When we snap open our laptops, we instinctively take a glance at (or spend an hour on) Facebook, browsing through our friends’ drunken shenanigans, liking YouTube clips of people slipping on ice, etc. In Egypt, people our age use Facebook to topple dictatorships.
Not that there’s anything wrong with what we do. Mark Zuckerberg’s website was certainly intended to be used for the former, not the latter. But the fact that a seemingly benign time-waster can be used as a trumpet for democracy, a massive organizational tool for the beleaguered masses … well, that strikes us as rather inspiring.
And though the actual degree to which social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have contributed to the revolution in Egypt remains unclear, there is absolutely no doubt they played a part.
Five million Egyptians use Facebook, the most in any country in the Middle East. Almost one in 10 of those users is a member of a Facebook page called “We Are All Khaled Said,” which was created by a human rights group to decry the brutal death of Mr. Said, who was beaten and killed by police officers last June.
The page has become the leading outlet of dissident anger in the country. Tens of thousands have joined Facebook events pages organizing protests. The “#jan25” hashtag has become ubiquitous on Twitter, connecting protesters and observers alike. YouTube clips of successful demonstrations and police brutality have inspired and given an edge to Egyptians on the ground.
It would be wrong to leave social networking tools out of the revolutionary Egyptian equation. The next question, though, is: would the protests have been as successful — or even happened at all — without them?
Clicking “attending” on a Facebook event page means little to nothing. We know this from personal experience — last year, a Binghamton University student organized a demonstration protesting then-President Lois DeFleur’s decision to not allow the men’s basketball team to compete in the postseason. Out of hundreds of supposed attendees, perhaps a dozen actually showed up. Showing up is the whole battle. And when the internet was essentially switched off in Egypt last weekend, protests only intensified.
But given legitimate and widely-held feelings of injustice — Egypt has ludicrously high unemployment, no democratic representation, skyrocketing food prices, endemic and well-known government corruption, a secret police force notorious for torture — sites like Facebook provide a spark that explodes nationally, and are capable of starting a fire (because of the very nature of the Internet) that is hard to put out.
There’s a reason China strictly regulates access to social networking websites in their country. Chinese authorities even recently blocked the word “Egypt” itself from their state-controlled version of Twitter. Apparently they didn’t want their people to get any ideas.
That is not to say that taking popular anger and adding Facebook necessarily equals a successful revolution. Though the recent protests in Tunisia and Egypt have changed (or apparently will change) their regimes, Iranian demonstrations in 2009 protesting an obviously fixed election did not lead to a new government. But even in that case, social media outlets did more to inform the outside world about what was happening than traditional media sources inside the country did.
Big picture, social networking sites change the game of human interaction, from harmless pictures of cute puppies to unsettling photographs of bloodied protesters. While they allow demonstrators in Egypt to know what’s going on and where to be, they also make it easier for a student in Binghamton to see and celebrate their righteous cause.