The Internet: For Better or for Worse

Steve Coll
http://www.nybooks.com/issues/2011/apr/07/



Last June, Khaled Said, a twenty-eight-year-old Alexandrian, suffered a vicious public beating at the hands of Egyptian police. Several witnesses documented the assault with cell phone cameras. Said apparently died from his wounds, but the police claimed he had choked to death on illegal drugs. Outraged Egyptians posted contrary evidence on Facebook pages and on YouTube. In Dubai, Wael Ghonim, a twenty-nine-year-old Google marketing executive originally from Cairo, employed his business and design skills to construct a Facebook protest community based on the slogan “We Are All Khaled Said,” where people could join an online protest of the case.

Ghonim’s anonymous campaign eventually attracted 473,000 online adherents, a striking number even in a nation the size of Egypt, which has a population of 85 million. Last December, as street protests spread in Tunisia and Algeria, members of the Khaled Said Facebook group interacted online with others of like mind, and also with traditional protest organizers, such as trade unions and political parties. Ghonim returned to Egypt, and after the January 25 protest he helped organize drew many thousands of people, he was arrested. He became a cause célèbre and later emerged as a leader of the Egyptian revolution as it metastasized and forced President Hosni Mubarak’s resignation on February 11.

“I want to meet Mark Zuckerberg [Facebook’s founder] one day and thank him,” Ghonim told a CNN interviewer afterward. “This revolution started online. This revolution started on Facebook…. I always said that if you want to liberate a society, just give them the Internet.”

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http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2011/apr/07/internet-better-or-worse/?insrc=rel