Social Networks Ignited a New Age of Revolution

The big global news lately is that Syria's civil war has officially come to an end. This war raged on from 2011 all the way through the end of 2024 — long, horrific, and bloody. Yet a war that dragged on for 13 years wrapped up in just 11 days at the very end of 2024: rebel forces launched a surprise offensive, swept forward unstoppably, government troops collapsed almost on contact, and within no time the rebels had taken the capital, Damascus, and toppled the Assad regime. The "Arab Spring" that began in 2010 can now be said to have formally come to a close, given how directly it fed into all this.

This isn't a tech column, so why am I talking about international news? Mainly because Syria's civil war is deeply intertwined with technological change. The whole war traces back to the world's first major social-media revolution — the Arab Spring — which swept through a billion-plus people across the Middle East and taught us a great deal about how technology reshapes human behavior.

To start, without the social-media revolution and the mobile internet revolution, there would have been no Arab Spring — no cross-border revolutionary movement at all. Both of these technological shifts are, in fact, remarkably recent: Facebook was only just invented at Harvard in 2004, Twitter wasn't built until 2006, and the iPhone — the first smartphone in the modern sense — wasn't invented until 2008. Even the "smart" phones that existed before that had barely any apps you could actually use day to day.

I remember buying one of those pre-iPhone "smart" phones myself — once I got it, I honestly had no idea what to do with it. Eventually I discovered you could actually use it to read Twitter posts, and that became the one thing I actually used it for regularly. Back then, friends thought it was strange that I'd stare at my phone for no reason just to read tweets. So smartphones and social networks really did feed off each other, each driving the other's growth.

Smartphones and Social Networks Reshape Human Behavior

It wasn't until 2008, when the iPhone was invented, that the mobile internet became a genuinely meaningful product. By 2010, smartphones were just starting to go mainstream, with global shipments crossing 200 million units for the first time. That's when a street vendor was beaten to death by police in Tunisia, sparking public outrage that eventually toppled President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, who had ruled for decades. The unrest spread to neighboring Egypt and Syria: Egyptians successfully forced out President Hosni Mubarak, but Syria, unfortunately, spiraled into a brutal civil war.

Some people point to youth unemployment across the Arab world and similar factors as the underlying cause. But in truth, uprisings like this had happened before in Arab countries, and in the past, media suppression had always been enough to bring them under control. This time was different from past uprisings, because social media represented a genuinely new era of mass communication — nothing like it had ever existed before. Social media let a limitless number of people learn about events at the same moment, see images and footage of what was unfolding, and understand what others were thinking. The mobile internet, in turn, let people post updates and upload content anytime, anywhere.

Back then, these dictators had no technological countermeasures ready, so they were toppled almost immediately. By the time Egypt's Mubarak thought to shut down the internet, it was already too late. Syria's Assad regime, which came under pressure somewhat later, was better prepared — so it wasn't overthrown outright, but the conflict instead exploded into an extremely violent civil war, one that eventually spilled over into Europe's refugee crisis and reshaped global geopolitics.

Syria's civil war was unlike wars of the past: Twitter and YouTube meant that, for the first time in history, the world had access to vast amounts of real-time footage and images straight from the front lines. That also gave birth to a whole new field — open-source intelligence (OSINT) — and with it, the founding figure of today's OSINT world: Bellingcat.

A New Field Emerges: Open-Source Intelligence Delivers Battlefield Truth

Bellingcat's founder, Eliot Higgins, was an unemployed blogger back in 2012. Because his wife is Turkish, he took an interest in Syria's civil war. He noticed that a huge number of people were filming videos on the battlefield, and if you studied the footage closely and cross-referenced it against Google Maps or military reference guides, you could piece together things nobody else knew — where the actual front line currently ran, which government or rebel unit was positioned where, what weapons they were using, and which weapons had already been destroyed.

He eventually realized he knew more than any of the journalists covering the war, because reporters on the front lines still had to go around asking people for information — whereas the people who couldn't resist filming the action had, in effect, already made the situation public. All it took was carefully cross-referencing social media posts, plus a fair bit of technical skill to pick out the fine details.

Using this method, he pinpointed specific troop positions, and Bellingcat later applied the same open-source intelligence techniques to the MH17 plane crash investigation, identifying those responsible — which is what made the organization famous, and its methods became an industry standard. Today, open-source intelligence has become a key reporting source for major outlets covering the Russia-Ukraine war: people scour social media, counting weapons visible in videos or photos and cross-referencing likely battlefield positions to piece together what's really happening on the ground. One notable company providing the underlying infrastructure for open-source intelligence work is, of all things, the U.S.-listed big-data giant Palantir.

Back when the Arab Spring — the "Jasmine Revolution" — first happened, social media was still in its adolescence, and plenty of tech people, myself included, believed social networks could open the door to all sorts of new possibilities for internet governance and good governance more broadly. It was only later that the full range of what social media could do — including its darker side — came into view. And nobody could have predicted that social media could spark a revolution that would spiral out of control for 13 years straight. I'm genuinely glad this whole ordeal has finally come to an end — it's good news for all of humanity.