In Sunday’s New York Times Magazine, Samantha Shapiro presents a compelling account of how young Egyptian dissidents have used Facebook as a tool for mass mobilization. As I can confirm from my own research in Cairo on this issue, Shapiro gets most of this story right. Here’s the short version: last year, a handful of activists associated with the opposition Ghad party used Facebook to publicize a protest scheduled for April 6th, ultimately attracting 70,000 members to its “April 6th Movement” Facebook group online. Insofar as this rattled the Mubarak regime, it was considered a huge success. Indeed, the regime deployed soldiers throughout downtown Cairo to deter demonstrators, and further showed signs of panic when it arrested organizer Esraa Abdel Fattah – a shocking rarity, as Abdel Fattah is a woman.
However, Shapiro omits one of the key events catalyzing the decline of the “Facebook Party” since the April 6th protests – namely, the Facebook activists’ failure to stage a follow-up protest on May 4th, 2008, which was intended to coincide with President Hosni Mubarak’s 80th birthday. In this instance, the regime completely outmaneuvered the activists. First, a few days prior to the proposed May 4th demonstration, the Egyptian government announced a 30 percent wage increase for state employees, thus killing the Facebook activists’ popular momentum. Then, on May 6th – once the target date for the demonstration had passed – the government negated the wage increase by announcing massive price-hikes in gasoline (46 percent!), cigarettes, and other goods. This severely discouraged many activists, who quickly adopted a “nothing changes” attitude that persists today.
In the months since the abortive May 4th demonstration, the regime has used a number of additional strategies for undermining the Facebook-based dissidents. First, the regime has used violence against certain web activists, including the infamous beating of Facebook organizer Ahmed Maher. Second, the regime has improved its monitoring of Egyptian bloggers, instituting new technology in web cafes for tracking Internet usage. Third, the regime has worked to sow divisions among the web-based activists. In this vein, the regime broadcast Esraa Abdel Fattah’s release from prison on state-run television, showing her weeping and running into her mother’s arms. This outraged Abdel Fattah’s fellow activists, who accused Abdel Fattah of weakness and excluded her from their circle.
In short, even as young Egyptian dissidents have attempted to leverage new technology for challenging the regime, the Egyptian government has used classic authoritarian strategies – devious maneuvering, improved domestic monitoring, divide-and-conquer tactics, and violence – with great success. Sadly, dissidents’ prospects are unlikely to improve anytime soon: in the aftermath of the recent fighting in Gaza, the U.S. is relying on Cairo to negotiate a sustainable ceasefire between Israel and Hamas, and is therefore unlikely to press the Mubarak regime on domestic reform. Indeed, in the aftermath of the short-lived “freedom agenda,” realpolitik has returned to Middle Eastern foreign policy – with young Egyptian liberals shouldering some of the burden.
