The purpose of this paper is to examine the effect of social networking sites’ (SNSs) characteristics on Egyptians’ perception and attitude towards the 25/30 uprisings, also known as the “Arab Spring”. Data were obtained from 422 Egyptian university students using SNS by means of questionnaire. Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) was conducted to test the research hypotheses. The study results i...

This study describes the state of the Internet in Arab countries. It reports certain Internet characteristics and e-commerce issues in the region and brings some of the critical challenges facing the diffusion of the Internet and its applications in Arab countries to the attention of policy makers in these nations. Overall, the review reveals that most Arab countries still have a long way to co...

While people in democracies can vote their government out when they are discontent with its policies, those in dictatorships cannot do so. They can only attempt to expel the dictator via mass protests or revolutions. Based on a general cause-and-effect mechanism, the author analyzes whether such mass protests are more likely when the economic situation is poor and vote outs are more likely unde...

The goal of this article is to place the role that social media plays in collective action within a more general theoretical structure, using the events of the Arab Spring as a case study. The article presents two broad theoretical principles. The first is that one cannot understand the role of social media in collective action without first taking into account the political environment in whic...