The Role of Social Media Sites in the Egyptian Uprising of 2011

The purpose of this study was to understand what role did social media sites play in the Egyptian Uprising of 2011. The importance of these social networking sites was highlighted to an extent by the mainstream media last year, hence; the study is carried out based on two sub research themes: understanding the role of social media as depicted by the Egyptian activists and studying the role of social media sites as represented by CNN and Al-Jazeera news websites. For this aim, both qualitative and quantitative research methodology was utilized in the study. The qualitative research data consisted of ten in-depth interviews with Egyptian activists who were actively participating in the Uprising of last year. The quantitative research data was gathered with the aid of content analysis of 100 news articles, from the respective news websites. The results of the in-depth interviews revealed that social media sites played a pivotal role to the protest movement in terms of interactivity and organization by the activists. Interview respondents felt that social media sites provided them with transparency that was essential to the Uprising, considering that the national media in Egypt is under strict government control and it is potentially harmful for people to voice their negative opinion about the government. The interviews also revealed that motivation was not primarily facilitated by social media sites and Egyptian interviewees felt that the role of social media sites in their Uprising has been exaggerated by western mainstream media. They do not agree with a label to their Uprising, such as a ‘Facebook Revolution.’ Content analysis of news articles demonstrated that CNN news website gave more importance to the role of social media in Egyptian Uprising especially to Facebook. The articles in CNN highlighted the role of social media in a positive tone. Al-Jazeera’s articles revealed a more neutral tone when talking about social media sites, when they did mention the importance of the sites it was mostly the blogs by Egyptian activists. The author recommends further study into how the rising popularity of social media tools will further affect political activism. To what extent the political parties and decision makers should not under estimate the power of social media. It is further recommended to study the reason for mainstream news media’s interest in promoting social media sites to its audience.