U.S. presidential election, the turnout was 63 percent, which was unusually high for the U.S. I think social media was an important factor in Tunisian voter turnout.
How so?
Traditional Tunisian broadcast media covering any candidate had to give equivalent time to all the other parties, which left no time to run a “Get out to vote” campaign. Social media became the platform by which people really encouraged their family and friends to register and then to vote. Instructions about where to go and what number to call to register all came out of social networking.
How much of the Tunisian population uses social media?
Certainly not everybody is on Facebook. But almost everybody has a family member who is on Facebook. It’s well used, concentrated mostly among youth. It becomes an important way to relay information.
Has your role as observer ended?
We wrote a three-page memo right after the election, but now we need to write a 50-page document with recommendations. There are definitely ways they can improve for next time. But for a first run, it was great.
Any thoughts on what might happen in Tunisia’s general election next year?
Next year will be interesting. In this election, Islamists won a majority. They were the single biggest party. I think this is going to force a lot of the secular parties to form alliances. There were 80 registered parties throughout the country, and probably 40 that consistently appeared on most ballots in most districts. The Islamists were the best organized far and away. The traditional opposition party under the last dictator was just decimated. The new secular opposition, if they can get down to two or three competing parties with coherent political platforms and a consistent message that contrasts with the Islamists, could do well. Reducing the number of parties would be good for the level of political conversation in the country.
What’s coming next in your own research?
I’m interested in what happens when there’s an election that everybody knows is going to be rigged. Those are going to be the sensitive moments for political change. I want to develop a research plan that predicts when these moments are coming. I call them “predictable surprises.” For example Iran, which has the largest blogging, tech-savvy population in the whole region, is going to have an election in the spring for its legislative assembly and another election in a year for its president. I will be very surprised if they can pull off another rigged election. So I’d like to have somebody in the field and get ready for that. More broadly, if we can help our foreign policy experts anticipate these moments, it may make them better prepared for what is coming.
Any final thoughts on the impact of social media on politics?
In political science, for many years we’ve separated online politics and offline politics. We treated them as distinct. Increasingly it’s difficult to make the distinction. Real world politics isn’t just what happens in the streets. There are conversations online that drive street action and there are things that happen on the street that get documented and put on YouTube. It’s all connected.