Aleppo, the city that is the scene of the biggest conflicts in the Syrian civil war, sends a portrait of horror to the world via social media. Orphaned children beg to leave the city safely, residents record farewell messages, parents ask for permission to sacrifice their daughters. News, whether true or false, is shared and “goes viral” in the virtual world, reaching major media outlets. Social media is used by all sides involved to create stories that support their political positions.
The analysis of social media behavior in the Syrian war was carried out, at the request of the Unicamp website, by retired Unicamp professor Mohamed Habib, who is president of the Institute of Arab Culture, and also by Puc-Campinas professor Tarcisio Torres Silva, who defended his doctorate at Unicamp on activism and the use of images in digital communication networks.
The city of Aleppo, in northern Syria, is the largest in the country and was taken over by rebels or terrorists, opposed to the regime of the president, or dictator, Bashar al-Assad. One can notice, in the choice of words used to define the parties, the contradictions of the narratives constructed to report the war. Rebels or terrorists? President or dictator?
According to Tarcísio Silva, there is, in general, a very strong narrative “that places the rebels as the right side of things, and the Syrian government as an authoritarian government that massacres people”.
Images of children are widely disseminated. “Since the drowning of the boy Aylan in Turkey, children and fragile people in situations of great vulnerability have appeared a lot in images of great impact that contribute to the war taking on a global dimension”, she states. An example is the girl's profile Bana Alabed on twitter. At the age of seven, Bana made daily posts showing what it would be like to live amid the bombings.
In addition to children, activists also star in what would be a “narrative” of the war on social media, who appear this time in a very different way from the period researched by Tarcisio in the Green Revolution in Iran (2009) and Arab Spring (2010- 2011). As there are no press organizations directly covering the conflicts in Aleppo, Western corporate media relies exclusively on the testimonies of people who appear as activists.
“Activism in these environments has changed, people have emerged who, in a way, have become professionals at it. I identified some profiles of very active people who present themselves as civilians, ordinary people, but in reality they have a very large number of followers and are often supported by the American government”, he highlights.
For the researcher, the type of information disseminated is very focused on the individual who turns the camera on themselves and begins to transmit a truth based on their own experience. “Interest has grown in the profile of the subject who produces content, through individual, non-institutionalized speech, through what is closest to me, most intimate”.
The owners of these profiles speak fluent English, while there are informants who only speak Arabic. “These factors lead to questioning the legitimacy of these narratives. More critical journalists warn that the humanitarian issue, which is to respect life, is being violated on both sides, so painting only the Syrian government as the one who massacres and the rebels as those who are taking care of these lives is not quite true”.
Mohamed Habib regrets that today social networks behave so differently from when they started, with the promise of giving a voice to those who were not heard. “Today most social networks are being manipulated as much as civil society itself by the mainstream media. The space of sovereignty and autonomy of social networks is becoming increasingly limited and with authoritarian stances, even from the capitalist West, which keeps watching, spying, following, monitoring and threatening to take it offline and punish, under the pretext of guaranteeing national security” .
The Unicamp professor believes that the true damage of the Syrian civil war is not being publicized and shown to the world “due to the interests of the two great powers that are in dispute: Russia, supporting the government; and the United States, supporting the rebels.” Mohamed emphasizes that civilians, children and all Syrian historical and cultural heritage, which belongs to humanity, are being destroyed and “turning into dust”.
Mohamed, who has visited Aleppo a few times, says that the Syrians are great artisans, with a potential for development that is being lost. The professor took a historical look back to remember how the country's situation got to this point. According to him, the two great powers of the Cold War, Russia and the United States, compete in the Middle East over its energy resources and Syria ended up being the last country under Soviet, socialist control. ”
“Most of the guerrilla groups that entered Syria to try to remove Assad from the government were financed by the US. They are young people wanted in various parts of the world,” he notes. On the other side, Russia defends the Syrian state, providing military support. “Aleppo is the victim, but who is to blame for this? I leave it to each reader to draw their own conclusion.”
Utopia
Professor Mohamed believes that social media should undergo participatory control by society. “The world is in acute metamorphosis, we are experiencing a very high polarization, with the oppressed classes, in all parts of the planet, who have already exceeded the minimum limit of human dignity”.
He says that Syria has been in a negative balance for a long time. “What was left there were some shards. We need to stop this crime that is happening so that the country can start to rise up. However, this seems impossible because there is a project for a new map of the Middle East that has to stop.”
Mohamed imagines that civil society needs to rise up peacefully, across the world, and say enough is enough. “The only way out is a global, civil and pacifist cry for dominant countries to stop interfering in the most fragile countries. A cry that is so strong that it reaches the point where people start to refuse products from countries that violate human rights, for example. It’s a utopia, and I’ve been living for 75 years based on dreams and utopias, unfortunately.”
