{"id":1372,"date":"2011-02-16T17:01:36","date_gmt":"2011-02-16T21:01:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/?p=1372"},"modified":"2011-02-16T17:22:18","modified_gmt":"2011-02-16T21:22:18","slug":"recap-social-media-and-egypt","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/2011\/02\/16\/recap-social-media-and-egypt\/","title":{"rendered":"Recap: Social Media and Egypt&#8217;s Revolution"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/upload.wikimedia.org\/wikipedia\/commons\/thumb\/5\/5e\/Unplug-mubarak.gif\/742px-Unplug-mubarak.gif\" alt=\"\" width=\"320\" height=\"259\" \/>The protests in Egypt have been front and center in the American media over the previous two weeks.\u00a0 We were greeted with daily updates about former President Mubarak&#8217;s grasp on power, and, ultimately, his resignation.\u00a0 Buried in all the rapidly unfolding events were numerous stories about social media and its role in the revolution.\u00a0 I think it may be useful to aggregate all these stories as we begin to analyze how important social media was (if at all) to the revolution &#8211; and, also, whether the revolution has significant implications for social media.<\/p>\n<p>As a prelude to the unrest in Egypt (and Tunisia) several cables conveying communications between US diplomats and the State Department were leaked to Wikileaks.\u00a0 The connection between these leaks and the protests in Tunisia was covered in <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/media\/2011\/feb\/02\/wikileaks-exclusive-book-extract\"><em>the Guardian<\/em><\/a> and <em>the <a href=\"http:\/\/blogs.villagevoice.com\/runninscared\/2011\/02\/yes_wikileaks_l.php\">Village Voice<\/a><\/em>.\u00a0 Journalists, ever eager for a sexy headline, quickly labeled Tunisia &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/wikileaks.foreignpolicy.com\/posts\/2011\/01\/13\/wikileaks_and_the_tunisia_protests\">The First Wikileaks Revolution<\/a>.&#8221;\u00a0 The cables also brought global attention to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/world\/2011\/jan\/28\/egypt-police-brutality-torture-wikileaks\">&#8220;routine and pervasive&#8221; police brutality under the Mubarak regime<\/a>, giving increased legitimacy to dissident groups.<\/p>\n<p>After Tunisia&#8217;s President Ben Ali fell, unrest quickly spread to Egypt.\u00a0 Largely unprepared to cover the event, the Western media was forced to rely on Twitter feeds (as well as Al Jazeera) as a primary source for reporting.\u00a0 (For an excellent analysis of the most watched Twitter feeds see Zeynep Tufekci&#8217;s &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/technosociology.org\/?p=366\">Can &#8216;Leaderless Revolutions&#8217; Stay Leaderless: Preferential Attachment, Iron Laws and Networks<\/a>.&#8221;)<!--more--><\/p>\n<span class=\"vvqbox vvqvimeo\" style=\"width:400px;height:300px;\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" id=\"vvq-1372-vimeo-1\" src=\"\/\/player.vimeo.com\/video\/19824159?title=1&#038;byline=1&#038;portrait=0&#038;fullscreen=1\" width=\"400\" height=\"300\" frameborder=\"0\"><a href=\"http:\/\/www.vimeo.com\/19824159\">http:\/\/www.vimeo.com\/19824159<\/a><\/iframe><\/span>\n<p>Social media sites like Twitter in Facebook became the primary tools employed by protest organizers.\u00a0 Of particular significance, is a Facebook page called &#8220;We Are All Khaled Said&#8221; (named for the young 28-year-old techie and businessman, who in 2010, was <a href=\"http:\/\/www.time.com\/time\/world\/article\/0,8599,2047006,00.html\">dragged out of an Internet cafe and murdered by Egyptian police<\/a>), which we now know was started by Wael Ghonim, a Google executive and &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.time.com\/time\/world\/article\/0,8599,2047006,00.html\">geek-activist<\/a>.&#8221;\u00a0 Ghonim was arrested and detained for 12 days during the protests but was eventually released.\u00a0 He is rapidly emerging as a leader in the new Egyptian political environment.\u00a0 Google&#8217;s chief executive, Eric Schmidt, publicly stated that <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/02\/16\/world\/middleeast\/16google.html\">the company is \u201cvery proud\u201d of Ghonim<\/a>.\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/02\/16\/world\/middleeast\/16google.html\">The New York Times also reported<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>In an <a title=\"CBS News interview.\" href=\"http:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/8301-501465_162-20031608-501465.html\">interview<\/a> with CBS News after his release last week, he said he had not discussed  his participation in the protests with Google in advance and would be  honored to return to the company \u201cif I\u2019m not fired.\u201dThat prompted a <a title=\"The Twitter message.\" href=\"http:\/\/www.cbsnews.com\/8301-501465_162-20031608-501465.html\">message<\/a> from the company\u2019s main <a title=\"More articles about Twitter.\" href=\"http:\/\/topics.nytimes.com\/top\/news\/business\/companies\/twitter\/index.html?inline=nyt-org\">Twitter<\/a> account that read: \u201cWe\u2019re incredibly proud of you, @Ghonim, &amp; of course will welcome you back when you\u2019re ready.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">Egypt&#8217;s Internet has long been censored, though workarounds were quite pervasive.\u00a0 For a period during the protests, however, the Egyptian government <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/02\/16\/technology\/16internet.html?_r=1&amp;emc=eta1\">shut the Internet down altogether<\/a>, severing the Egyptian people&#8217;s main line of communication with the outside world.\u00a0 <a href=\"http:\/\/mashable.com\/2011\/01\/28\/egypt-internet-graphic\/\">A graphic circulated by Arbor Network<\/a> illustrates the drop off in Internet traffic. <a href=\"http:\/\/mashable.com\/2011\/01\/28\/egypt-internet-graphic\/\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter\" src=\"http:\/\/6.mshcdn.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2011\/01\/egypt_graphic.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"538\" height=\"293\" \/><\/a>The shutdown in Egypt highlighted <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/02\/16\/technology\/16internet.html?ref=technology\">the tenuous nature  of the politics and infrastructure of the Internet<\/a> in many  authoritarian countries.\u00a0 When Egypt&#8217;s Internet was disconnected from  the outside world, it was revealed that the internal Internet was hardly  able to function because sites rely so heavily on information from  outside servers.\u00a0 Moreover, the Mubarak government proved that was easy  to force Internet service providers into compliance, by threatening to  that measures that would require costly repairs.<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">Shortly after the Internet shutdown, Google and Twitter made news when they <a href=\"http:\/\/www.guardian.co.uk\/technology\/2011\/feb\/01\/google-twitter-egypt\">teamed up to  offer a service that allowed individuals to tweet by leaving voice  messages on their cell phones<\/a>.\u00a0 The messages were translated into text  and posted with the <a href=\"http:\/\/twitter.com\/#%21\/search\/%23Egypt\">#Egypt<\/a> hashtag.\u00a0 Google acknowledged that this is was an overtly political act on its <a href=\"http:\/\/googleblog.blogspot.com\/2011\/01\/some-weekend-work-that-will-hopefully.html\">official blog<\/a>, saying:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">Like many people we\u2019ve been glued to the news unfolding in Egypt and  thinking of what we could do to help people on the ground. Over the  weekend we came up with the idea of a speak-to-tweet service\u2014the ability  for anyone to tweet using just a voice connection.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">In contrast to Google and Twitter, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/02\/15\/business\/media\/15facebook.html?_r=1\">Facebook executives largely remained silent<\/a> about their position on the protests, despite their &#8220;<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/02\/15\/business\/media\/15facebook.html?_r=1\">starring role<\/a>.&#8221;\u00a0 Facebook, purportedly, seeks to avoid the appearance of taking sides, and thus, possibly prompting other authoritarian regimes to block their site.\u00a0 Ethan Zuckerman, of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard, <a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/02\/15\/business\/media\/15facebook.html?_r=1\">explained<\/a>:<\/p>\n<blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">It might be tougher for Facebook than anyone else. Facebook has been ambivalent about the use of their platform by activists<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">And, in fact, Facebook has been an equal opportunity host for pro- and anti-Mubarak demonstrators alike.\u00a0 Other industry leaders are less shy about celebrating Facebook&#8217;s significance for democratic movements.\u00a0 Google&#8217;s Eric Schmidt said collaboration tools like Facebook \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.nytimes.com\/2011\/02\/16\/world\/middleeast\/16google.html\">change  the power dynamic between governments and citizens in some very  interesting and unpredictable ways<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n<p style=\"text-align: left\">What all these events have highlighted is that <em>the very existence of\u00a0 social media is a political act<\/em>.\u00a0 As much as such companies might prefer to remain neutral to avoid alienating their potential clientele, their every decision (or non-decision) has potential political consequences.\u00a0 Given that the very existence of such companies depends on the free flow of information, the goals of these companies and the goals of democratic movements are often aligned.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The protests in Egypt have been front and center in the American media over the previous two weeks.\u00a0 We were greeted with daily updates about former President Mubarak&#8217;s grasp on power, and, ultimately, his resignation.\u00a0 Buried in all the rapidly unfolding events were numerous stories about social media and its role in the revolution.\u00a0 I [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":563,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9967],"tags":[46,760,234,361,10180,10422,942,775,1970,10421,85,3334,852,732,331,184,10423,10424,8511,4521],"class_list":["post-1372","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-commentary","tag-activism","tag-cell-phones","tag-democracy","tag-egypt","tag-eric-schmidt","tag-ethan-zuckerman","tag-facebook","tag-google","tag-movements","tag-mubarak","tag-politics","tag-protests","tag-revolution","tag-social-media","tag-the-internet","tag-twitter","tag-wael-ghonim","tag-we-are-all-khaled-said","tag-wikileaks","tag-zeynep-tufekci"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1372","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/563"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1372"}],"version-history":[{"count":26,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1372\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1399,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1372\/revisions\/1399"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1372"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1372"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/cyborgology\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1372"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}