Social Media Revolution in Egypt

Robert Mackey
Mass Communications 100
Professor Safreno
12/15/2011
A Revolution in Egypt through Social Media
People call today the information age. The reason for this is the internet. With the internet, people can go online and have what seems like limitless information available to them at their fingertips. Recently, Egyptian activists have incorporated the internet to serve their revolutionary needs. They have come up with intelligent ways of knowing when online protest will lead to offline protest. Activists look at who is starting a protest and if it is someone they deem credible they are much more likely to join. Without the internet and social media, the Egyptian revolutionaries would not have found their start, their leader, and their means of exposing the injustice taking place in their country.
In this fast-paced time it is appropriate to point out the Internet 's role in the Egyptian revolution. In doing this, we must consider the leading role of a 30 year old executive from Google. “The peaceful Egyptian revolution had a distinct goal, but no clear leader”, reported CBS News correspondent Seth Doane. “Yet, from the masses, a handful emerged, including Wael Ghonim. His “tweets” offered both a narrative and a nudge to protesters.” “He has sort of been tweeting every day, almost every hour,” said CNET.com 's Declan McCullagh. “He has been saying this is what I 'm doing this is how we are going to bring democracy and freedom to Egypt. He has developed quite a massive following; he has become a figure head of this revolt. I guess we can now call it a revolution,” (Pelly, 2011). Wael Ghonim does not seem like someone who would lead a revolution. At Cairo University he studied computer engineering and he earned an M.B.A. in marketing and finance at the American University in Cairo (Crovitz, 2011). Ghonim is currently the product and marketing manager for the Middle East and North Africa sector of Google. He was a typical web marketer who was quoted in corporate press releases promoting the ArabNet conference, creating Google AdWords vouchers for small businesses and launching an Arabic website to teach people how to run searches, send emails and chat online (Crovitz, 2011).
These were hardly the activities of a revolutionary, but from his place in Dubai, Ghonim was waiting for an opportunity to become politically active in his home country from behind the scenes. In June of 2010, he found his opportunity when a horrible murder of a young Egyptian businessman took place. Khaled Said, died after being beaten by the police (Prettyman, 2011). Witnesses described how Said was taken from an Internet café by a small group of policemen, his head smashed into a set of marble stairs and left for dead on an Alexandria street. Police officers took Said as a threat when he was caught copying a video they had made of themselves splitting up confiscated marijuana, which later appeared on YouTube (Crovitz, 2011).
Ghonim responded by creating a Facebook page called “We Are All Khaled Said.” It showed brutal cell phone photos shot in the morgue of Said’s face after the beating (Alexander, 2011). This visual evidence proved the official explanations for his death to be false. The Facebook page attracted, almost immediately, around 500,000 members (Alexander, 2011). After 30 years of martial law, abuse of power by police and state security officials were so common that the case was a perfect starting point for a network of many upset Egyptians. With this large following, Ghonim and others used the Facebook page to track more accounts of police abuse of power which included wrongful arrests, torture and corrupt government (Alexander, 2011).
Social media also became a substitute for traditional media because most, if not all, of traditional media in Egypt is controlled by the governemnt. Even though Ghonim ran the Facebook page anonymously, Egyptian authorities traced it back to him (Crovitz, 2011). A few days after the protests began; Ghonim was arrested and blindfolded for 10 days. Authorities questioned him about how the protests had been organized, thinking he had knowledge of foreign involvement. When he had no information to give them the authorities learned there was no foreign involvement, which turned out to be worse. Angered, but inspired as well, by decades of authoritarian rule, Egyptian citizens had organized themselves into an internal problem for the government (Crovitz, 2011).
When Ghonim was released, he posted on Twitter, “Freedom is a blessing that deserves fighting for it.” Soon, another Facebook page was created, with hundreds of thousands of people supporting him and claiming him to be the spokesman for the revolution (Alexander, 2011). “This is an Internet revolution,” he said. “I’ll call it Revolution 2.0.” Google also played a role. After the Egyptian government cut off the Internet, Google created Speak2Tweet, which allowed Egyptians to leave voice messages that could be posted to Twitter (Crovitz, 2011). The events in Egypt also show the different roles for different types of social media. Rafat Ali, founder of paidcontent.org said, “Facebook helps organize people, such as detailing how and where to gather physically, while Twitter is for ‘amplification,’ enabling people in real time to share news and comment.”
Shortly after the fall of Tunisian President Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali, a Jordanian newspaper printed a joke pointed at Egypt; “Why do the Tunisian youth ‘demonstrate’ in the streets, don’t they have Facebook?” Less than a week later, protests across Egypt organized by a coalition of opposition groups, many of which are organized through Facebook, seemed to prove this punch line wrong (Prettyman, 2011). Social media was used by activists to pass on information and over the month of January 2011 there were an estimated five million new Facebook members in Egypt. Around 90,000 group pages were created that attracted hundreds of thousands of members and promoted the early protests in Cairo. During an interview on CNN, Nicholas Thompson said, “Posters on Facebook and Twitter are saying things like, ‘Get together in twenty minutes’ or ‘the revolution is coming,’” (Prettyman, 2011).
The BBC stated that this is the start of a new generation with a “vast number of the population being under the age of 30 who are technologically savvy and able to coordinate their protests,” (Alexander, 2011). Leaders in Egypt must have felt the threat of these social media outlets as they cut off the Internet and soon after cell phone lines in an attempt disrupt the protests. It had become clear that the protesters were using a variety of different media types to communicate with each other and to get their message across (Alexander, 2011). In Tahrir Square everywhere you looked there were, and there still are, cell phones, placards, protest message on cups, graffiti, newspapers and flyers, and al-Jazeera 's TV cameras which broadcast hours of live footage from the square daily. When one channel of communication was cut off, people moved on to the next (Alexander, 2011).
Even the U.N recognizes the effect that social media had on Egypt’s revolution, according to MSNBC, American U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice recognized the “enormous impact” of Twitter and Facebook on the world’s stage. “Governments are increasingly cognizant of their power” (Prettyman, 2011). Social media outlets have been recognized as a new means of protest for the people.
The revolution in Egypt is still taking place. While online social networks provide a new means to strengthen the people’s voice, activists are still struggling with digital isolation when it comes to gathering masses of people against the military and what remains of the old administration. Various human rights groups claim that just over 10,000 civilian Egyptians have been put through a military trial since the revolution began, which is more than during the Mubarak regime (Aitamurto, 2011).
In Cairo, a digital campaign against military trials for civilians was started. Activists were posting a bombardment of comments on the Facebook site of the Egyptian Armed Forces and their Supreme Council, SCAF, who holds power in Egypt now that President Hosni Mubarak has been removed from office during the revolution in February 2011 (Aitamurto, 2011). After shelling the SCAF’s Facebook site with comments for about 15 minutes, the online activists moved on to posting comments on the ministries’ sites. Soon after, an official closed the comments sections on the Facebook sites. Activists then continued on Twitter with the hash tag #nomiltrials (Aitamurto, 2011).
“Twitter and Facebook are the ways we keep the momentum going. We protect and defend people. We campaign there,” said Salma el Daly, an Egyptian video blogger. She, like other Egyptian activists, is not happy with the outcomes after the spring uprising. The old regime is still in power and the army has its foot on the neck of the country. Not so much has changed since Mubarak left and many view the revolution as unfinished business. “But we will make the change happen. It is only a matter of time,” she said.
The main challenge in these new stages of the revolution is shifting the public’s anger from the ex-president to the army. The military is hugely popular with the general public in Egypt. One of the reasons for the army 's popularity is the fact that it was against the law to criticize it for the last 60 years (Crovitz, 2011). Few Egyptians are aware of the relationship between the military and the regime of former President Hosni Mubarak. “The military has been a black box for the last 30 years. We were not allowed to write about them, to talk about their funding. So because we don’t know anything about them, we can’t hold them accountable,” journalist Adel Iskandar said (Crovitz, 2011). Salma el Daly said she respected the military just like most of the nation. Her perception changed only after soldiers chased her and other activists from Tahrir Square during a peaceful meeting between Christians and Muslims. “That was eye-opening for me. I went home and I video blogged about it so that everybody can see how our military is,” she said (Crovitz, 2011).
The April 6 Movement is one of the main organizations behind the Egyptian revolution. They organize protests in many parts of Cairo (Aitamurto, 2011). About five minutes from Tahrir Square, Egyptian activists have come together for “TweetNadwas”, a series of online and offline meetings, to discuss the next steps in campaigning (Aitamurto, 2011). In one TweetNadwa, the topic was citizen journalism and seasoned tweeps and bloggers shared tips for efficient use of mobile phones for footage and pictures. Among the participants was an influential group of Egyptian bloggers, many who write under pseudonyms and are largely known solely by their Twitter handles (Aitamurto, 2011).
Some among the more seasoned digital activists are concerned about the small amount of Egyptians continuing to follow Twitter and Facebook. An estimated 10 percent of 80 million Egyptians are on Facebook (Aitamurto, 2011). “The link between citizen journalism and mainstream media is crucial,” said Gigi Ibrahim, one of the prominent revolutionaries at the TweetNadwa, also known as a blogger called the Angry Egyptian (Aitamurto, 2011). Ibrahim also gathers pictures of accused human rights violators on Piggipedia, which is a Flickr collection of pictures of policemen, soldiers, and other officialdom. “Transparency is a weapon against corruption. The more information there is about the span of the problem, the bigger possibility there is for a change. And when people know which police stations are corrupted, they can be prepared for that and, for example, hide video cameras and shoot incidents at the station,” said Kamal Sedra, a digital activist (Aitamurto, 2011).
Sedra is the managing director of DISC, or the Development & Institutionalization Support Center in Egypt (Aitamurto, 2011). He has set up crowd mapping efforts in several countries in the Middle East by using the open-source crowd mapping platform Ushahidi (Aitamurto, 2011). In Egypt, he has set up a site for citizen monitoring of the elections. It allows citizens to report from their polling stations by SMS or online.
Crowd funding initiatives in Egypt also have been organized through social media. In an online event called Tweetback, Egyptians gathered funds for humanitarian projects (Aitamurto, 2011). Corporations, small companies, non-profits and individuals were invited to donate. In return for their donations, the most prominent Egyptian digital activists tweeted about the companies’ charitable donations to their hundreds of thousands of followers. Tweetback raised 2 million Egyptian pounds, more than $330,000, and the money was directed to support an impoverished neighborhood in Cairo (Aitamurto, 2011).
Revolutions have been organized through social means and media from the start. The Protestant Reformation would not have been possible without the printing press and in the American Revolution, Thomas Paine’s pamphlet “Common Sense,” published in 1776, inspired the colonists and became the most-read publication second to the Bible. John Adams later said: “Without the pen of the author of ‘Common Sense,’ the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.” Social media on the Web operates at a newer and faster pace and on a much greater scale. It is too soon to know the outcome of the Egyptian revolution. It will be interesting to see whether online social networks of people can overcome traditionally organized groups like the Muslim Brotherhood. What we can say, is it’s already proven that online social media such as Facebook and Tweeter can be an effective tool in starting a large scale revolution and that government control over the media and our sources of information is much harder to hold onto.

Work Cited
Aitamurto, T. (2011, September 2011). How social media is keeping the egyptian revolution alive. Media Shift: Your guide to a digital revolution. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2011/09/how-social-media-is-keeping-the-egyptian-revolution-alive256.html
Alexander, A. (2011, February 9). Internet role in egypt 's protests. BBC News: Middle east. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12400319
Crovitz, L. G. (2011, February 14). Egypt 's revolution by social media . The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703786804576137980252177072.html Pelly, S. (Performer) (2011). The face of egypt 's social networking revolution [Web series episode]. In CBS Evening News. New York: CBS. Retrieved from http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/02/12/eveningnews/main20031662.shtml
Prettyman, K. (2011, February 11). Egypt 's social media revolution. Desert News. Retrieved from http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700109077/Egypts-social-media-revolution.html

Cited: Aitamurto, T. (2011, September 2011). How social media is keeping the egyptian revolution alive. Media Shift: Your guide to a digital revolution. Retrieved from http://www.pbs.org/mediashift/2011/09/how-social-media-is-keeping-the-egyptian-revolution-alive256.html Alexander, A. (2011, February 9). Internet role in egypt 's protests. BBC News: Middle east. Retrieved from http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-12400319 Crovitz, L. G. (2011, February 14). Egypt 's revolution by social media . The Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703786804576137980252177072.html Pelly, S. (Performer) (2011). The face of egypt 's social networking revolution [Web series episode]. In CBS Evening News. New York: CBS. Retrieved from http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2011/02/12/eveningnews/main20031662.shtml Prettyman, K. (2011, February 11). Egypt 's social media revolution. Desert News. Retrieved from http://www.deseretnews.com/article/700109077/Egypts-social-media-revolution.html