Breakdown of Transnational Repression 101 During Tunisia, I was tweeting in my own name. When Libya started, the first thing my mom said was change your name on everything, take down any pictures, because my entire extended family is in Tripoli. Yet, respondents attested that anonymity was relatively rare, and did not hinder their efforts to form new movement groups under the banner of the revolutionary flag. Because the regime proved incapable of making good on its threats at the onset of the revolution, members of the diaspora largely experienced a rapid liberation of their own. The murders of protesters in the early days of Libya’s uprising not only backfired at home, therefore, but also abroad, as the barrier caused by fear of consorting with the “wrong” Libyan largely dissipated. 4.1.2 The Syrian Case: Persistent Fears of Transnational Repression and Guarded Advocacy In contrast to the swift eruption of a regime-rebel standoff in Libya, Syria’s uprising resembled a “slow motion revolution” (International Crisis Group [ICG] 2011a). Calls on Facebook for a “Day of Rage” on February 4 failed to materialize on the ground, and the regime attempted to stave off protests by implementing a series of concessions, including lifting the bans on YouTube and Facebook.4 Yet, many Syrians were aggrieved by years of growing inequality, corruption, and everyday abuse. In light of the new mood induced by Egypt’s Arab Spring, individuals and crowds in Syria began to spontaneously challenge regime officials in ways that were previously unimaginable (ICG 2011a). For example, about a dozen children were arrested by security forces on March 6 for chanting slogans against the regime in the city of Daraʻa. After their families rallied to demand the children’s release, security forces used live ammunition to disperse them. This incident motivated this group to escalate their demands from releasing their children to demanding the end of the regime itself. Other collective displays of dissent emerged in Damascus as well, as when small groups held vigils to support neighboring revolutions. Cell phone videos of protests being harshly dispersed, including one that showed security forces dragging activist Suheir al-Atassi by her hair and throwing her in jail for demonstrating peacefully, affirmed to many observers that Bashar al-Assad was not interested in change. On March 15, the moment that many regime opponents-in-exile had been waiting for arrived. A small demonstration in the central market of Damascus’ Hamidiya neighborhood was recorded and disseminated to international news channels for the first time, and the territorial scope of the protests expanded shortly thereafter. Assad’s March 30 speech denounced dissenters as traitors and foreign conspirators (ICG 2011b). Attempts by demonstrators to form a Tahrir 4 According to the International Crisis Group (2011a), much of the internet-connected population were already using these sites before 2011 through proxy servers. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press