On the morning of December 17, 2010, in the market town of Sidi Bouzid, Mohamed Bouazizi struck a match. A bystander captured the aftermath on a Nokia — grainy, shaking, barely forty seconds of footage uploaded to Facebook by nightfall. Within 48 hours it had been shared over 200,000 times. The regime controlled every television channel and newspaper in the country. They could not control the feed.
The Network Effect of Grief
Nawaat.org, the blog collective operating in semi-legal status since 2004, became the de facto wire service for the uprising. Their volunteer editors aggregated phone-camera footage and translated Arabic Facebook posts into French for international media. When digital activist Slim Amamou was arrested at his Tunis apartment on January 6th, his last tweet was retweeted 14,000 times before his account went dark.
الشعب يريد إسقاط النظام
"The people want the fall of the regime" — chanted first in Sidi Bouzid, December 2010