Spring is over and peak summer is approaching. The Arab Spring that began in December 2010 also seems to be over, but more than in a narrow meteorological sense. Folks in West Asia, North Africa and elsewhere are now talking of the gruelling path ahead — the so-called Arab Summer.

The Arab Spring really shook the world — a tumultuous event that saw ordinary people take to the streets to fight against oppressive regimes on the strength of mere human spirit. It led to the demise of many dictatorships, including those in Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, and Yemen. Other countries, like Bahrain and Syria, observed serious civil uprisings; even Iraq, Jordan and Kuwait did not escape turmoil.

Social media had a significant role to play in the success of these uprisings by providing a means for rapid communication and unique opportunities for interaction among the protestors.

True, in Egypt the political pundits were always anticipating street discontent, given the sheer gap between the ruling elites and the lay public. But social media escalated this process. In Tunisia, the social networking sites actually provided the initial spark through quick dissemination of information and feedback.

As an Egyptian protestor succinctly put it, “ We use Facebook to schedule the protests, Twitter to coordinate, and YouTube to tell the world .”

Street Games

The protestors basically created event pages on Facebook and Twitter. Once the relevant information was put in the public domain on social networking sites, the “snowball effect” did the rest: People shared the events with their family members and acquaintances, who further shared these with their relatives and acquaintances, and so on. Some even shared their own video footage of police or military atrocities. Such crowd-sourced information incited the sort of rage that fuelled the Arab Spring.

Social media abetted these uprisings, essentially by creating what game theorists call focal points , a notion for which Thomas Schelling received the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2005.

Simply put, focal points help resolve coordination problems. In this instance, social media played the key role of naming designated locations — focal points — where protestors could show up in large numbers, instead of undertaking fragmented demonstrations.

As governments started recognising the role of social media in fomenting discontent, many responded by restricting access to many Web sites. Thus, Egypt blocked the use of Twitter and Facebook. Likewise, the Syrian government was allegedly involved in hacking the passwords of Facebook users, while Libya restricted access to the Internet itself.

Similar attempts at restraining social media, though not as gross, have been made even in India. Union Minister of Communications and Information Technology Kapil Sibal, not too long ago announced plans for censoring the contents of Facebook and YouTube. Needless to say, it drew all-round flak.

The immediate provocation for the Indian Government’s desire to “regulate” social networking sites by removing “objectionable content” was again street movements, happening just around the time of the Arab Spring.

But unlike the latter that sought to overthrow political regimes, the protests in India were focused on governmental corruption and financial irregularities, whether in the organisation of the Commonwealth Games or allocation of telecom spectrum and coal blocks.

The India Against Corruption (IAC) movement, which gained momentum with the indefinite fast by social activist Anna Hazare in April 2011, had widespread participation by the middle-class youth. And just as with the Arab Spring, social media played a key role in this movement by creating focal points , among others.

Deterrent effect

While the contribution of social media in dislodging or undermining entrenched Arab dictatorships is well-recognised, how effective has it been in addressing the issue that the IAC movement focused on: Corruption?

To answer this, we decided to investigate the impact of Facebook usage on corruption across countries. The idea was simple: In any country with a large number of Facebook users, news regarding graft can be spread easily and quickly, and at virtually zero cost. That, in turn, can have a deterrent effect, especially in urban areas — remember how the Anna movement used Facebook as a means to educate people about the corrupt practices of politicians, and organised protest events around them.

We collected data on both corruption and Facebook usage from 61 countries, including 16 from Asia, eight from Africa and 14 from South-Central America. Data on corruption was obtained from Transparency International , a leading NGO that publishes corruption indices for countries, using inputs from sources such as the Asian Development Bank, African Development Bank, Freedom House and the World Bank.

Our findings did, indeed, reveal a negative correlation between Facebook usage and corruption. Simple regression analysis further confirmed that higher Facebook usage is associated with lower levels of corruption.

To make our findings robust, we added additional variables such as education, age, and income levels for each country to the regression, so that we would be comparing apples to apples and not apples to oranges.

But at the same time, more sophisticated statistical testing (such as testing for causality-related issues) showed the above relationship to be not a very robust one.

That, however, is still not cause enough to dismiss the role of social media in lowering corruption (think Chinese micro-bloggers; their impact on the government’s operations may not be small!). It could just be that the number of Facebook users is not yet large enough in all countries to have a significant impact. Also, there may not be enough people speaking English (Facebook’s lingua franca ) or having Internet access at all.

Secrecy in graft

But more than all these, the real reason for social media not making the expected dent on corruption could be that, as a phenomenon, it is different from mass protests. Corruption creates a different type of interaction — or lack of it — that, in turn, affects its spread on social media.

Protests need only a few leaders to initiate the process and social media can then quickly spread the message. Further, event pages can be created anonymously on Facebook.

Graft, on the other hand, is not simply about large scams. Much of it actually is of a petty and retail nature, though massive at an aggregate level.

Petty corruption occurs when one individual has regulatory authority over another. In these situations, most people will not report graft activities on social media sites, since both the bribe giver and the taker are deemed guilty. Reporting will not happen in the absence of substantial anonymity or privacy.

This only reinforces the case for leniency towards bribe givers in petty corruption matters — a suggestion made by Kaushik Basu while he was Chief Economic Advisor to the Government of India a few years ago.

While social media can help educate people about corruption and how to fight it, it will not have a substantial impact without an effective law protecting whistleblowers. Till then, the popular refrain that Facebook is spoiling our kids will continue!

(Sarangi teaches microeconomics and game theory at Louisiana State University (LSU), and is a Visiting Professor at the School of Management, KIIT University, Bhubaneswar. Jha is a doctoral student at LSU.)

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