First, you control the media. Then you have everything.

There is a ton of misinformation1 about various, mostly recent, events in Syria floating around, and I hear from relatives all the time – however “by the way” they mention it – that they don’t know a thing, actually. And it requires a lot of self-awareness that I’m surprised to see in said relatives to admit that while they know so many details, they nonetheless don’t grasp the full picture because their recounting of the story they’re telling has many contradictions they are aware of. It is a feat worth applauding for these people to recognize all the doublethink they have to perform to find their way around their reality because it’s harder to spot it from the inside than for me as the outsider.

If the online culture in the West is hazardous, well, Syria2 has it ten times worse. Whereas in the West people use multiple social media sites (so multiple algorithms – for now), have at least some diverse and established media outlets that mostly report factually with sources (it’s at least better than the way things are in poorer/desolate countries like Syria), Syrians have only some TV channels covering their issues/causes/troubles, a lot of them state-controlled, and then some that support the opposition (whatever that may be). However, this depends on centralized electricity infrastructure that failed them in the best of times. Since the Civil War, people have had to get by with just half an hour a day of electricity; so no TV.

Naturally, phones and with that social media became the main mode of disseminating information. People have no resources to spare so web hosting is out of the question. That’s how Facebook came to be equated with the internet over there, since it’s free. Since the Russian invasion of Syria in 2015/16, Telegram has also set foot as another medium for public messaging there. Oh, you need to access information from the Ministry of Education? Check their Facebook page or Telegram channel. There is no such thing as going onto their webpage. Their webpage is whatever is available on those two platforms.

This is important to note because it leaves people locked within the walls of these two platforms (mostly Facebook, though). It makes them dependent on this central source of (mis)information, and along with it being a central source means the government only has to tamper/work with one platform to further entrench its power. And we all know Facebook loves nothing more than to bend the knee to fascists. Russian disinformation3 campaigns were soon deployed on Syrians to discredit activists and “flood the zone with shit” whenever there was a scandal to cover up, similarly to Russian campaigns in Europe now.4

There is no way to know what happened, no way to know whom to believe. Even when you see footage of the thing happening, there are enough instances of differing accounts of that event that convincingly deny or twist the events so at least you discredit the atrocity you just saw on video. All this even before deepfakes made it so easy to fabricate an alternate reality, which exacerbated an already terribly desolate situation.

Mind you, this was mostly taking place whenever the Assad regime would bomb civilians with chemical weapons in areas cut off from literally everything (kind of like Gaza right now, except it’s a slightly different perpetrator). We would get videos of children and helpless civilians being slaughtered, and then there would be an influx of campaigns with varying degrees of falsehoods and truths and covering such a wide range of “perspectives” that facts turn into subjective truths.

Having everything so centralized is what prepped fruitful grounds for the spread of misinformation. I doubt that social media was accounted for when protests were breaking out across the Middle East and North Africa. Social media was truly a disruptive factor that emancipated so many oppressed peoples from the shackles of propaganda until the autocracies of the world adapted to the new medium and showed us who really had the upper hand.

And you might be wondering now why I’m telling you about all of this. It is because I urge you, dear reader, to spot the parallels between what is happening to electoral aristocracies across the world at the moment with the Arab Spring. Between the capture of the main media for dispensing information by the ruling class to the intentional spread of subjective truths, it is all straight out of the Arab Spring playbook.

Nazi Germany is probably the best Western example for this: Upon taking over the government apparatus, Hitler gave out practically free radio receivers dubbed the “Volksempfänger” (literally the people’s receiver) to every household to ease the deliverance and increase the efficacy of his propaganda. Compare that with the Twitter takeover or Meta changing its (already trash5) policies to be in line with Trump’s agenda. It’s two sides of the same coin.

These developments in the US don’t just aid US Nazis; they come in handy for every Nazi leader active right now. They might follow different agendas specific to their nation-state, but in the grand scheme of things? Whether it is Meloni, Weidel, Kickl, Starmer, Le Pen, Milei, Orban or Trump, they all aim for a homogenous society on their terms. The specifics may differ, but the overarching goal is the same and thus the methods used to achieve that goal will be the same for every one of them, meaning a success for their ideology in one part of the world will benefit them all everywhere else.

The main objective of the Arab Spring – next to democratizing governance in the region – was to recognize the plurality of Arab society and reject the hegemonic belief that that region’s populations were homogenous. The last couple of decades have seen white supremacy, that sees white hegemony as natural/god-given and wants society to mold to its ideals, being resisted by anti-fascists and anti-racists alike, and now we’re getting the backlash that demands society be homogenous as the Führer*in6 says it should be.

So the “enemy” so to speak is the same one that the freedom fighters in the Arab world were fighting, and the tools used to crack down on their struggle are pretty similar to the tools deployed over here. Thus, we can learn plenty from them in our fight now. I definitely don’t have the data to back up these parallels, let alone the proper tools to analyze these things. Just a hunch and a feeling in my gut that we should learn from MENA’s failures to avoid the worst here.

  1. Misinformation is incorrect or misleading information. ↩︎

  2. I can only speak with certainty for Syria, although many of the factors present in Syria are also there in much of South and East Asia, Latin America and most of Africa, especially North Africa. ↩︎

  3. Disinformation is misleading content deliberately spread to deceive people, or to secure economic or political gain and which may cause public harm. ↩︎

  4. This probably started with the COVID pandemic and only got worse with the Russian invasion of Ukraine. And now we see some similar tactics deployed against Palestinians to discredit them. ↩︎

  5. It can always get worse. And this instance all the more proves the rule. ↩︎

  6. It unfortunately has to be gendered correctly these days. Women are just as capable of becoming the next Hitler which is … something, I guess? ↩︎

This World