rfmcdonald | [BRIEF NOTE] Facebook in Egypt (Reply)

A post by

slit regarding Facebook usage in Egypt caught my attention. A quick googling revealed that back in April 2007, Nadine El Sayelhad a piece in Egypt Today ("Smile and Say 'Facebook'") about Egypt and Facebook.

Call it a social network, a place to keep track of your old friends and fill up those empty hours when you have nothing to do, or even call it a place to hook up--whether you like it or not, the Facebook website has become hugely popular among Egypt’s upper-class teens and twentysomethings.

Launched in 2004 to students of a limited group of US-based colleges, Facebook is a social networking site where members create profiles that are visible only to other members; they can then form networks of friends, create groups open to people with similar interests, upload and share photos, and send messages to friends. The site sorts member profiles by the different groups each belongs to, making it easy to find old (and new) friends.

Facebook has seen explosive growth in Egypt among its target market of English-speaking college students, with over 20,000 Egyptian users signing up since general registration began in October 2006. Although young Egyptians still visit MySpace and other social networking sites, Facebook is the clear winner locally.

The Egypt network page claims nearly a half-million members. That's not a trivial number in a country of seventy-five million people with only relatively small middle- and upper-class populations. This has continued, mind, even though this April past an egyptian user of Facebook managed to trigger massive protests against rising prices for food and other commodities.

Last month saw the arrest of Esra Abdel Fattah, 27, after she formed a group on Facebook calling for protests against the high price of food and other commodities in Egypt. Strike action was already planned by factory workers in the Nile Delta city of Mahalla al-Kobra, and the Facebook group, which attracted 64,000 members, tapped into a national mood of unrest. During Fattah’s incarceration, police clashed with protestors in Mahalla, killing three; some 500 people were detained.

By the time Egyptian police freed her two weeks ago, Fattah, an active online activist and member of the liberal al-Ghad political party, had become something of a cyber folk hero, feted by Middle Eastern bloggers and tech-minded students. A second Facebook group began calling for the release of Fattah and the other detainees, and for further protests on May 4th. A Cairo University student even heckled the Egyptian prime minister as he gave a speech at the campus on role of the internet as a communication tool:

Fattah is still being harassed by the state. Whether or not young Egyptians--and people fo otehr antionalities--will be able to use Facebook to defy domestic censorship remains to be seen. If nothing else, this will be a pretty impressive footnote to the story of the first social networking-guided revolution? (Will it be Facebook, LinkedIn, Livejournal, or MySpace that does it?)

UPDATE (3:17 PM, 27 August):

slit provides more disturbing information on Facebook on Egypt.