The Role of the Internet in Shaping the Political Process in Egypt

Abstract

There has been a growing debate about the extent to which the Internet influenced the Arab World’s recent revolutions described as the “Arab Spring”. This belief that the Internet had a contribution is supported by several events and evidences that occurred prior to these revolutions and provided clear indications about the Internet’s power. This paper investigates the effect of the Internet on shaping politics in Egypt. Research was conducted a few months before the revolution (January 25, 2011) covering the relevant literature, and the news and events that took place. A questionnaire was sent to a sample representing different segments of Internet users in Egypt to recognize their perceptions towards the value of the Internet in politics. Findings indicate a high interest among Egyptians in accessing news online, especially international and privately owned media. In addition, survey participants recognize the Internet’s potential for committing political change. Survey results show that the Internet is perceived in Egypt as a strong tool that political candidates could use to communicate with citizens; however, it is still used primarily for mobilization and information dissemination. Moreover, it was proven that age, gender, education and reading frequency of online news all have varying effects on civic engagement and perception of the role the Internet can play in politics in Egypt.

Overthrowing the dictator: a game-theoretic approach to revolutions and media

“…The results gleaned from the empirical evidence support the idea that citizens perceived social media to be very important during the Arab Spring (Howard et al 2011;Lang and De Sterck 2014), including the Tunisian revolution (Marzouki et al 2012) or the protests in Egypt (Attia et al 2011;Azab 2012;Lim 2012;Tufekci and Wilson 2012). Hence, microblogging activity (Qin et al 2016) or the amount of tweets (Acemoglu et al 2014;Steinert-Threlkeld et al 2015) might have been related to the incidence and the intensity of protests.…”

Secular vs. Islamist polarization in Egypt on Twitter

“…Several studies have looked at the role that social media played during the Egyptian revolution [10], [11], [12], [13], [14], [15], often from a qualitative point of view or relying on surveys. None of them has, however, tried to quantify the polarization online in the post-revolution setting.…”

Content and Network Dynamics Behind Egyptian Political Polarization on Twitter

“…To approach the question, he looks for geographical correlations between census information for income and house value/size, and estimates for how much Islamist activity on Twitter there is originating from a particular region. Down to conflictive situations, we find a plethora of works devoted to the Arab Spring -as the expression "Twitter Revolution" was coined and settled in mass media: some examples can be found in [6,7,23,24,31,34], often from a qualitative point of view or relying on surveys. With the use of data from blogs, Al-Ani et al [5] explore alternative news sources -beyond the government-supplied versions of events.…”