Egyptian blogger Eman AbdelRahman aka LastoAdri. Courtesy of Oso on Flickr.

Why did the Mubarak regime turn the internet off?

That was the question I asked the attendees of a gathering recently at the Oxford Internet Institute looking at the role of the internet in the revolutions sweeping the Middle East. The question gives us, I suggested, a route into understanding the other side of the equation, ie. How authoritarian regimes maintain their power. It therefore connects us to a long standing debate that has encompassed media studies, cultural anthropology, political science and more.

My provisional response was to suggest that turning the internet off was more than anything a gesture of power that shed light on how an authoritarian regime perceived its ability to exercise control. Yes, turning off the internet was an attempt to stop activists using free publishing tools online to organise protests and share information. Yes, turning off the internet worked to prevent information reaching the outside world and so perhaps preserved for one more day alliances with powers who were not going to like the violence and repression that had to be meted out to protect regime interests. But perhaps more importantly, turning off the internet was a gesture of a power relation. We can do this. You cannot stop us. We are in power, you are not. Targeting the internet as a way of stating the existence of a relationship of power just goes to show how embedded the internet had become in Egyptian society, and that its long term role had been to help render the tools of authoritarianism far less effective. In a paradoxical way then, the Egyptian government’s decision was a statement of its powerlessness in the face of the long term impact of the internet.

A number of caveats are necessary. A revolution depends on many factors coming together at the same time: the fuel of long term economic grievances and repression, a cadre of young people willing to die, the fuse of a revolutionary setting – in this case that incredible moment broadcast on Al Jazeera and other satellite networks when President Ben Ali fled Tunisia in the face of the unstoppable force of public protests. Perhaps more importantly for this debate is the caveat that illiteracy and poverty exclude many millions of people from social media in Egypt. Despite these caveats, and without wanting to be trapped in the eddies of the causality debate, social media was influential enough for it to be worth discussing. According to statistics shared by the impressive Noha Atef – founder of a blog documenting torture and Twitter user extraordinaire – there are perhaps as many as 21 million internet subscriptions in Egypt, a figure that demonstrates how the internet has come to play an important role in the country. A middle class phenomenon perhaps, but powerful in its reach.

In taking the longer term view, rather than focusing on the immediate examples of how social media were used in the protests, we can look at the role of social media in helping to undermine the tools of authoritarianism. Three areas are of particular interest: 1) the ways in which authoritarian states obstruct the Freedom of to assemble, 2) the way in which authoritarian regimes control public space with propaganda, objects of fear and the cult of personality, and 3) the ways in which repressive regimes attempt to block critical thinking and freedom of expression.

Freedom of Assembly

Many of the protest movements sweeping the Middle East have gathered pace in towns outside the capital. Sidi Bouzid, Suez, Daraa, Benghazi. But in each case, the protest movement needs to also take hold in the capital, and more specifically in a symbolic location and central gathering place. Only that way could the protest take on the regime in a national sense – a blow to the heart. The best example of this was Tahrir Square which became effectively proto-liberated space for the protesters. It represented what you might describe as ‘sacred national space’ where peace and fraternity reigned amongst those committed to the revolution and both Muslims and Christians could pray alongside one another. A junction at the heart of the capital city, Tahrir became the beating heart of the revolution, so much so that Al Jazeera and other news networks had to broadcast the scene there almost continuously to all corners of the country and beyond. By reclaiming Tahrir Square and fighting every regime attempt to clear it, the Egyptian protesters reclaimed the heart of Egypt for themselves.

Facebook pages and Twitter hashtags provided similar gathering places. These were assembly points that attracted the focus of the many (in the case of Twitter the focus of the most active activists and international networks). On Facebook Kulina Khaled Said and the April 6 Youth Movement were prominent throughout. So too was the January Revolution Day against Torture Poverty Corruption and Unemployment. On Twitter, the hashtag that gathered most attention was #jan25. To be prominent, hashtags and Facebook pages necessarily required wide community participation – just as holding Tahrir required a big number of dedicated protesters in it for the long haul. The impact and attention of these gathering places forced the regime to acknowledge the protesters. Unlike regime media that could largely ignore the protests at the start, to interrupt these gathering points either required using them – thereby acknowledging them – to spread the regime line, or removing access to them altogether (by blocking the service or turning the internet off).

The focus here on date and time is particularly interesting. Why use a date for a revolutionary hashtag? Many other protest movements have used a date on Twitter too – Tunisia, Libya, Bahrain, Syria. So the trend is deeply rooted. A date is important because it suggests rupture. Although – as Noha Atef pointed out – the revolution began many years before in the gradual activism of a new cohort of web-savvy young people, the symbolic date of rupture was January 25 in Egypt. Before this date, Mubarak reigned supreme. After this date he was effectively ruined. The date announced the rebirth of the nation, the narrative moment in which Egyptians took history into their own hands, purging themselves of the past ills imposed on them by a corrupt regime. This date of rebirth was in many ways more significant than the date on which Hosni Mubarak stepped down – as the continued use of the hashtag attests.

Dates, landmarks and national narratives are deeply interrelated in Egypt, inscribed as they are into the history books and the geography of Cairo. Many of the bridges and major thoroughfares are named after important historical dates (October 6, May 15, July 26). The hashtag had a similar connection to Tahrir. It was both a space, a landmark and a new national narrative, written by the community outside of the control of the regime. In using it, Egyptians broke through the atomization enforced on them through years of Emergency Law preventing them from freely assembling to demand their rights and influence policy. Just as the community collectively broke through the barrier of fear by taking to the streets in such numbers on 25 January, numbers so large that individually the Egyptian protesters faced a greatly reduced risk of reprisal from the regime, so Egyptians took courage in collectively joining Facebook pages and contributing to the #jan25 hashtag on mass.

Propaganda and the Cult of Personality

Authoritarian regimes flourished in the days of old media in large part because the one-to-many paradigm of radio, television and print favoured central control on the distribution of information and ideas. Just as public space could be cluttered with the paraphernalia of the ruler (statues, portraits, banners, insignia on cars), so public media could be cluttered with the propaganda of the regime. This helped to spread fear and furnish the idea that everyone else was wildly supportive of the ruling regime (a process in sharp focus in Bashar Al-Assad’s speech to parliament on 30 March 2011). Some scholars have suggested that the effectiveness of this propaganda quickly wears thin with the people; it is not so much then that Egyptians believed everything Mubarak said or Al Ahram told them, rather they had no power to prevent this propaganda intermediating between their lives and the lives of their fellow citizens. Rather, propaganda acted as a code for describing acceptable behaviour and denied the viability of alternatives to regime rule. As political parties, syndicates and other public bodies are quickly co-opted by the regime, so ‘independent’ mass media are co-opted to distribute regime messages and sideline challenges. Public debate largely ceases to exist or is marginalised, so there is little opportunity to take part in public debate. The regime flourishes in this environment.

But what happens when you have publishing tools that provide for dense inter-connected networks? Egyptian use of Twitter is the perfect example of this. Twitter is the fruition of trends in the web that emphasize networked inter-linked information where everything is social. Everything is linked: users are hyperlinks, topics (hashtags) are hyperlinks, tweets are hyperlinks, replies are connected hyperlinks. Moreover, Twitter is a gateway to other content through traded links. So tools like Discus allow you to see all the users gathering around a particular url on Twitter. Retweets and suggested links broaden and enrich the connections users are willing to take part in between one another. Egyptian activists took this opportunity to build their own web of people and information which was integrated over time into the global link economy.

The point here is not to eulogize the brilliance of Twitter, but to show that its functions – which are the result of evolving trends in the social web – and the breadth of its global community provide for a dense network of people and information which is a direct threat to the stability of regime propaganda through old media. In their own way, Wordpress, Facebook, YouTube and all the other popular web services do a similar thing. In a multi-polar networked paradigm that crosses barriers of location, culture and ideology it is much harder for any one set of interests to take full control. The atomizing effect of regime propaganda is sorely undermined. Simply put, social tools escape the authoritarian suppression of sociability (unless you turn the internet off).

Governments can’t be ‘social’ – only people in communities can. The US Defence Department is surely learning this. So the Mubarak regime’s efforts to insert itself into the evolving online network was doomed to failure. Just as it could not stir enough people onto the streets to counter the revolutionary demonstrations, so it could not tackle the weight of community action online when the floodgates truly opened (#jan25). The regime’s decision to send threatening text messages through the Vodafone network are a case in point. They did not stem the tide of the Egyptian Revolution. Similarly, Mubarak’s televised addresses had the feeling of watching history, literally. This is how the regime treated Egyptians for so long. It was captivating for western audiences to see a dictator in the act of dictating. The content of those speeches could never have met protester expectations precisely because protesters called for Mubarak to go, and in the absence of any meaningful progressive political platform from the regime (was there ever one?), the televised addresses were surely designed simply to show who was in power. But they actually worked the other way. They provided fuel for the community to enervate its critiques and lampoon a dictator. The addresses enhanced the sense of the clumsy powerlessness of the regime, its crass ineptitude, its emptiness. The display demonstrated that the regime’s power had long since evaporated. Suddenly the idea of ruling a country for 30 years looked something incredible and unlikely.

Freedom of Speech

When I was living in Egypt in 2006, I came to know two middle class female bloggers (muhagabat) in their early twenties who blogged anonymously. My interest in their blog stemmed from the fact that they were not tackling overtly ‘political’ topics, but nevertheless their blog was deeply political. They used the blog as a critique of their family life, and particularly to vent against their parents and wider social norms. Why can’t we live in a place of our own outside the family home? Why are we expected to get married and have children? Why won’t my dad let me come back to the house when I want? Around this agenda gathered a community of peer bloggers who offered support and self-affirmation. This small community worked to take on bloggers with opposing world views who stumbled across the blog from the wider public.

The interesting point here was that by blogging and gathering anonymously in this way, the group began to formulate and disseminate a social critique that previously could not have been propagated in public space. So the blog acted for them as a node of critique. This kind of interaction was being repeated among the young educated Egyptian middle class right across Egypt, creating new avenues for free expression and debate, though largely ignored by the media pundits interested more in activists fighting torture. The long term repercussions of this evolution in the Egyptian public sphere cannot be underestimated. Though gradual in terms of the life span of social media, this change is rapid and profound in the broader social history of the Middle East, and surely its impacts will be felt for a long time to come.

Conclusion

We cannot boil revolutions down to a simple equation such as [social media + young people + grievances = revolution]. But then nor can we ignore social media use as an important and growing trend that has direct implications for the way in which authoritarian regimes exercise power. We should be cautious about many aspects of social media – linguistic hegemony, increased status competition, the erosion of privacy protections. Nevertheless, we should celebrate the long term impact of social media use that has created a more networked, community-led, editable public sphere.