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Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak
Facebook and the Internet Influence Egyptian Politics
by
Josh Katz
In April and May, young activists used Facebook to organize opposition to the Egyptian government. Now, Egypt is thinking about banning Facebook.
30-Second Summary
Yesterday, an op-ed in the Los Angeles Times said that Egypt “is considering blocking Facebook” following the antigovernment protests in April and May that were coordinated using the popular social networking Web site.
The protests were over soaring food and oil prices and a growing gap between rich and poor in the country, according to World Politics Review. Although Egypt’s economy has been growing, “there’s been little trickle down to the 45 percent of Egyptians who continue to survive on $2 a day,” the article writes.
In April, workers at a state-owned textile factory in Mahalla, Egypt, planned to strike for better pay. Just before the strike, a young woman named Esra Abd El-Fattah used Facebook to garner support for the workers by calling for a nationwide strike. The strike occurred as planned throughout the country on April 6.
A second Internet campaign pushed for a May 4 strike in Egypt, boasting about 150,000 Facebook members. But this time, President Hosni Mubarak undercut his opponents by promising reforms and he warned protesters of repercussions.
The two protests show that the Internet could be a significant political force, and not only in Egypt. Last week Canadians protested in favor of net neutrality, a rally organized through Facebook. In February, a different Facebook group attracted 250,000 members, causing protests in 185 international cities in opposition to the Colombian rebel group FARC.
On the other hand, blogger and activist Mustafa Domanic argues that, “Without grass-roots action on the field, online political activism is useless.”
The protests were over soaring food and oil prices and a growing gap between rich and poor in the country, according to World Politics Review. Although Egypt’s economy has been growing, “there’s been little trickle down to the 45 percent of Egyptians who continue to survive on $2 a day,” the article writes.
In April, workers at a state-owned textile factory in Mahalla, Egypt, planned to strike for better pay. Just before the strike, a young woman named Esra Abd El-Fattah used Facebook to garner support for the workers by calling for a nationwide strike. The strike occurred as planned throughout the country on April 6.
A second Internet campaign pushed for a May 4 strike in Egypt, boasting about 150,000 Facebook members. But this time, President Hosni Mubarak undercut his opponents by promising reforms and he warned protesters of repercussions.
The two protests show that the Internet could be a significant political force, and not only in Egypt. Last week Canadians protested in favor of net neutrality, a rally organized through Facebook. In February, a different Facebook group attracted 250,000 members, causing protests in 185 international cities in opposition to the Colombian rebel group FARC.
On the other hand, blogger and activist Mustafa Domanic argues that, “Without grass-roots action on the field, online political activism is useless.”
Background: Egyptian discontent leads to Facebook protests
A May 27 article from The Guardian portrays Egypt’s worsening food shortage and the resulting anger toward Mubarak’s government. “The government’s opponents tried to capitalise on the food crisis by calling strikes and mass protests in Cairo last month and early May,” according to The Guardian. But “Mubarak sought to undermine them by announcing a 30% pay rise from July for all public sector workers. … But days after the protests passed, the government announced a 35% increase in the price of several goods. People said they had been duped.”
Source: The Guardian
The May protests, like the April ones before them, were organized via the Internet. However, unlike the April protests, the May ones quickly fizzled out, demonstrating an Egyptian political trend “where every step forward towards change is often followed with one step backwards,” according to a May 13 article from World Politics Review.
Source: World Politics Review
Opinion & Analysis: The Internet as a political tool
Sherif Mansour, who works for the human rights organization Freedom House, argues that, “The international community and the U.S. government should pressure the Egyptian government to support Internet freedom and keep Facebook accessible to Egyptians.”
Source: Los Angeles Times (free registration may be required)
Michael Geist, the Canada Research Chair in Internet and E-commerce Law at the University of Ottawa, Faculty of Law, details how integral the Internet is to politics in the present age. Geist compares last week’s Facebook-organized Canadian protest in favor of net neutrality with the anti-FARC protests earlier in the year and with the Egyptian rallies, and writes, “Not only is the Internet increasingly the focus of policy advocacy, but it also serves as the platform to enable such advocacy.”
Source: The Toronto Star
Egyptian blogger Alaa Abd El Fattah says that citizen journalism and bloggers are especially important in Egypt; but, in particular, YouTube is the “most effective political Web site.” The blogger writes, “With the pervasiveness of mobile phone cameras, it is rare to hear of a human rights violation, a political event or a major incident that isn’t accompanied with a mobile phone video published on YouTube.”
Source: PostGlobal (The Washington Post and Newsweek)
Blogger and activist Mustafa Domanic questions the efficacy of the Internet on politics in light of the Egyptian protests, using Turkey as an example: “Yet in the end, both the rallies and the massive online groups proved useless when the opposition bitterly lost all the elections and parliamentary votes that their enthusiastic web supporters had campaigned for. What I learned from the vain activism of the Turkish secularists was this: Without grass-roots action on the field, online political activism is useless.”
Source: PostGlobal (The Washington Post and Newsweek)
Related Topic: ‘Facebook used to target Colombia’s FARC with global rally’
A Feb. 4 article from The Christian Science Monitor explains how a group of young people initiated an international protest against Colombia’s FARC rebels through a Facebook group. The resulting event, “One Million Voices Against FARC,” was “less a response to the FARC’s ideology than it is global public outrage over kidnapping as a weapon,” say some observers, The Christian Science Monitor reports.
Source: The Christian Science Monitor
Reference: ‘Country profile: Egypt’
Hosni Mubarak took over as Egypt’s leader following the assassination of Anwar Sadat in 1981, and has served as president ever since. He banned his only influential opposition, the Muslim Brotherhood, from open political participation. According to The BBC, “The president is an economic liberal and his government has promised economic reforms. But Egypt remains plagued by high unemployment and low standards of living.”
Source: The BBC
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