When one of the Egyptian movement's leaders heard the news from Tunisia, he started texting: 'Ben Ali gone. Of course, that's no accident: The Egyptian activists were following the events in Tunisia, learning from them, and even communicating with some of the leaders - over Facebook, of course. Pollock's portrayal of Egyption activism displays strategies and tools similar to Tunisia's. We Are All Khaled Said emerged as an enormously influential Facebook group it now has almost 1.5 million members. Said became a revolutionary icon when ghastly post-mortem photos, taken on his brother Ahmed's cell phone, were post to Facebook. Police said he had resisted arrest but his family says he had videos showing the police dealing drugs that police feared he would upload to YouTube or Facebook. When he was released he announced the beginning of the 'April 6 movement' and he and his fellow organizers began to study nonviolent civil disobedience online at an Arabic site called Academy of Change, inspired by the Serbian youth movement Otpor.Īs in Tunisia, one of the key turning points in Egypt came from a display of state brutality that went viral online: On June 6, 2010, police dragged a computer programmer named Khaled Said out of a cybercafe and beat him to death in the street. Following the protests, one of the planners was arrested, beaten, and threatened with rape. Early on, organizers did not use Facebook because so few people were on it at the time, but when they did start up a page, they gained 3,000 fans a day. He begins that chronicle with the April 6, 2008, textile-worker strike in the city of Mahalla. Pollock's look at Egypt's social movements doesn't go as far back into the history as his study of Tunisia. Facebook is what guided the protests, but the true vehicle for change was the protests themselves. Foetus calls it 'the GPS for this revolution' - quite a helpful analogy. You hae a moral obligation to look at what is happening in your country.''Įven though these other tools played their parts, Facebook was on a plane of its own. She remembers the video vividly: 'A friend put it up and wrote something like 'You don't want to see this, it's horrible, but you must. Like thousands of Tunisians, Rim Nour, a business consultant, was 'online almost 24 hours a day,' spending a lot of time identifying government stooges on Facebook groups. Posted and reposted hundreds of times on YouTube, Facebook, and elsewhere, set off a wave of revulsion across North Africa and the Middle East. One video emerged filmed inside a hospital in the town of Kasserine: a young man lay dead with his brains spilling out. In the days following the death of Mohamed Bouazizi, protests erupted in towns across Tunisia's poor interior. 'We were online every day,' Foetus told Pollock, 'and on the streets pretty much every day, collecting information, collecting videos, organizing protests, getting into protests.' One activist even used Foursquare to broadcast his location when he was being held in the Ministry of the Interior. Activists used Skype and Mumble to talk to one another over the Internet.

Takriz used many other online tools: It created a fake Twitter account and website for Tunisia's foreign minister. But by the end of 2009, more than 800,000 Tunisians had Facebook accounts and when Ben Ali fled earlier this year, the number was just shy of two million, nearly a fifth of the country's total population. Ben Ali's online censorship was so severe that Tunisia ranked below Iran and China on measures of Internet Freedom. Even in 2008, when protests broke out in Tunisia's mining region, fewer than 30,000 Tunisians were on Facebook. Over the next decade, more and more Tunisians slowly came online. Takriz meetings 'in real life' meant 'spies and police and all these Stasi,' he says, using the term for East Germany's secret police. Foetus, Takriz's chief technology officer, a skilled hacker who started hacking because he couldn't afford Tunisia's then-exorbitant phone and Internet costs, saw another advantage online: safety.

Waterman recalls that the Internet was the only viable option for organizers in 1998, because other media were controlled by Ben Ali.

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