Faces of the revolution (warning: graphic image)

Khaled Said
Source: Arabist
This photo of this man, Khaled Said-- beaten to death at the hands of the Egyptian police for allegedly being in possession of a video showing police selling illegal drugs-- went viral online.

It lead to this Facebook page, We Are All Khaled Said, whose original page in Arabic has over 1,600,000 'likes' and is still updated hourly (there are almost 150,000 'likes' on its English page).

This Facebook page led to the coordination of this flash mob, a peaceful protest led by hundreds of Egyptians who were given these simple instructions on Facebook:

Stand 5 feet apart, so as not to break Egyptian laws against public demonstration; be absolutely silent; no signs; wear black, as determined in an online vote; stand on the banks of the river or sea for one hour only, then walk away.

Cue video to 0:52:


This YouTube vlog by this woman, Asmaa Mahfouz, was shared with her friends on Facebook on January 18th.



These Egyptians led in a significant way to this:

Government security forces with water cannons and tear gas confronted protesters to the Mubarak government in a battle that lasted hours on January 28th.
Image: Peter Macdiarmid/Getty Images

And then this:

Egyptian anti-government protesters celebrate under fireworks at Cairo's Tahrir Square after president Hosni Mubarak stepped down on February 11.
Image: Marco Longari/AFP

These are the people that sparked the 18-day revolution that toppled a government who had been in power for as long as some of them had been alive. These are the people who used social media as a tool to spread their message and voice their dissatisfaction. They didn't do it with guns and clubs, they did it with words, images and videos.

There are a large number of other contributing elements which helped in the uprising. For example:

• Facebook page, April 6 Youth movement
• The Facebook 'event' for January 25 called "The Day of the Revolution Against Torture, Poverty, Corruption and Unemployment"
• The #jan25 Twitter hashtag spearheaded by activist Wael Ghonim

A more comprehensive list can be found here and here. This Guardian rolling blog also includes good screengrabs of key tweets throughout the uprising.

Doing an online feature on the use of social media in the Egyptian revolution is complementary because we can link directly to web pages, embed videos, photos, and so on. In our feature we could document the revolution in a similar format to this one by Al Jazeera, but through images, videos and interactives. This is not only visually engaging for the audience but also makes full use of the online medium.

References

Adams, Richard, et al (2011)  “Egypt protests – Wednesday 2 February Live Blog,” The Guardian, 2 February 2011. <http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/blog/2011/feb/02/egypt-protests-live-updates> [Accessed: 20th August 2011]

Al Jazeera (2011) "Timeline: Egypt's revolution," Al Jazeera, 14 February 2011. <http://english.aljazeera.net/news/middleeast/2011/01/201112515334871490.html>  [Accessed: 19th August 2011]

Beaumont, Peter (2011) “Can social networking overthrow a government?” Sydney Morning Herald (online), 25 February 2011 <http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/can-social-networking-overthrow-a-government-20110225-1b7u6.html#ixzz1XAC1qcA8> [Accessed: 19th August 2011]

Sutter, John (2011) “The faces of Egypt’s ‘revolution 2.0’,” CNN, 21 February 2011.
<http://edition.cnn.com/2011/TECH/innovation/02/21/egypt.internet.revolution/index.html> [Accessed: 20th August 2011]