هذا التقرير متاح أيضًا بـ العربية
The phrase “the people want” reclaimed the right to speak from regimes that had monopolised the power to define the nation, its interests and its enemies. After the revolutions, the struggle over that right returned within society: who speaks in the name of the people, and who can turn their vision of the people’s identity and values into rules for everyone else?
In post-Assad Syria, part of that struggle is playing out on social media. Competing narratives contest the meaning of the revolution, the relationship between religion and politics, and who counts as a revolutionary or belongs to the old regime. A trending topic allows its supporters to present their position as the national mood. If institutions treat that impression as a mandate, people who can mobilise online gain power over those who cannot.
Online campaigns can expose injustice and widen participation. They can also create the appearance of a majority, damage reputations and make dissent so costly that people withdraw. The contest is therefore about more than winning an argument. It is also about which views can be expressed publicly, and who can take part without fear of reprisal.
How does online pressure become a mandate?
Influence can begin with the way a dispute is framed. Present a disagreement over a concert as a battle for the country’s identity, and discussion of the concert itself recedes. Present someone’s remarks as an insult to a group, and the speaker may have to defend himself before an audience has even agreed on what he said. Whoever frames the debate first can force others to respond on those terms.
Shared identity helps explain why such campaigns gather support. People do not always mobilise because they lack information, and treating them with contempt achieves little. Research on social identity points to the importance of shared norms and meanings: someone may see taking part in a campaign as a duty to a group they belong to, and backing down as a betrayal of it. A correction becomes harder to accept when accepting it carries a social cost.
A campaign’s apparent size matters too. A study of the “majority illusion” explains how people’s positions and connections within a network can make a view with limited reach appear widely held. Fake accounts are not always necessary; a small, active and closely connected group may occupy more space than its numbers warrant.
Silence can reinforce that impression. One person sees what happened to someone else and decides not to post. Another avoids an argument that could reach their workplace or family. Neither decision appears in the comment count. Angry voices remain visible while those deterred by them disappear, making consensus appear stronger as participation narrows.
Speed compounds the effect. An accusation can be posted immediately; checking it takes time to gather the original material, establish a timeline and seek responses. By then, another controversy may have begun. Issues that need sustained attention, from justice to public services, can be pushed aside.
Political actors, people seeking attention and angry users may all take part in this cycle without answering to a single organiser. Deliberate coordination requires evidence of its own. Assuming that similar conduct must have one source risks a conspiratorial account that lets society and its institutions evade responsibility for their own roles.
Who sets the terms of participation?
The debate over Assala’s concert grew from a dispute about an artistic event into an argument over who could define society’s identity and what belonged in public space. If a call to cancel the concert on those grounds had succeeded, its supporters would have gained power over the choices of people who disagreed with them.
People have every right to criticise the singer, boycott the concert and question its sponsorship and funding. Prohibiting it requires a justification beyond a claim to speak for society. That distinction remains important after the concert went ahead despite calls for its cancellation.
In a separate incident, the circulation of an old recording of Sheikh Osama al-Rifai prompted a dispute over religious authority and his relationship with President Ahmed al-Sharaa. Coverage of the controversy relayed remarks about an earlier disagreement, including the sheikh’s description of the president as having “abandoned his Wahhabism.” Assessing the remarks requires knowing when they were made and in what context. The dispute between the two men has since ended, though the substance of the recording remains open to criticism.
When people who hold official positions join such debates, their office, religious standing and access to the media give their words added weight, even if they speak in a personal capacity. A remark from an ordinary citizen does not carry the same potential influence over institutions as one from an official.
The two incidents differ and do not establish that a single campaign was behind them. One concerned an attempt to prevent an event; the other, the meaning and context of a recording and the authority of its speaker. Both, however, show how disputes in Syria’s public sphere can become contests over power. A person who casts their position as “society’s identity” puts those who disagree under pressure to explain why their views fall outside it. Someone who claims the authority to define loyalty to the revolution can cast doubt on whether a political opponent belongs to the revolutionary camp.
These conflicts also strain relationships between Syrians when individuals are held responsible for everyone who shares their religion or comes from their region, or when defending someone else’s rights becomes grounds for accusation. That leaves less room for cooperation across divisions at a time when the country needs more of it.
What has the counterrevolution learned?
Egypt shows how a dispute with a political opponent can become an effort to build public acceptance of their exclusion. In August 2013, ONtv aired footage of the dispersal of the Rabaa sit-in set to music from the film “Rocky,” according to a New Yorker report. The presentation cast the use of force as a victory, inviting viewers to respond to it in those terms before considering questions of responsibility.
When an entire group — in this case, the Muslim Brotherhood — is presented as a threat, sympathy for its members becomes harder to express. Defending their rights carries a greater cost, and their exclusion from politics becomes easier to justify.
Later, an analysis of digital campaigns in Egypt documented coordinated, inauthentic activity in hashtags both supporting and opposing the government, alongside genuine participation. The analysis found that the state’s capabilities prevailed. Platforms that had helped people mobilise against the authorities also gave the authorities a means to amplify their own account and compete for visibility.
The imbalance matters most when a narrative is backed by an institution. A trend cannot arrest anyone, but an actor with the power to use force can give an online accusation consequences beyond the screen. Public acceptance of exclusion becomes especially dangerous when those who encourage it can also enforce it.
This is a lesson Syrians should keep in mind, especially when a campaign targets their opponents: accepting the exclusion of those who differ from the public sphere sets a precedent that does not remain the preserve of those who first benefited from it.
Counterrevolutionary forces can exploit that acceptance and widen hostilities until restrictions on everyone are presented as a way out of chaos.
A large digital audience offers no lasting protection on its own. Turkish researcher Zeynep Tufekci, who studies networked protest movements, examines the gap between rapid online mobilisation and the slower work of building organisations that can make decisions and endure. In Twitter and Tear Gas, she argues that a movement may discover its power in a single moment, then find it lacks the institutions needed to carry its demands forward and protect its rights.
Outside actors shape the debate
Outside actors can exploit disputes that already exist. Amplifying a view already circulating while concealing who is behind the effort may give it weight it would not otherwise have. Documented operations have used apparently local identities to do so.
In 2019, Facebook uncovered a network linked to two marketing companies in Egypt and the UAE. It used fake accounts and pages posing as local media, targeted countries including Syria and Libya, and carried content supportive of Khalifa Hifter. Users encountering such posts could mistake them for contributions to a local debate without knowing who ran the accounts or whose interests they served.
The Israeli company STOIC used artificial intelligence tools in a covert influence operation, according to OpenAI’s account in 2024. A New York Times investigation attributed funding for the campaign to Israel’s Ministry of Diaspora Affairs.
Artificial intelligence is expanding the capacity to make material from one source appear to come from many. In September 2026, Anthropic reported that a commercial network linked to a French company operated about 70 fabricated news sites. It also uncovered an operation that produced fabricated news in favour of the Awami League in Bangladesh and attacked its rivals and protest leaders, without establishing that the party directed or funded it.
Readers may take repeated exposure to a story as independent confirmation. Yet Anthropic also found limited genuine engagement with some of these activities. Producing content does not, by itself, show that an operation persuaded people; its effects must be assessed separately.
These cases show how interference can work. They do not establish any connection to the Syrian disputes discussed here. Tracing funding, management and coordination is more useful than accusing people of treason on the basis of their political views. Syrians living abroad are also part of the debate about their country. What warrants scrutiny is deception about a speaker’s identity or interests, not their place of residence.
Public decisions must not be left to online trends
The state has a decisive role because it can turn pressure into binding decisions. It must give people ways to influence policy that do not depend on stirring fear or dominating online platforms.
If a campaign demands the cancellation of a legitimate event, the institution responsible should explain the standard governing its decision and protect participants from threats. A specific danger may require exceptional measures, but those measures need a stated justification and a means of review. Yielding simply to stop threats teaches those making them that threats work.
Countering rumours begins with how an institution handles information: publishing its decisions and reasons, giving the press access to documents, and correcting mistakes publicly. Accurate information alone cannot resolve grievances, however. Anger at a bad decision does not become disinformation merely because the government’s opponents make use of it.
The government is also a party to the public debate, and disclosure of funding should therefore include its campaigns and media partnerships. It is not enough to demand transparency from others while leaving its own means of influence beyond accountability.
Government allegations of deceptive coordination should likewise be supported by evidence others can examine.
Protecting public debate requires institutions that remain active after online attention fades: journalism that follows a claim until its facts are clear; associations and professional bodies that represent their members’ demands; and social and religious authorities willing to restrain abuse from their own audiences. Such institutions give citizens a way to participate without having to generate a trend of their own.
Measures presented as safeguards against disinformation also need scrutiny. Amnesty International documented the use of Decree 54 in Tunisia to prosecute journalists and people who posted critical comments. Protecting debate cannot give any party the authority to monopolise truth or criminalise criticism that embarrasses it.
Whoever holds power over public debate helps determine whose voice is heard, which grievances receive attention and what kinds of difference are tolerated. Institutions must be accountable for the decisions they make under pressure and for whether they protect people who have no crowd to defend them.
Syrians emerged from a regime that monopolized speech in their name, and they deserve for the meaning of “the people want” to remain open to plurality and accountability, rather than becoming a phrase brandished by every power holder to grant themselves the right to silence others.