“We Are All Khaled Said", the page
that one could argue marked the beginning of social media's outsized impact on the Egyptian Revolution, was made by Wael Ghonim, a 29-year-old Google marketing executive. When analyzing how social media, particularly facebook, became so important in mobilizing a digital revolution, it's important to not lose sight of the detail that makes the medium so influential in the first place. Ghonim seemed to have perfectly mastered the ability to reach a community hell bent on change and used facebook in a way that was previously not believed to be possible.
In his “We Are All Khaled Said" page dedicated to the symbol of police brutality in egypt, the arguments he makes are highly substantive, listing detailed grievances which focus heavily on poverty and police torture, and to a lesser degree on the disingenuousness of Egyptian state media. Many of the his complaints are extremely detailed; he objects, for example, to the high cost of supplementary education lessons for which Egyptian parents feel the need to pay. Postings on the page include actual statistics on the rates of poverty, depression, suicide, unemployment, newborn deaths, anemia, Hepatitis C, cancer due to water pollution, and income disparity among Egyptian citizens, as well as the country’s ranking on the Corruption Perceptions Index and ratio of ambulance cars to citizens.
Furthermore, the page diagnoses causal factors—arguing, for example, that police corruption has been caused by poverty—and prescribes broad remedies, such as the need for collective solutions to individual problems and for a focus on commonalities in order to eliminate classism and religious hatred. Ghohim advances solutions which are likewise thoughtful and specific, with proposals such as increasing education budgets and revising pedagogy in schools.
The postings are not only substantive but also coherent. In fact, Ghonim develops a political platform, listing four demands for the Mubarak regime—addressing poverty, ending emergency law, firing the country’s Interior Minister, and instituting term limits on the presidency—and offers eight guidelines for protesting, in order to ensure safety and promote efficacy. In other words, the page resembles the communications of a full-fledged political organization or movement, yet lacks an offline structure or membership. Prior to the creation of the Facebook page, it did not exist.
Ghonim showed how social media postings can actually be remarkably sophisticated. In reality, it is unlikely that an ordinary citizen participating in protests—not just in Egypt but in any nation—is likely to seek information beyond the level of depth offered by statistics such as the ratio of ambulances to citizens. The page owner’s postings successfully present evidence in support of a coherent ideology and set of demands remarkable for their thoughtfulness and consistency.