The role of digital media in the 2011 Egyptian revolution

ABSTRACT

The Egyptian uprising in January 2011, widely known as the 25 January Revolution, was initially claimed to have been caused by the internet. However, the relationship between social media and participation in the anti-regime demonstrations is contested and opaque. This article explores this relationship through both a theoretical and empirical approach. More concretely, by using two survey data sets, we examine a hypothesis derived from a diffusion model of information and social movement theory. The two key findings are: (1) vanguards of the demonstrations were more active on social media than followers during the revolution, and (2) active bloggers tended to participate in demonstrations against the Mubarak regime. These findings contradict previous findings of social media’s limited effect and indicate that social media diminishes the collective action problem in anti-government protests. They also indicate that the concept of political opportunity structure is useful for understanding the revolution.

KEYWORDS:

• Arab Spring
• digital media revolution
• diffusion model
• social movement
• Egypt

Acknowledgement

This article was originally presented at the 2018 meetings of the Southern Political Science Association held in New Orleans. The author wishes to thank Hiroki Takeuchi, Naoko Eto, Yao-Yuan Yeh, Ning Leng, Nataria Forrat, Yuko Kasuya, Masaaki Higashijima, and Martin K. Dimitrov and anonymous reviewers for providing constructive comments on previous versions of manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Data availability statement

Replication Data for this article is available online, Harvard Dataverse. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/XCSH4Z

Notes

1 A typical example is the Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim, who identified the Egypt Revolution as the “Web 2.0 Revolution” in his TED talk “Inside the Egyptian revolution” on March 4, 2011.

2 Brownlee et al., The Arab Spring, 36–7; Chalcraft, “Egypt’s 25 January Uprising, Hegemonic Contestation, and the Explosion of the Poor,” 157–9; Ketchley, Egypt in a Time of Revolution, 158–9.

3 Abdelmoula, “Al-Jazeera’s Democratizing Role and the Rise of Arab Public Sphere,” 263.

4 Wilson and Dunn, “Digital Media in the Egyptian Revolution.” 1252–3.

5 Tarrow, Power in Movement.

6 Tufekci and Wilson, “Social Media and the Decision to Participate in Political Protest.”

7 Clark et al., Principles of Comparative Politics.

8 Olson, The Logic of Collective Action.

9 Aman and Jayroe, “ICT, Social Media, and the Arab Transition to Democracy.”; Breuer and Groshek, “Online Media and Offline Empowerment in Post-Rebellion Tunisia.”; Howard and Hussain, “The Role of Digital Media”; Lim, “Clicks Cabs, and Coffee Houses”; Wolfsfeld et al., “Social Media and the Arab Spring.”

10 Aman and Jayroe, “ICT, Social Media, and the Arab Transition to Democracy.”

11 Lim, “Clicks Cabs, and Coffee Houses.”

12 Wolfsfeld et al., “Social Media and the Arab Spring.”

13 Howard and Hussain, Democracy’s Fourth Wave?

14 Ibid.

15 Aouragh and Alexander, “Egyptian Experience.”

16 Abdelmoula, Al-Jazeera’s Democratizing.

17 Brym et al. “Social Media in the 2011 Egyptian Uprising.”

18 Tufekci and Wilson, “Social Media and the Decision to Participate in Political Protest.”

19 Ibid., 377.

20 Hassanpour “Media Disruption and Revolutionary Unrest.”

21 Ibid., 20

22 Harindranath et al. “Social Media and Social Transformation Movements.”

23 Ibid., 3.

24 Burns et al. “The Arab Spring and Social Media Audiences.”

25 Ibid., 895.

26 Tarrow, Power in Movement, 163.

27 Granovetter “Threshold Models of Collective Behavior.”

28 Bikhchandani et al., “Theory of Fads, Fashion, Custom, and Cultural Change as Informational Cascades.”

29 Bueno De Mesquita, Regime Change, constructed revolution theories using the information cascade model, whereas Mekouar, No Political Agents, used information cascades to explain the Arab Spring.

30 Masuda and Konno, “Multi-state Epidemic Processes on Complex Networks.”

31 An important property of small-world networks is that the distance between a pair of vertices, or the minimum number of edges connecting two vertices, is fairly small on average (Masuda and Konno 2006: 64).

32 The percolation SIR model was originally developed to explain the spread of infection in the 1920s, by Kermack and McKendrik “Contribution”, but its significance was sufficiently understood only after 1980.

33 A numerical analysis was carried out by differentiating the differential equation and solving it with the fourth-order Runge-Kutta method.

34 Gur, Why Men Rebel.

35 Dissatisfaction or complaint as a cause of political change was first explained by Aristoteles, whose argument was subsequently developed in different eras by Locke and Marx.

36 The heredity of republic presidencies and other most-prominent leadership positions were considered to be a problem. Before the Arab Spring, it was presumed that Gamal Mubarak in Egypt and Saif al-Islam al-Gaddafi in Libya would each succeed their respective fathers.

37 Zurayk, Food, Farming, and Freedom, describes people’s anger with poor governmental management of food, fuels, and rising prices in the Arab countries. In Egypt, the cabinet resigned en masse on January 29, and the vice presidency was set up for the first time under the Mubarak regime. On February 7, a salary increase for government officials was decided. For more details, see Brynen et al., Beyond the Arab Spring, 186.

38 Hoffman and Jamal, “The Youth and the Arab Spring.”

39 Kelly and Cook, Freedom on the Net 2011, 123.

40 The outline of the survey, the simple tabulation, and the research questionnaire are all available on the website of Contemporary Middle East Political Studies in Japan: https://cmeps-j.net/.

41 Harindranath et al., “Social Media,” 2, found that, as of 2010, Egyptian internet users numbered 29,000,000, Facebook users numbered 4,100,000, and Twitter users numbered just 75,000. Therefore, there was a gap between the number of internet users and Facebook users.

42 Anduiza et al., Digital Media and Political Engagement Worldwide; Brym et al., “Social Media in the 2011 Egyptian Uprising”; McAdam and Paulsen, “Specifying the Relationship and between Social Ties and Activism.”

43 Brym et al., “Social Media in the 2011 Egyptian Uprising”; Wolfsfeld et al., “Social Media and the Arab Spring.”

44 McAdam, Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency; McAdam and Paulsen, “Specifying the Relationship between Social Ties and Activism.”

45 Hoffman and Jamal, “The Youth and the Arab Spring.” 8

46 Wilson and Dunn, “Digital Media in the Egyptian Revolution.”

47 Boulianne, “Does Internet Use Affect Engagement?”

48 Tarrow, Power in Movement.

49 Valenzuela, Arrigada, and Scherman, “Facebook, Twitter, and Youth Engagement.”

50 Tufekci and Wilson, “Social Media and the Decision to Participate in Political Protest.”

51 Abdelmoula, “Al-Jazeera’s Democratizing Role and the Rise of Arab Public Sphere,” 263.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by Japan Society for the Promotion of Science (JSPS KAKENHI) [Grants-in-Aid for Scientific Research] [grant numbers JP23310173, JP24653033, and JP15H03308].

Notes on contributors

Shingo Hamanaka

Shingo Hamanaka is a Professor of Middle East Politics at Ryukoku University in Kyoto, Japan. His research focuses on the strength of the authoritarian regimes in the Middle East, public opinion and foreign policy issues in Israel, and Muslim migration from the Arab countries. His publications include “Demographic Change and Its Social and Political Implications in the Middle East,” Asian Journal of Comparative Politics. 2 (2017), “Sensitivity to Casualties in the Battlefield: The Case of Israel,” Asian Journal of Comparative Politics. 3 (2018), and “The Inconvenient Facts Hindering a New Approach to Refugee Assistance Program” Annals of Japanese Association for Middle East Studies 35 (2019).