Launching Revolution: Social Media and the Egyptian Uprising’s First Movers

Abstract

Drawing on evidence from the 2011 Egyptian uprising, this article demonstrates how the use of two social media platforms – Facebook and Twitter – contributed to a discrete mobilizational outcome: the staging of a successful first protest in a revolutionary cascade, referred to here as ‘first-mover mobilization’. Specifically, it argues that these two platforms facilitated the staging of a large, nationwide and seemingly leaderless protest on 25 January 2011, which signaled to hesitant but sympathetic Egyptians that a revolution might be in the making. It draws on qualitative and quantitative evidence, including interviews, social media data and surveys, to analyze three mechanisms that linked these platforms to the success of the January 25 protest: (1) protester recruitment, (2) protest planning and coordination, and (3) live updating about protest logistics. The article not only contributes to debates about the role of the Internet in the Arab Spring and other recent waves of mobilization, but also demonstrates how scholarship on the Internet in politics might move toward making more discrete, empirically grounded causal claims.

How the Internet has changed participation: Exploring distinctive preconditions of online activism

“…Despite the fact that online activism is often condemned for its ineffectiveness (Barney, 2010;Gladwell, 2010;Morozov, 2011), a number of studies showed that social media can be an effective tool in mobilizing society into offline political actions, such as protests and even revolutions (Clarke & Kocak, 2020;Eaton, 2013;González-Bailón, Borge-Holthoefer, Rivero & Moreno, 2011;H. H.-s. Kim & Lim, 2019).…”

How social networks affect the repression-dissent puzzle

“…Since clustering and influence in a network are determined by a tunable control parameter, we control for it. Finally, the initial size of protests is a reliable determinant of their final size [30,43] and is partially a lagged dependent variable, so we include it as well.…”

“…Recent datasets that specifically code protest episodes and states’ behaviors across dozens of countries also recreate the repression-dissent puzzle, as Figs 1 and 2 show. Fig 1 uses the Mass Mobilization (MM) dataset, which codes 13,060 protests with at least 50 attendees from 162 countries from 1990 through 2014 [ 43 ]. From that dataset, we model the size of protest as a function of protester violence and whether the state responds with accommodation, killing, arresting, shooting, or beating protesters; the model includes country and year fixed effects.…”

“…Fig 1.The repression-dissent puzzle persists in the mass mobilization dataset. This figure is made using the Mass Mobilization (MM) dataset[43]. We run 1,000 ordinary least squares regressions that model the logarithm of the number of participants at a protest as a function of protester violence, state response (accommodate, arrest, beat, kill, or shoot protesters), and year and country fixed effects.…”

Arap Ayaklanmaları’nda Protestolara Katılımın Belirleyicileri: Mısır ve Tunus’ta Sıkıntılar ve Fırsatlar

“…39 Clarke and Kocak similarly indicate the role of social media in the mobilization of first movers during the Egyptian protests. 40 While I discuss the findings of these studies under grievances and opportunities for the purposes of providing links, their direct focus is not necessarily these factors. These studies benefit from the main tenets of the literature discussed above; however, some of them do not directly test for both grievances and opportunities while others test them only in single case settings.…”