I’m gonna share some roughly translated excerpts from Dalila Ben Mbarek Msaddek’s testimony Je prendrai les armes s’il le faut: Tunisie, mon combat pour la liberté (2013) which she co-wrote with the French journalist Valérie Urman. These excerpts are from Chap. 7 Information Wars

« Ennahdha built a war machine by buying all the social media pages it could get its hands on. The Islamist party tried to purchase the most popular pages, usually those that had more than 100000 followers. They bought pages indiscriminately: pages that focused on politics

social issues, music and fandom, and of course football. They bought the page ´Koora’ (ball) which has 800000 followers. Once they take over a page, they begin infiltrating the content slowly at first, with only a handful of political messages, then they start intensifying their

propaganda, before finally bringing out the heavy artillery. They’ve even acquired ‘Tunisie-Tounes-Tunisia’ a page that was very active during the Revolution...Today it’s the 3rd most influential pro-Nahdha page on Facebook. The same strategy is used by the pro-Ben Ali folks.

Tunisians have quickly understood that Facebook has become a market. We started seeing ads selling FB pages with more than 20000 followers. The latest party to join the game was Nidaa Tounes, an opposition party founded last spring by BCE. They launched a communication battle as

as soon as they started... Ennahdha had an early start, though, and is much more experienced in this. Its communication strategy is directly managed by Lotfi Zitoun, who is also an adviser to the prime minister. »

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