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

Enough with "Color" Revolutions

[Renderer of Evil]

The Tunisian uprising was called Jasmine Revolution. If the Egyptian thing pans out they'll assign some new unrelated color.

Set the naming conventions according to the social media outlet which was instrumental in fomenting it. For example:

Twitter Revolution in Tunisia
Facebook Revolution in Egypt
Github Revolution in Jordan

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.

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 !"

Re:Enough with "Color" Revolutions

[mito]

Jasmine is not a color in Tunisia, it is the national flower often worn by men over the ear.

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.

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.

Views from an Egyptian ...

[kbahey]

Rather than moderating, I'd rather write what I know.

There is a lot of misinformation here, and mainstream media coverage in the USA seems not up to par. Europe's coverage is much better, and Canada somewhere in between. The church bombing on New Year's Eve got more coverage than this history in the making period.

First, I am Egyptian, born and raised there, but living outside of Egypt for the last 2 decades. I was personally affected by the regime there for decades, but that is a story for a future blog post. I have family there, and was in Egypt for all of December 2010.

The whole region is run by military dictators, after the post-World War II upheaval. The colonial rule by European powers, or local monarchies, were ousted in military coupe d'etats. Many of the dictators were idealistic at first, and took a socialist or communist slant initially, only to become totalitarian despots, fascists, or something else other than socialist. Now the trend is to make it a dynastic rule, with Syria the first to have a nominal republic convert into a dynastic one. Tunisia's ex-despot had a son in law (Sakher El-Materi, only 30 years old) who was into politics big time and poised to take over the reigns of the country. In Algiers, the president is set to install his brother to succeed him. In Libya, a son seems earmarked for that. In Egypt it is also a son as well. I think Yemen.

Look at the statistics and cringe in horror at how long these despots are in power:

- Libya: Qaddafi - 41 years.
- Yemen: Saleh - 32 years.
- Egypt: Mubarak - 29 years.
- Tunisia: Ben Ali - 23 years.

Let us ignore the monarchies in the region for a bit, since they are not a republic and can nominally remain in power for that long.

Mubarak has been in power FOR MORE THAN ANY EGYPTIAN RULER IN MODERN HISTORY. That is since 1847 or so, NO ONE has ruled as long as Mubarak did.

All of them have had a sham parliament amend the nominal constitution to make it possible for them to run for more than the maximum of 2 or 3 terms, and then make it a lifetime thing as well.

All of them have parliaments that consist exclusively of those from the ruling party which gets 90% or more of seats via intimidation and exclusion of the opposition.

Now, the Operation Egypt thing is relatively new. I saw it today in the morning only. So it remains to be seen if they are helpful or not.

What I can say is that on Jan 25, the Egyptian Presidency web site was showing "under development and construction". I was checking it for a page for the list of modern rulers of Egypt and their time in power. Today, the web site seems to be under a DoS attack.

However, the stars of the show are first Kolena Khaled Saeed (We are all Khaled Saeed). It is a Facebook group that is named after a 20-something youth tortured and killed by the police last year. Police brutality is one of the top demands of those who are protesting. Last I checked, they had 413,000 "likes".

The second star is the Rassd News Network. This is a grassroots citizen news organization that is very mature, professional and objective. They verify sources and rate items as either "unconfirmed" or "confirmed". They have both Arabic and English updates from various sources, including eyewitnesses from action. You can "Like" them in Facebook, ignore the Arabic messages, and read the English ones to see updates.

The path to where we are today with protests was a long one.

The parliamentary and presidential elections in 2005 and 2006 show a lot of courage from a very small number of people. They were mainly middle class or intellectuals. The rest of the public did not catch on. Those who opposed the president got the heavy hand of the regime on them. For example, Saad El Din Ibrahim (an academic, and a bit eccentric) got imprisoned on false charges, Ayman Nour (another opposition figure) was impriso