A silent revolution is taking place in the Middle East. In 2000, there were about 460,000 Internet users in Egypt; by the end of 2014 there were over 46 million, more than half of the Egyptian population. The same trend is true for most countries in the Middle East and North Africa where Internet penetration reaches an average of 20% per year. On average, these countries have reached a level where roughly 50% of its populations have Internet access (a higher average than globally, which is 42.3%). In Israel, a global pioneer in Internet development and usage, the penetration rate has reached 75%. This rate is even higher in most Gulf states, but also impressive in Jordan (86%) and Palestine (60% in the West Bank).

A great number of young Middle Easterners are spending a lot of time on social media sites; there are more than 60 million Facebook users in the Arab world, Egypt and North Africa included. This technological transformation has created a new discourse in the region, opening it up to the rest of the world. Young people, mostly those who are secular, have transferred much of their social life to online networks. They are creating new social media communities of common interests and values, such as online gaming and human rights groups. Today, a young Egyptian, Palestinian or Moroccan can make friends in the United States, Germany or Japan on Facebook, in minutes. And with many youngsters in the region interacting, a more multicultural climate is gradually being created.

It is a silent revolution, but its political repercussions are already visible. The Arab Spring protests were generated, to a large extent, by Facebook and Twitter; young people were recruited to the squares through social media. But in Egypt, for instance, these protests ultimately failed, when the revolution in Tahrir Square was kidnapped by the Muslim Brotherhood and subsequently strangled by army generals.

Today, the more vocal Internet revolution is being led in a destructive direction by Muslim fundamentalists, who try to marry age-old ideologies with modern-day technology. Former US special Middle East coordinator Ambassador Dennis Ross told Al-Monitor June 25 that we witness today “the emergence of ideologies that are completely characterized by rejection; that are governed by a sense that there is no one else except what they embody; that is driven by a rejection of the other; that the very concept of tolerance and coexistence is something that they exclude; and that there can only be one truth, and anyone who would raise questions about it must be an apostate.”