140 Voice for Rebellion and Relief 5.1.1 Disseminating Facts and Movement Claims In light of these concerns, longtime regime opponents prepared themselves to remedy their compatriots’ isolation and neglect on the world’s stage. Brainstorming privately with family and friends, many reported setting up social media accounts dedicated to publicizing events underway at home. Libyans in Enough Gaddafi! (the US-based youth activist network founded in 2009) worked to relaunch their anti-Gaddafi information campaign days before the planned Day of Rage on February 17. Raucous protests erupted in Benghazi on February 15, however, and within days, rioters had liberated the city from regime control, prompting soldiers to defect or flee. As protests spread like wildfire from the east to the western capital of Tripoli, Gaddafi’s stronghold, and confronted a media blackout, diaspora activists took up the task of broadcasting events on the ground via the Internet. Ahmed of Enough Gaddafi! explained, “We knew that in Libya there was no such thing as an independent media that could effectively report on what was taking place.” He continued, We understood our role in the beginning to be the media team. We needed to do whatever we can to make sure that the world knows about what’s going on. We [planned] to essentially flood all media outlets with as much information as we possibly could to bridge the gap between [them and] the credible on-the-ground presence. So we thought of our role as being the bridge. We could report [through] our networks on the ground what was happening [until] the time when somebody from those Western or other media outlets could actually be on the ground reporting in the first person. His colleague M. echoed, “Information is key. And whenever it’s able to be disseminated, the situation becomes a global issue – no longer just something that happened in Libya that was wiped off the face of the planet.” Abdullah attested that this “bridging” work was vital if “people on the inside were going to stand a chance.” Libyans outside of the United States had the same idea. Ayat, a Libyan Canadian from Winnipeg, launched Shabab Libya, the Libya Youth Movement, with activists across the United States and Britain to broadcast on behalf of the revolution. “Obviously, we had to,” she recounted, because there was nobody [inside the country] who’s going to put Libya on Al Jazeera for twenty-four hours and show us what’s happening. We worked primarily in English. What we wanted to do was tell the world to help those people making decisions to make decisions in our favor. To undertake broadcasting, Enough Gaddafi! activists established a “central place on the Internet to get news” about Libya, according to Hamid, by launching the website Feb17.info. Assia, one of their longtime friends who was living in Dubai at the time, recalled, “We were all around the world. We would run it in four-hour blocks to keep it twenty-four hours. Our houses were newsrooms.” M., who was working with the Enough Gaddafi! team from her home in Pennsylvania at the time, recalled, “I remember the first week, there was no sleep. We literally overnight just became like a source of information for the outside world.” Hamid also contacted activists in Cairo over social media https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press