Human and Political Grievances for Mobilization: Different roles of Facebook during the Egyptian Arab Spring (original) (raw)
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Facilitating the Egyptian Uprising: A Case Study of Facebook and Egypt’s April 6th Youth Movement
It has been suggested that social media offers important organizing tools for activists in countries where free expression is curtailed and news outlets are handcuffed by government censorship. The 2011 revolution in Egypt offers an opportunity to examine the extent to which social media fulfills the role that free journalism plays in more democratic societies. By analyzing messages posted in Arabic by activists from one of the largest Egyptian opposition groups, this study attempts to see what role Facebook played in the revolution. This chapter aims to fill a gap in scholarly understanding of the event while simultaneously contributing to the understanding of the importance of social media tools for activists and organizers. The results show that the organizers used Facebook largely to communicate a mixture of expressions of national pride, news events, and calls for mobilization on the ground to support their revolutionary efforts.
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Public opinion leaders and activists characterized the Egyptian "Arab Spring" of January 2011 as a "Facebook Revolution". They highlight the intrinsic power of social media as an influencing factor for social change. Undeniably, social media played important roles in that revolution process. However, these roles cannot be disconnected from the socio-political contexts. This paper discusses the use of social media, particularly of Facebook, by the April 6th Youth Movement (A6YM), a decisive actor of the Egyptian protests. It is based on the analysis of two Egyptian newspapers and one American newspaper, between 2008 and 2011. We propose that a) social media provided alternative mechanisms for political expression and organization, b) social media contributed to the genesis and consolidation of the A6YM and to the establishment of youth political identities, and c) the combination of "bits and streets" amplified not just the movement's mobilization but the degree of opposition experienced by the Egyptian regime.
"The objective of this article is to ground the debate about the connection between social media and popular uprisings in the specific context of recent social and political trends in Egypt. This is crucial when attempting to draw conclusions about the factors and mechanisms that produced Egypt’s January 25, 2011, revolution and, more importantly, whether social media can contribute to building a new political culture to support the revolution. Although it took just 18 days of protests to force the resignation of President Mubarak, constructing a new political culture will be a slower and more challenging process. If social media are to provide a real channel for political debate and activism, they must connect with traditional forms of media and civil society. This will ensure that the dialogue about Egypt’s future remains national rather than retreating to the virtual."
Facebook and Twitter as Platforms for Human Good: A Case of Egypt Uprising, 2011
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Through wider and rapid dissemination of information, social media sites (Facebook and Twitter in this article) influence the psychology of the users, making them ready for the collective action. This article analyses the role played by Facebook and Twitter in bringing about political change in Egypt during the Egyptian Uprising of 2011. Drawing insights from social media studies and Foucauldian discourse of power, this article exposes the tussle between the autocratic Egyptian government led by the then president Hosni Mubarak and Egyptian citizens and scrutinizes the horizontal connectivity and dissemination of information, citizen journalism, pervasive nature of power, and multiple resistance sites. It concludes that in materializing their aspirations of right, liberation, and justice along with the economic, social, and political revamp, Egyptian civilians took recourse in digital technologies and freed themselves from thirty-years long dictatorship of Mubarak.
Social Media Activism in the Arab Uprising
A version of this paper was presented at the First West Asian Studies National Convention, Centre for West Asian Studies, JNU on 14 November 2014. The goal of this paper is to place the role that new social media has played in achieving collective action using the early events of the Arab uprisings and the experiences of Egypt and Tunisia as particular references. Almost four years since the uprisings began, their disrupted momentum has challenged the oft hypothesized and heavily mediatized season of unified Arab awakening. The political economy of communications differed across the affected region making it evident that these countries were in different stages of social, economic, political and digital development. This informs why different regimes were more or less vulnerable to opposition (including cyberactivism) and why the structure of opposition, in turn, varied. Though resisting techno-optimist narratives, the paper seeks to explain the communicative and connective power of social media in the Arab context as well as its disruptive potential in discourse-shaping. In setting up the stage for street protests, the use of ICT’s by Arab activists most crucially aimed at revealing an accurate picture of their respective societies, not just within but also to a broader international audience. Rather than support the cohesive neoliberal success stories quoted in the international media, the respective online Arab publics cast film onto the reality of everyday economic and political repression. Moreover, Arab cyberactivists created virtual forums for citizen journalism through enabling ordinary citizens to question regime legitimacy and record instances of governmental brutality, corruption and violations of human rights. This allowed for the continued exchange of civic discourse, deliberation and articulation, enhancing the region’s social capital and contributing to the growth of a tentative virtual civil society. The liberating role of cyberspace in overcoming gender, class and geographical barriers is, however, tempered in the final analysis by the contradictory impact of networked technologies – in terms of the quality of content generated and by whom as well as the capacity of regimes and traditional political actors to monitor, control and manipulate online communication (“Tyrants can tweet too”). Further, in the persisting debate between those on the optimist and pessimist sides of networked technology communication, an underlying tension is that while leaderless network structures can mobilize and even unite a disparate coalition of protestors around issue- specific demands such as “The people want the fall of the regime”, they are ineffective at articulating nuanced demands in the subsequent negotiation processes. Cyberactors are also reluctant to participate in the political processes of party building and institutional organization. In other words, digital storytelling supersedes the political communiqué and expressive protest- politics tends to depoliticize the impact of cyberactivism.
Journal of Arab & Muslim Media Research, 2011
The Egyptian uprising of 2011 was characterized by the instrumental use of social media, especially Facebook, as well as Twitter, YouTube and text messaging by protesters. Facebook, in particular, was hailed as a key mobilizing tool for the protest movement, spurring the mass demonstrations of young protesters converging on Cairo's Tahrir Square during the uprising. Of the Facebook pages that gained popularity in the Egyptian online community, one page in particular, 'We Are All Khaled Said', was credited with mobilizing and organizing the largest number of protesters. An English-language sister page with the same name was launched approximately at the same time, but was geared more towards spreading awareness in the international community of human rights violations and ongoing events in Egypt, rather than organizing protests on the ground. This article will discuss the multiple roles and changing functions of this particular Facebook page during different phases: namely before, during and after the Egyptian revolution, as well as its potentials and limitations in acting as an effective tool for public mobilization, civic engagement and political change.
2015
Social media networks were at the centre of the dramatic events in 2011 events widely referred to as 'the Arab Spring' uprising or revolution. This thesis investigates the role of social media networks (such as Facebook, Twitter and YouTube) in facilitating political mobilisation and the creation of a new Arab public sphere. The thesis asks whether the Arab Spring revolutions would have even happened in the absence of social media networks. The analysis will focus specifically on Egypt and how these networks acted as a catalyst and tool for mobilisation and how they shifted the balance of power between civilian activists and the authoritarian regime in the uprisings that occurred in 2011, 2012 and 2013. 4 TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS………………………………………………………………………….1 ABSTRACT………………………………………………………………………………............2 TABLE OF CONTENTS ………………………………………………………………………….3 INTRODUCTION…………………………………………………………………………………………………...5 CHAPTER 1: THE EGYPTIAN UPRISINGS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKS ………………………………………………………………………………………..13 1.1 Introduction 1.2 The seeds of the Egyptian uprisings 1.3 Facebook political activism in Egypt 1.4 Networks of outrage and hope 1.5 The strength of weak ties 1.6 Networks of antagonism and hate 1.7 Conclusion CHAPTER 2: THE NETWORK SOCIETY THESIS AND THE EMERGENCE OF NEW ARAB PUBLIC SPHERE………………………………………………………………………………….28 2.1 Introduction 2.2 The dawn of the Arab networked society 2.3 Dimensions of the network society 2.4 The democratic nature of the Arab public sphere 2.5 Communication power in the networked society 2.6 Networks vs. the state 2.7 Networks vs. networks 2.8 The state vs. networks 2.9 Conclusion CHAPTER 3: THE POWER OF EXTERNAL ACTORS…………………………………….. 51 3.2.2 Nawaa activism 3.2.3 WikiLeaks and the new Arab public sphere 3.2.4 WikiLeaks revolutions, truthful or fallacy? 3.3 The role of Aljazeera 3.3.1 The power making news network 3.3.2 Aljazeera vs. the military regime 3.3.3 The Aljazeera effect 3.4 Hacktivism and the Arab Spring uprisings 3.4.1 Acting together: Anonymous and Telcomix 3.4.2 Operation Egypt 3.5 Conclusion CHAPTER 4: INFORMATION WITHIN A REVOLUTION: THE ROLE OF WEB 2.0 PLATFORMS…………………………………………………………………………… 80 4.1 Introduction 4.2 The impact of web 2.0 on the Egyptian uprisings 4.3 Phase one: outrage and hope 4.4 Phase two: instability and distrust 4.5 Phase three: disinformation and criticism 4.6 Phase four: antagonism and hate 4.7 Facebook pages 4.8 Facebook data 4.9 Facebook networks of the pro-military and pro-Ikhwan groups 4.10 Facebook media networks involved with social media and key players in the conflict 4.11 Facebook trends used by the two parties 4.12 The clashing of networks 4.13 Twitter feeds 4.14 YouTube pages 4.15 Conclusion CONCLUSION……………………………………………………………………………………….. 127 Bibliography………………………………………………………………………………….. …133 14 CHAPTER 1 THE EGYPTIAN UPRISINGS AND THE TRANSFORMATION OF SOCIAL MEDIA NETWORKS
Journal of Global Initiatives: Policy, Pedagogy, Perspective, 2016
Research on media and contentious politics in the Arab world point to the vital role that social media played in the Arab Spring. For the purposes of this article, the Arab Spring is defined as a series of demonstrations and democratic uprisings-and in the cases of Libya, Syria, and Yemen armed rebel movements-that arose independently and spread across the Arab world from Tunisia and Egypt to Yemen, Bahrain, Libya, and Syria in 2010-2011 and beyond. This article advances the theoretical assumption that while not causing the Arab uprisings, New Media (defined here as all forms of digital communication technology including satellite television, cell phones, social networking, video-blogging, and citizen journalism platforms that allow broader dissemination and participation than traditional print or broadcast media) provided the technical infrastructure for these uprisings to develop, sustain, and intensify over relatively short periods. With this assumption at its focus, this paper digs out the political, economic, social, and cultural roots of the Arab Spring. It explores how Arabs' hunger for decentralized news and information paved the road for the organic growth of a new breed of Arab "citizen journalists." It describes how New Media technologies, which Larry Diamond (2012) of Stanford University calls "Liberation Technologies" have combined words and images on iPhones, Blackberries, laptops, and social media platforms and managed to turn previously underground oppositions in several Arab countries into Virtual Public Spheres. It explains how the socalled "Generation-in-Waiting" who could no longer wait and took to the streets in waves of demonstrations against police brutality, economic deprivation, corruption and dictatorship. It then examines how these Liberation Technologies helped to convert Arab subjects into engaged citizens. It assesses how these revolutionaries broke the government monopoly on traditional media and used New Media to mobilize, organize, and take to the streets. Furthermore, it explains how this enabled the Arab revolutionaries to "occupy" in a matter of days, not just the virtual cyber-space, but also the physical space including Habib Bourguiba Avenue in Tunis, Tahrir Square in Cairo, Pearl Square in Manama, and the University Quarter in Sanaa, which ultimately brought the fall of entrenched dictators