This paper will describe my efforts to meet two related challenges posed by the rise of social media in the undergraduate Middle East politics classroom. The first challenge concerns maintaining a healthy sense of proportion. Social media (SM) outlets, such as YouTube, twitter, and Facebook, often garner hyperbolic attention (i.e., the “Twitter Revolution,” etc.). Our students, heavy consumers of SM themselves, may accept such claims uncritically, including sometimes unsubstantiated claims of SM’s effects on actual political events. My paper and presentation will describe some successful strategies to place the rise and influence of SM in balanced contexts. By way of brief illustration, I ask students to consider the following quote: “It is true that our people are still illiterate. But politically that counts far less than it did twenty years ago… [Social media] has changed everything… Today people in the most remote villages hear of what is happening everywhere and form their opinions. Leaders cannot govern as they once did. We live in a new world.” The quote is attributed to Gamal Abdel Nasser, and hails from the 1950s; I have only substituted “social media” for “radio.” Classroom exercises such as this nurture healthy skepticism towards easy claims of SM’s transformational influence. They also redirect discussions towards considering the actual impact of SM, and its relation to other, often interconnected factors shaping current politics. In short, these exercises allow students to approach the study of SM with fresh eyes. The second challenge I will address concerns useful ways to incorporate SM into the syllabus. Over time, I have devised a number of exercises that improve students’ grasp of how social media does indeed affect politics. One exercise I will describe uses Tunisian rapper El Général’s famous music video “Rais ElBilad” (widely disseminated via SM as “the anthem of the Jasmine Revolution”). Students view the video three times: first, without sound (watching for production decisions such as setting; camera angles, body language, etc.); second, with sound but without translation (observing changes in rhythm and tone, repetition of phrases, etc.); and, finally, with sound and translation. This exercise is stimulating and fun, and inspires student insights into the impacts of globalization, youth bulges, the universality of narratives, as well as the specificities of the Tunisian situation. More broadly, students see that they can gain critical understandings of SM’s role even when they do not know the language. This is an important pedagogical goal.