Egyptian Protests: Facebook And Twitter Are Up To Their Old Tricks--Plus A New One!

In What if Twitter is leading us all astray in Iran?, Joshua Kucera raised the question of just how reliable was the information being passed around about the protests following the Iranian elections in 2009:

Here are a few of the things that we’ve “learned” the last few days about the Iranian elections and their aftermath:— 3 million people protested Monday in Tehran
— the losing candidate, Mir Hossein Mousavi, was put under house arrest
— the president of the election monitoring committee declared the electioninvalid on Saturday
These are just a handful of data points that have been shooting around the Internet, via Twitter or the opposition-friendly blogs. And all have been instrumental in building a public opinion case against the Iranian government for undercounting the support for Mousavi.

But there is a problem:

The problem is, none of them appear any longer to be true. The crowd was in the hundreds of thousands, most newspapers reported. Mousavi’s own wifesaid he wasn’t under house arrest Sunday, and Monday he appeared in person at the protest. And if the president of the election monitoring commission has gone over to the opposition, no serious reporter has reported it.

It turned out that the problem with social media is that instead of relaying information about the unrest in Iran--it may have been causing or encouraging it it. 

Fast forward to the protests in Egypt, and it looks like social media is being used for that same purpose. An Egyptian student writes that Twitter was used to exaggerate the turnout at protests:

For two weeks calls were made using new social media tools for a mass demonstration on the 25th of January. Observers dismissed those calls as another virtual activism that would not result in anything. Other calls in the past had resulted in very small public support and the demonstrations were limited to the familiar faces of political activists numbering in the hundreds. As the day progressed, the observers seemed to be correct in their skepticism. While the demonstrations were certainly larger than previous ones, numbering perhaps 15,000 in Cairo, they were nothing worrisome for the regime. They were certainly much smaller than the ones in 2003 against the Iraq War. The police force was largely tolerating and when they decided to empty Tahrir Square, where the demonstrators had camped for the night, it took them less than 5 minutes to do so.

But beneath that, things were very different. The social media tools had given people something that they had lacked previously, an independent means of communication and propaganda. Hundreds of thousands of young Egyptians in a matter of minutes were seeing the demonstration videos being uploaded on youtube. For an apolitical generation that had never shown interest in such events the demonstration was unprecedented. More remarkable they were tremendously exaggerated. At a moment when no more than 500 demonstrators had started gathering in that early morning, an Egyptian opposition leader could confidently tweet that he was leading 100,000 in Tahrir Square. And it stuck.

Of course, traditional media can do the same thing: Al Jazeera claimed that over a million protesters showed up on Tuesday at Tahrir square--which can only hold about 100,000.

Social media can also mislead those who are using it.
Take for instance Mohamed ElBaradei, who is supposed to be the face of Egypt's anti-Mubarak revolt.

After stepping down in November 2009 as head of the UN's International Atomic Energy Agency, ElBaradei had no interest in politics.

So what changed?
According to the Wall Street Journal, everything changed when Mohamed ElBaradei discovered Facebook:

But ex-colleagues say Mr. ElBaradei, whose international profile soared after he shared the Nobel Peace Prize with the IAEA in 2005, experienced a change of heart after teaching himself how to use social-networking sites on the Internet to monitor Egyptian events from afar.

Among other things, he discovered Facebook "fan" pages with thousands of followers urging him to run for president this year. His own Facebook page, which is frequently updated, currently has more than 314,000 admirers.

Admirers? Just how valuable is the kind of admiration that is expressed with the click of a mouse? As some politicians learned in the last election, the fact of the matter is, Facebook friends do not translate into votes:

Robert Ehrlich has lots of friends — 58,273 of them, to be exact. That’s the number of people who’ve friended the former Maryland governor on Facebook, and as he campaigns across the state trying to get his old job back, he mentions his online pals whenever he can. Ehrlich’s Democratic opponent, Gov. Martin O’Malley, can claim a mere 24,516 Facebook friends. “That proves I’m friendlier,” Ehrlich told the crowd at a Saturday corn roast in Baltimore County, and “more popular.”

Ehrlich is one of many politicians this year who have discovered the limits of friendship.No doubt, if the election were held on Facebook, Ehrlich would be the runaway winner. But in Maryland, where the election actually will be held, a Washington Post poll has him trailing O’Malley by 11 points.[emphasis added]

According to that Wall Street Journal article, ElBaradei and the Egyptian activists appear to be discovering the same thing as ElBaradei has not lived up to the hype and rather than being the face of the revolution--he is nothing more than a figurehead.

On the other hand, there are those who think that Hosni Mubarak is handling himself pretty well without Facebook and Twitter.

We'll just have to see how all this plays out.

Technorati Tag: Facebook and Mohamed ElBaradei and Mubarak.