The Role of Social Media One Year After the Egyptian Revolution

It has been a year since the start of Jan 25^th 2011 Egyptian Revolution, many events took place during that past year, good and bad. What we would like to address here however, is the part the social media played in the aftermath and try to answer a few of the open questions we had in our last year’s post, The eRevolution; “Could social networking become a two-edge sword? What if social networking is used by the wrong people or for the wrong reasons? What would constitute a wrong reason or the wrong people?”

After a month of vacation which I spent in Egypt, I came back more confident of the power of social media, but at the same time realizing how a serious two-edge sword it could be. It was very clear to me that in Egypt, social media with its embedded lack of governance became a tool of igniting people rather than mobilizing them. The absolute positive role social media played during the 18 days of the 25^th of Jan, 2011 Revolution has been shattered and been transformed for the most part into a tool of creating chaos.

According to socialbakers.com (Egypt Facebook Statistics) and The Wall Street Journal (Facebook Sees Egypt Usage Spike), Facebook usage jumped 91% from Jan 2011 to Jan 2012. Among many other reasons, the massive growth and high penetration rate in social media usage in Egypt created a very healthy environment for gossip, rumors and a tremendously effective way of transporting a piece of information across almost the entire nation.

A single tweet or Facebook status update can go viral and create a lot of misconceptions among users and before you know it, media outlets with an unforeseen irresponsibility and lack of oversight, start exchanging that piece of information as if it were a fact with no or at best minimal effort to validate it.

More details on the role of Social Media one year after the Egyptian Revolution…