How Information Warfare Shaped the Arab Spring: The Politics of Narrative in Egypt and Tunisia

Nathaniel Greenberg

Jun 2019 · Edinburgh University Press

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On January 28 2011 WikiLeaks released documents from a cache of US State Department cables stolen the previous year. The Daily Telegraph in London published one of the memos with an article headlined 'Egypt protests: America's secret backing for rebel leaders behind uprising'. The effect of the revelation was immediate, helping set in motion an aggressive counter-narrative to the nascent story of the Arab Spring. The article featured a cluster of virulent commentators all pushing the same story: the CIA, George Soros and Hillary Clinton were attempting to take over Egypt. Many of these commentators were trolls, some of whom reappeared in 2016 to help elect Donald J. Trump as President of the United States. This book tells the story of how a proxy-communications war ignited and hijacked the Arab uprisings and how individuals on the ground, on air and online worked to shape history.

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Nathaniel Greenberg is the author of 'The Aesthetic of Revolution in the Film and Literature of Naguib Mahfouz (1952-1967)' and 'Islamists of the Maghreb' with Jeffry R. Halverson. He lives in Northern Virginia where he works as an Assistant Professor and Head of the Arabic programme at George Mason University.