Facebook and Twitter Seen Playing An Important Role in Egypt Protests

Jakarta Globe, January 27, 2011

Cairo. The protest movement in Egypt has mobilized the young and the middle classes using the Internet and social networks in a challenge to the authorities that has seen both Twitter and Swedish video-streaming site Bambuser blocked.

Mobile phones too were unable to get a signal on Tuesday in Tahrir Square in the center of the capital, Cairo, which has been a rallying point for thousands of protesters.

Pro-democracy activists countered on Wednesday by disseminating technical advice to overcome these obstacles and enable the mobilization to continue.

Twitter said in a terse “tweet” that it was blocked in Egypt starting about 1600 GMT on Tuesday and that the interruption had derailed Twitter.com as well as applications linked to the service.

Bambuser, a Web site that provides live streaming of videos from mobile phones and Web cameras and is very popular in Egypt, was blocked from 1200 GMT on Tuesday, Hans Eriksson, the company’s chief executive, said via e-mail.

As with the monthlong protests in Tunisia, which led to the overthrow of veteran strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali earlier this month, Facebook and Twitter have emerged as important tools for the Egyptian movement in organizing demonstrations and rallying opposition to the regime.

“What happened in Egypt was almost entirely organized on Facebook,” said Issander al-Amrani, a political blogger.

Spearheading the protests, the “April 6 Movement” launched a Facebook poll a few days before the demonstrations asking: “Will you rally on January 25?”

Nearly 90,000 indicated they would, leading a few days later to the biggest anti-regime protests in President Hosni Mubarak’s 30-year rule.

Under a decades-old state of emergency, only officially sanctioned gatherings are legal in Egypt and police have routinely cracked down on unauthorized rallies in the past.

Founded in 2008, the “April 6 Movement” is a group of pro-democracy activists who work primarily on the Internet.

It claims tens of thousands of members, mainly well-educated youngsters looking for a modern and open method of self-expression.

Internet use in Egypt has increased rapidly in recent years, with some 23 million of the country’s 80 million residents regular or casual Web users at the end of 2010, up 45 percent from 2009.

Mobile telephony is also booming, with 65 million subscribers, up 23 percent year-on-year according to official statistics.

Much of Egypt’s traditional opposition, both secular and Islamist, has been caught off guard by the success of the young Web users in drawing large crowds onto the streets across the country.

The Muslim Brotherhood, the most powerful opposition force, which is banned but tolerated by the regime within certain bounds, gave no explicit backing to the protests although it said that some of its members might take part.

But Amr al-Choubaki, an analyst with the Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies, said the magnitude of the protests of the past two days was likely to mobilize broader swaths of the population in the days to come.

“The unexpected scale of the protests is due to several factors, including the political roadblocks erected by a regime in place for 30 years,” Choubaki said.

“The revolution in Tunisia of course, has been an inspiration.” 

Agence France-Presse

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