Social networking again – EGYPT REVOLUTION

By : Hesham Abdel Rahman

hesham@compusharm.com

Lack of respect for human rights – stifling freedoms – election fraud – the systematic looting and poor distribution of wealth in the country – the collapse of health and education services – Focus of security services to protect the regime more than people’s security – continuous disturbances and protests. These are the main reasons for the ‘Young Egyptian Revolution,’ which began on 25th January and was conducted mainly by a special group of young people who have struggled for a period of up to three years prior to reaching this point.
We talked earlier about Twitter’s role in Iran’s protests. Today, talk is different. The youth revolution in Egypt had it’s roots in many youth movements that have evolved over the previous three years. Specific notable events were on April 6, 2008 (April 6 Movement), which was a protest against high prices and unemployment. Then followed the movement of  Khaled Saied, which arose mainly on the Internet in June 10, 2010 after the incident of torture and murder of a young Alexandrian man after obtaining a video condemning some police officers in illegal acts. The protests against torture and suppression of opinion and human rights had a major role in mobilizing hundreds of thousands of Egyptian youths to the streets on the day of 25th January 2011, a day that was followed by many days of protest that have had a tremendous impact on the revolution. A Facebook group, created by unknown persons one of whom was arrested, on 28th January, one day before the ‘Day of Anger’ and was later known to be a Google MEA executive, announced later that this group includes a dentist who holds a degree in mass communication and two film directors. Facebook groups characterized by the following:

1 – Speed proliferation : group launched after the death of Khalid Saeed on 10/06/2010. After quarter of an hour, the number of its participants reached 300, bringing the number to 30 thousand subscribers after two days, 140 thousand after 18 days figure and rose to 247 thousand on 29 / 8 and 350 thousand on 16/12 t o end the year 2010 with a number of 449 million impressions on the page. It had over 2 million comments and likes to the page and today has 780 thousand subscribers or more and is widely geographically spread, from north Alexandria to south Aswan and from east in El Arish to Marsa Matruh to the west. This supported the revolution in the beginning with about 50 thousand demonstrators. This increased later to also include members abroad, especially the Egyptian community in Britain which is a wealthy and highly educated community. People in this community gathered in front of the Egyptian Ambassador’s house while celebrating Egypt NationalDay and distributed pictures of tortured Khalid to entrants to inform them of the case and spread it internationally.

2 – Member characteristics: The page attracted an age group between 10 to 45 years who own computers and Internet connection. Therefore, it can be assumed that the members had at least a minimum level of education and income, and this contributed to maintaining revolution requests and even dictated that the regime contained only national interests ( which was accepted later ) It also possibly kept the Revolution clean and empty of blood (even though there was police brutality in dealing with them) because of their awareness and understanding of the concept of state property and its components.Being well informed on the concepts of human rights and contact with what is happening elsewhere in the world, Lawyers, journalists and doctors unions contributed to reporting cases of violation of human rights to motivate the revolution.

3 – The use of silent marches : after several days of its establishment , the preparation and guidance that was provided allowed for a call for peaceful marches, wearing black and reading Qurans or Bibles. Within 11 days, groups of several hundred people from different political groups and different social movements such as Kefaya ( Enough) were involved in the movement. In total, from April 6 there were 8000 members of the march up to 25th January in Alexandria, guiding residents of the vicinity to film the marches in order to document and publish it on the Internet for the world to see. Then, for the 50 thousand involved in demonstrations of anger on 28th January 2011, this documentation and the group helped in explaining how to deal with the police harassment or detention and to exposed these cases alongside directing lawyers to support them.

4- E- Campaigns: asked page subscribers to add police officers and students of the Police Academy to be friends on Facebook to talk with them to explain the discontent of the people and contempt for these heinous deeds, as well as detect all cases similar to Khalid’s torture and murders of which there were many cases during these past seven months.

5– Media plan: an accurate media plan was constructed to contact media and personalities of interest regarding torture and police abuse. The group published names and the telephone numbers collected by its subscribers of talk shows in the Egyptian and Arab TV channels and advised several points to speak about. They asked all participants to connect with shows and drew their attention to Khaled’s case and torture in Egypt in general. The group managed to gather many key persons, such as the mother and sister and the brother of Khalid , some artists, doctors and famous opposition politicians to join the marches. In addition, they managed to publish several articles in newspapers such as the famous New York Times – Spanish EL PA?S and others in Britain and the United Emirates, this led to publicity of issues in several countries such as Britain, Canada, and Spain.
6 – Risks and threats: the administrators received many threats, starting from email threats, through to police harassment, preventing them from accessing the areas of the march and risking detention for hours or being beaten in the streets and police cars.
7 – Use of the power of films, songs and poems was used to address the members of the group and raise their enthusiasm and participation. For example, the spiritual movie Vendetta was shown , which talks about a mysterious man who succeeded in freeing his people from the oppression of the ruling regime in an atmosphere similar to what was going on in Egypt – oppression and torture was also shown in the film the Race Champion with Derek Redmond , whose father gave him support during the race and used the Internet to spread an unprecedented type of encouragement.
8 – Teaching Constitutional Rights and Human Rights: where administrators repeated the constitutional rights to members of the page and to clarify the role of the President and the Ministers and how it is funded and organized.

9 – The use of surveys and consultation : In many cases, a page adopted the style of a consultation tool including timings and locations of marches. From the above information, we can conclude that the revolution, which is about to change Egypt, has awakened a special quality in the educated youths loyal to his country, where education and the internet has provided a variety of experience which will lead the country towards a brighter future with hope, dissemination of freedom, support for development and proper utilization and distribution of wealth in Egypt to reach a better level among world countries.