Wall Street Journal: Social-Media Movements Helped Drive Out African Leaders

ComProp research Mona Elswah spoke to the Wall Street Journal about the continued potential of social media to mobilize protestors.

People assume there is no hope because of the monitoring, the surveillance, the cyber armies, that Facebook and Twitter are no longer a space for opposition and activists,” said Mona Elswah, a researcher in the Computational Propaganda Project at Oxford University…

But she said the recent cases of Sudan and Algeria, where a social-media fueled protest movement led President Abdelaziz Bouteflika to resign earlier this month after 20 years in power, showed that Facebook and Twitter continue to provide valuable tools to mobilize people against autocratic regimes.