Social media allows access to datasets with an unprecedented range of detail, but presents a host of new challenges for researchers
- Anne Alexander
25 January 2011 was the day Egypt’s revolt began. People flooded the streets of cities across the country, calling for an end to the Mubarak regime. Two days later – in a moment unprecedented in history – the government turned off Egypt’s internet, in the hope of quelling massive civil unrest.
It didn’t work. Two weeks later Mubarak stepped down.
The Western media relished portraying the Egyptian uprising as the ‘Facebook revolution’, a digital epoch securing social media’s place in history as a vehicle for political change – an unstoppable galvanising force.
Such views were clearly oversimplistic, especially as the revolution continued apace despite – even because of – the loss of the internet. As one activist stated on his blog, losing the internet at the hands of his own government served as a powerful reminder of “why we’re doing any of this.”
So in what ways did social media influence Egyptian revolution, and how do opposition movements continue to use it? Can researchers capture these digital datasets to analyse social turbulence?
Dr Anne Alexander, a research fellow at the Centre for Research in the Arts, Social Sciences and Humanities (CRASSH), is investigating the digital fingerprints left by Egyptian people on Facebook, Twitter and other social sites during civil unrest.
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Image: Nasr City/revolution will not be tweeted
Credit: Hossam el-Hamalawy
Reproduced courtesy of the University of Cambridge
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