On February 11, 2011 we really believed that The Internet could bring democracy to the world. At least in the Arab world. After eighteen days of protests, Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak resigned and transferred power to a military council.
Many said and wrote that it was the victory of social networks, and in particular of Facebook and Twitter, which had allowed the Egyptians to inform themselves and organize the protest. In the chronicles it turned out that in Egypt everything had started from an open Facebook page of the activist Wael Ghonim who at one point disse una frase molto potente: “If you want to liberate a society all you need is the internet”. In Italian: “If you want to free a people, all you need is the Internet”. Ghonim had opened that page at the end of 2010 after seeing on Facebook photos of an Egyptian young man beaten to death by the police for trying to report the corruption of the police. His name was Khaled Said, and the page was dedicated to him: “We are all Khaled Said,” was the name. In a sense, Mubarak’s downfall began with a Facebook page.
A few months later a study by the University of Washington concluded that: “In the twenty-first century the revolution will not be triggered by television, but it will probably be tweeted, texted and organized on Facebook”. The study asserted that in the week leading up to the president’s resignation, the total daily tweets on the topic around the world had passed. from 2300 to 230 thousand per day; and protest videos had gone viral, sometimes exceeding 5 million views.
A year later, Pew Research, an observatory on journalism, returned to the topic with other data. In the meantime, a study by the Institute of Peace of the United States had come out which had conducted a deeper analysis on the links shared in those months by Tunisia, Egypt and Libya, arriving at different conclusions: “The importance of social media was in communicating to the rest of the world what was happening on the ground of the riots … Social media therefore were more a megaphone than a trigger of the revolt “.
Pew Research somehow supported this thesis: “Most Egyptians are not online. THE two thirds of the population do not use the Internet. Those who attend universities are social media users to inform themselves about politics … In short, social media has played an important role in disseminating information, but the data does not indicate that it was also one tool to mobilize people”.