Anatomy of a Facebook Revolution

Tonight, Frontline airs Revolution in Cairo, a behind-the-scenes look at Egypt's April 6 Youth Movement as it plots strategy and then heads out into Cairo's Tahrir Square, hoping to bring down President Hosni Mubarak. "The film traces these young Egyptian activists' long road to revolution, as they made increasingly bold use of the Internet in their underground resistance over the last few years," Frontline's Executive Producer David Fanning recounts. "Through sites like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube, the members of April 6 and related groups helped organize a political movement that the secret police did not understand and could not stop, despite the arrest and torture of some of the movement's key members."

The piece includes soundbites from David Wolman, the WIRED writer who has been reporting inside the April 6 movement and Mona Eltahawy, a popular blogger on Arab issues.

Here's the PBS promotion trailer:

Here's the fuller video; the story begins after a 30-second advertisement:

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(Photo, top, is of April 6 Youth Movement headquarters in Cairo.)

Twitter Contagion

(Click on the image for a full-sized view)

"Egypt is the crystal ball in which the Arab world sees its future," writes Kovas Boguta, creator of this data visualization (above), which analyzes the Twitter communication that erupted during the recent youth uprising in Egypt .

Boguta, founder and CTO of Infoharmoni -- which analyzes real-time social structures on the Web -- says he arranged the map to place individual Twitter users close to the people with whom they communicate. The red and blue dots represent which language users were using to communicate (Arabic is denoted in red, while English is denoted in blue). The size of the dots represents the individual's influence on the group as a whole. Different factions are placed near the factions they influence, revealing how weak ties get stronger.

Boguta offered this explanation February 11th on his blog, Computational History:

“Many fascinating structures can be seen. Wael Ghonim, a pivotal figure in this self-organizing system who instigated the initial protests on January 25th, is prominently located near the bottom of the network, straddling two factions as well as two languages. The size of his node reflects his influence on the entire network.

The lump on the left is dominated by journalists, NGO and foreign policy types; it seems nearly grafted on, and goes through an intermediary buffer layer before making contact with the true Egyptian activists on the ground. However, this process of translation and aggregation is key; it is how those in Egypt are finally getting a voice in Western society, and an insurance policy against regime violence. Many of the prominent nodes in this network were at some point arrested, but their deep connectivity help ensure they were not ‘disappeared’.”

"Most of those in this network speak both English and Arabic, and their choice of language says a lot about both the movement and about Twitter. Some may choose to primarily communicate with friends, while others make an effort to be visible to the rest of the world on purpose. They want to reach out, and connect with, the rest of global society."

Boguta told TechCrunch at the launch of Infoharmoni in 2009:

People are social animals, and love to both move in packs and purposefully individuate. ... Existing social groups incubate new topics of interest on Twitter, and existing interests incubate new social groups. Both move in response to each other. Twitter bills itself as the pulse of the planet, but it's more like the pulse of creative networks.

Portable Propaganda

There's no question that text messages are helping self-organized groups to assemble and vent their protests around the world. But as mobile phone operator Vodafone reminded the world earlier today, social media can just as easily be turned into new tools for government propaganda.

Vodafone is accusing Egyptian authorities of using its network to send pro-government text messages to its supporters, without disclosing that activity. "The current situation regarding these messages is unacceptable," Vodafone said in a press release. According to Reuters, text messages sent on February 2 announced the location and timing for a mass demonstration to support Egypt's President Hosni Mubarak amid mass protests calling for his immedite ouster. Vodafone says Egyptian authorities ordered Vodafone and two other mobile networks, Mobinil and Etisalat, to send messages to Egyptians to support the status quo, turning disabled networks back on briefly, just to be able to send them. The text messages were addressed to "Egypt's youth" and urged them to "listen to the voice of reason."

Vodaphone, trying to distance itself from Mubarak's propaganda efforts, said: "We have made it clear that all messages should be transparent and clearly attributable to the originator. These messages are not scripted by any of the mobile network operators and we do not have the ability to respond to the authorities on their content." Last week, Vodafone said in a statement that all mobile operators in Egypt had been "instructed to suspend services in parts of Egypt. Under Egyptian legislation, the authorities have the right to issue such an order and we are obliged to comply with it."

Speaking to reporters earlier today, Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao said voice calls remain off but that data services allowing people to access the Internet are now back on. Text messaging services, however, remain disabled for the general public. Reuters is reporting that one engineer who had been working on the network to keep services running has been seriously injured and another engineer is missing. "No voice and text but mobile internet is working," Colao told Reuters. "It will be restored when we are authorized. We are in a continuous dialogue with the government on keeping our services up. But this is a country that still has a curfew in place."

For more on censorship amid Cairo's turmoil, check out this Danger Room post and also this piece that appeared January 31 in The New York Times about the viral nature of censorship. Also see "Caught in the Net: Why Dictators are Going Digital'" in The Economist online.

- Marcia Stepanek