Social Media as a Narrative Battlefield: An Investigation into the 2019 Lebanese Protests

Abstract

An inherent battle between narratives wages on social media. Social media’s democratic aspect has benefitted collective and connective action in non-democratic regimes, as exemplified by the Arab Spring. Simultaneously, social media has grown stronger as a tool for regime actors’ influence campaigns. The battles for online narratives in non-democracies are conducted between civil society and the regime, ultimately inciting or deterring collective and connective action. In Lebanon, deep-seated sectarian divisions are entrenched in every aspect of society. Sectarianism is ensured through a communitarian political power shared between different religious groups. Sectarianism is not only a part of Lebanese history but also a strategy that political elites exploit. The Lebanese media is part of the sectarian infrastructure that fuels and reinforces group divisions. However, social media’s democratic openness has severely handicapped the regime’s efforts to employ it for the regime’s sectarian narrative. Social media facilitated mass mobilization in Lebanon in 2011 and 2015. Yet, in both protests, the Lebanese regime used its weaknesses to refuel its sectarian narrative, which helped deter mass mobilization. October 17, 2019, marked the start of anti-regime protests across Lebanon. They were in protest against and triggered partly by the corrupt sectarian system. Traditional media like television and newspapers were enmeshed in the regime’s sectarian narrative, making social media the only outlet for a civil society. Thus, social media became a battlefield between civic and sectarian narratives. I argue that social media played a sectarian-reducing role and allowed an online civic narrative to develop, which united the Lebanese people and facilitated greater collective and connective action. Moreover, I also examine information warfare online and argue that false sectarian narratives online discredited the cross-sectarian protests and deterred mass mobilization. I devised quantitative and qualitative research methods to study social media’s narrative battlefield during the 2019 Lebanese protests. I conducted multiple interviews with prominent Lebanese social media activists, physical activists, journalists, politicians, and independent media center directors. To substantiate the interviews, I devised a Twitter data analysis that focused on the false narrative of foreign funding for the demonstrations and the sectarian nature of these tweets. Two main findings emerged from this analysis of the 2019 Lebanese protests. First, a civic narrative dominated social media and played a constructive role in greater collective and connective Lebanese action against the regime. Second, online information corruption was used as a sectarian narrative tool to discredit the protests, but this was not enough to deter collective action. These findings add to the existing scholarly literature concerning the online narrative battlefield through a case study of Lebanon’s 2019 protests. The results determine that social media remains a tool for a civic narrative rather than for regime influence, but that false narratives online were sectarian and discredited the cross-sectarian protests.