Brokering 155 Shaam News Network would provide on their Facebook page and YouTube channels. My involvement was to moderate their English channel on Facebook and translate the Arabic news into English news, and post all of this on Facebook. Yemeni respondents also served as representatives of the revolution in the media when invited to do so. Mazen O. of Washington, DC, recalled that “because we’re basically the voice of the peaceful protesters here in the US [in] the local media, to the American public,” the Yemeni Youth Abroad for Change group appointed a spokesperson, an activist named Faris, to speak on networks such as Al Jazeera and MSNBC. He explained that their roles were to transmit the general grievances and claims of anti-regime youth, who were consciously leaderless and anti-hierarchical. As Ahlam of New York attested, “What we were doing – or what we thought we were doing – was amplifying the voices of the people in Yemen. Simply amplifying.” However, unlike the Libyan and Syrian cases, no Yemeni activists in the United States or Britain reported acting as deputized representatives of any revolutionary groups in Yemen. 5.3 brokering Activists worked as brokers – intermediaries who linked together previously unconnected entities – for the purposes of channeling attention and resources to the Arab Spring. They did so in two main ways: (1) by connecting revolutionaries and aid workers on the ground with geopolitical actors such as host-country policymakers, journalists, NGOs, and international agencies, and (2) by connecting rebels at home with one another. Libyans and Syrians reported engaging in both sets of actions; for Yemenis, rare instances of brokering involved connecting outside journalists with Yemenis in the sit-in movement in Sanaʻa. 5.3.1 Brokering between Revolutionaries and Geopolitical Actors Activists worked as brokers for their compatriots – what Tasbeeh, a Libyan American, called “remote fixers” – to connect them with journalists for major networks, governments, and donors. Heba, for instance, put a cousin and a friend living in Benghazi in touch with CNN and Al Jazeera for interviews since they were “not afraid to talk” and could communicate in English. Likewise, Ahmed of Enough Gaddafi! contacted a Libyan American named Rahma, then living in regime-controlled Tripoli with her family, over Facebook, and (with her permission) introduced her to a news organization. This single connection, they attested, snowballed into regular calls from NPR, the BBC, Al Jazeera English, and the Los Angeles Times.9 This kind of brokerage enabled Libyans 9 Eventually Rahma and Ahmed were married. This echoed many stories I heard during my fieldwork of how the Libyan revolution had forged new ties between conationals who were previously estranged from one another because of Gaddafi’s repression. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press