Social Media As a Weapon In Egypt

oxide7 writes "The internet and social media sites have become a battlefield between the Egyptian government and protesters. From the article: 'Facebook has at least two pages, Operation Egypt and one titled Egypt's Protests. The former carries calls to arms, asking for volunteers to mount distributed denial of service attacks. The latter has posted messages and videos, such as one that said the Ministry of Awqaf which is in charge of religious endowments, might work with the Ministry of the Interior to stop Friday prayers.'"

Comments

Re:Enough with "Color" Revolutions

[Seumas]

Social Media has as about as much to do with revolutions as wearing a red ribbon on your lapel does with curing AIDS.

Other than the symbolic part

[mvar]

What is the actual purpose on doing DDoS attacks on some rarely visited government web sites? If people want to actually change things, they should really go out and protest against the government rather than sitting behind the safety of their monitors clicking endlessly until some crappy configured server goes down.

Re:Other than the symbolic part

[DNS-and-BIND]

Well, to the modern type of person who attends protests, saying things is as effective as doing them. This has a long history going back to the 60s radicals. There's this idea of "the narrative" where real-life events are supposed to follow a script. In the past, framing events made them happen in reality (the story of US defeat in Vietnam, for example) but this only works in free countries with biased media. This is why so many people were baffled when Iran didn't fall..."I changed my web page background to green and applied twitter directly to the forehead...why didn't it work?"

Re:Other than the symbolic part

[rikkards]

That's pretty easy to answer though. If you look at both Vietnam (for the US) and Afghanistan (for the USSR), they both had external political backers who were supplying weapons. There were other factors as well but without said supporting through armaments, things probably would have been a lot different. These protests are pretty much doomed to fail without serious physical (and not digital) violence happening. Why did East/West Germany and Poland fall? Neither would have if the USSR had not been rotting from the inside thus resulting in less influence. Pretty much everyone in the countries involved wanted it to happen, even the politicians. In all of these cases the influential force is internal to the country and has a vested interest in making sure it fails. Remove that interest and things would change.
I think until these protests are willing from the start to end in potential bloodshed, they are spinning the proverbial wheels. Granted it may persuade some over to their side and gets their cause some exposure but that can be risky when they come in the night.

Re:Enough with "Color" Revolutions

[CharlyFoxtrot]

Yes but a facebook page that could have been set up by one person in a basement somewhere isn't really proof of a real grass roots movement yet it gets reported on breathlessly by the international media. "Oh look they have a facebook page and are using teh twitterz, OMG their government is doomed !"

Social Media - The Safe Angle

[MrSteveSD]

Conspicuously absent from the mainstream media is any discussion of our support for these brutal and oppressive regimes. The use of social media in these revolts has provided a safe angle for journalists. Journalists are now able to spend most of an article talking about how amazing Facebook and Twitter are rather than note that the US has funded the oppressive security apparatus of Egypt for decades. Tacit support for a dictator is one thing, but massive material support to the tune of billions of dollars is quite another. The very least the US could do to help the Egyptian people is to stop actively helping their oppressor.