Social Media and Social Justice: Egypt

by David Deutsch

When I give social media training seminars, the first thing I do is wave a hammer around in the air, asking people what it is. After they get over their initial shock of a 6'3" guy frantically swinging a hammer, they guess correctly that it is a hammer. I then ask the audience to list the kinds of things you can do with a hammer, leading to a wide variety of creative responses: hammer nails, destroy recalcitrant computers, clock someone in the head, etc. Then I throw the hammer on the ground and ask what it can do now; the audience correctly guesses that it obviously can’t do anything on the ground. Social media, I explain, is like that hammer: it is a tool, a means to do something (i.e. connect with other people in interesting and fascinating ways). If the social media tools such as Facebook and Twitter are not used, they are as useless as the hammer lying on the ground.

Many people consider social media to be a fad, something that they don’t need, or want, to be involved with. Social media skeptics assert such things as, “Why do I care about what other people have to say? It does not impact me.”

Tell that to the people of Egypt, Tunisia and South Sudan, who used social media tools to launch and sustain their revolutions. And tell that to Barack Obama, the first president in the US, if not the world, to effectively use social media to gain the highest reaches of political power. In fact I would argue that we could not possibly have a President Obama if it wasn’t for social media.

When the telephone and television were first introduced they were considered to be a waste of time at best and harbingers of destruction at worst, and we all know how that turned out. Same thing goes with e-mail, cell phones and the Internet itself. When I first got online in 1993, my college friends thought I was nuts. They insisted they would never need to use the Internet, nor would they ever want or need a computer. Many of these early skeptics are now my Facebook friends and probably own their own computers, laptops and/or smartphones.

Let’s discuss the impact social media has had on Egypt. When the Egyptian uprising began, what was the first step the Mubarak regime took? They shut down the Internet to stop people from plotting online. After all, the revolution began with a few people posting calls to action on Facebook. 

According to Frank Rich of The New York Times, social media, in and of itself, did not cause the revolution. Once the Mubarak regime shut down the Internet, the protests grew. In fact, Rich argues that the role of social media in this revolution is overblown.

It is true that social media by itself did not cause the Egyptian revolution. It came from the Egyptian people, who were deeply frustrated by their abysmal living conditions. But social media certainly lit the spark. And subsequent tweets from outlets like Al Jazeera—who, as a side note, provided by far the best coverage of the crisis—kept and sustained international pressure like never before. (One can only imagine what history would have been like if we had social media in 1989 during the Tiananmen Square massacre in Beijing, or during South Africa’s brutal apartheid regime.) And if social media were such a fad, why are some of the most powerful people on Earth using it for their own political ends, or trying to ban it altogether?

And, after Rich wrote his piece, The New York Times came out with another article detailing how Egyptians collaborated and worked with Tunisians to share information, strategize, and find a way to bring democracy to the region years before the uprising. One piece of advice the Tunisians passed to Egyptian youth was “Put vinegar or onion under your scarf for tear gas.” Again, social networks were not the only driving force behind the uprising, but to discount or minimize their role is fallacy. As the Times put it:

[Egyptians] fused their secular expertise in social networks with a discipline culled from religious movements and combined the energy of soccer fans with the sophistication of surgeons. Breaking free from older veterans of the Arab political opposition, they relied on tactics of nonviolent resistance channeled from an American scholar through a Serbian youth brigade—but also on marketing tactics borrowed from Silicon Valley.

It is important to note that social media is a double-edged sword. Again according to Rich, Mubarak used Facebook to track down the people responsible for initiating the protests. Social media can be (and is) used for bad ends, not just good ones. It just depends on who is using it.

Social media has empowered a new global conversation like nothing before. Are there risks associated with utilizing these tools? Sure. There are also risks associated with stepping outside your front door. That doesn’t stop you from doing it.

Social media cannot make conversations, or revolutions, happen. A hammer can only build a house if it is in the hands of a skilled carpenter, and social media can only create social justice if it is used in the right way. In the case of Egypt, the tools were used to both create and suppress social justice. The people of Egypt succeeded, driving out the Mubarak regime and taking their first steps toward freedom, the ultimate social justice.

Comments

Comments closed.