Media Disruption and Revolutionary Unrest: Evidence From Mubarak's Quasi-Experiment

Abstract

Conventional wisdom suggests that universal lapses in media connectivity—for example, disruption of Internet and cell phone access—have a negative effect on political mobilization. On the contrary, I argue that sudden and ubiquitous interruption of mass communication can facilitate revolutionary mobilization and proliferate decentralized contention. A dynamic threshold model for participation in network collective action is used to demonstrate that full connectivity in a social network can hinder revolutionary action. I exploit a decision by Mubarak's regime to disrupt Internet and mobile communication during the 2011 Egyptian uprising to provide an empirical test for the hypothesis. An interrupted time series inference strategy is used to gauge the impact of media disruption on the dispersion of the protests. The evidence is corroborated using historical, anecdotal, and statistical accounts. In line with the theory, the results of a survey among Egyptian protesters show a significant decline in the percentage of participation in Tahrir Square as a fraction of total participation across Cairo on the first day of media disruption.