There has been considerable worldwide
attention given to the fact that new media played a critical role in the wave
of Arab Spring revolutions that began in 2011.
However, new media has also played a critical role in providing
transparency in post-revolution elections as well. This case study provides information on one
such election transparency endeavor, highlighting how “netizens”[i]
organized to broadcast information about voting day activities in the 2011
Egypt parliamentary elections.
New media is not a new phenomenon for Arab Spring
revolution countries. Facebook, blogs,
Twitter, YouTube and other social networking sites, gained traction there over
the years, just as they did elsewhere. However,
the revolutions provided an environment that further fueled dramatic growth and
diversification in new media usage. Of
course, there is little grounding for claiming that the revolutions were a result of new media per-se. Instead, the
revolutions were born from a host of circumstances that gave rise to social
unrest, including spikes in wheat prices, decades of political repression,
poverty, as well as many country-specific circumstances.
However, new media facilitated a
hereto-unprecedented means for social unrest to pronounce itself, mobilize
support, and organise. New media put
information in the hands of regular citizens and through its internet-based
nature, was able to evade strict environments of information censorship in each
of the Arab Spring countries. As one dissertation case study on the Egyptian
revolution states:
Due to the recent nature of these events, the scholarly and
academic discourse is still developing, and there is fairly limited data and
analysis of the role of social media in the Arab Spring. This is not to imply that there is a lack of
information. What sets the information
apart is the nature of its sources: for
one of the first times in history the tumultuous events of the Arab Spring have
been covered by ordinary citizens via Twitter, Facebook, online blogs, and
videos on YouTube, more so than the mainstream media. According to the 2011 Arab Social Media
Report, 94% of Tunisians get their news from social media tools, as do 88% of
Egyptians. “Both countries also relied at least on state-sponsored media for
their information (at 40% and 36% of people in Tunisia and Egypt
respectively).” Equally noteworthy, in
Egypt there are now more users of Facebook than there are subscribers to
newspapers. In addition to Twitter,
Facebook, and YouTube, personal blogs have been used as an insider perspective
to the ongoing revolutions. The fact
that these tools of social networking that have previously had a reputation
strictly for socializing are now being used as sources for information and
data, speaks volumes of their relevance in contemporary political mobilization.[ii]
While
analyses of new media is usually devoted to its use in facilitating these
revolutions and political mobilization in general, it is also important to
recognize the critical role new media played in providing transparency to elections
which came afterward. The parliamentary
elections in Egypt that began in November 2011 were the first genuine elections
the country had witnessed since the overthrow of the monarchy in 1952. And new
media was there to scrutinise and debate those elections.
The
groundwork had been laid less than a year before the revolutions began, when
one activist organization, U-Shahid (“You are a witness” in Arabic), began
organizing a network of social media-savvy citizens to observe the 2010
parliamentary elections, elections which would prove to be fraught with
problems, oppressed opposition, stifled independent media, and stacked results.[iii]
In this YouTube clip, organizer and well known Egyptian
activist Esraa Abdel Fattah explains to Human Rights First, the group’s
motivations in calling for reform using new technologies: http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=ANkpNSVplDs#!
The organization was up against great
odds in their endeavor to monitor the upcoming (pre-revolution) elections.
However, that experience gave the activists an opportunity to put methodologies
to the test, fine-tune techniques and approaches, and garner support. Once the
revolution had taken place, resulting in the overthrow of the Mubarak regime,
U-Shahid found itself operating in a new environment in which new media
flourished, while local traditional media as well as election observation
groups were struggling with the evolving (and oscillating) environment of
freedom.
Here
is an excerpt from a Christian Science Monitor article on the group’s plans
prior to that election:
"Unfortunately most of the
indications are very terrible, very negative, very worrying, especially the
fight which has been launched against the independent media," says Bahey
el-Din Hassan, director of the Cairo Institute for Human Rights Studies.
While
that bodes ill for Mr. Mubarak's promise that the election will be clean, a
group of bloggers and activists are using the Internet, cellphones, and citizen
engagement to create a monitoring process they predict will expose government
misbehavior.
How Twitter could tweak the election
scene
The
website U-Shahid.org, which means "you are a witness," will plot
reports of election irregularities on an interactive map of Egypt. Citizens can
submit reports via text message, Twitter, or e-mail, along with photo or video
verification. The effort's organizers hope it will push regular citizens toward
political participation.
"We
think it's a new tool for election monitoring that will attract more people to
participate," says Esraa Abdel Fattah, a project organizer and activist
who was arrested after she used a social-networking site to help organize a
national strike in 2008. "We want them to feel there is something
happening in Egypt. They should participate and they should see there is
something illegal going on. This election is window dressing to say to the
world that we have elections and democracy in Egypt. But we have no democracy.
It's fake."
125 volunteers to fill a void
The
group has recruited 125 volunteers from around the country, and those people
have used their own networks to recruit and train more volunteers. Most of the
people involved are regular citizens, not seasoned activists, says Kamal Nabil,
director of the Development and Institutionalization Support Center, the
Egyptian nongovernmental organization administering the project.
On
a recent afternoon, about 35 volunteers gathered for training. As the
late-afternoon sun streamed through the window, they learned how to manage the
mapping technology and contribute photos and videos through Twitter to report
election violations.
They
will be filling a void. In addition to barring international election monitors,
local civil society groups are expecting obstacles to their own monitoring
efforts. The government recently closed a slew of satellite stations and placed
restrictions on live television broadcasts and mass text messaging.[iv]
On election day, U-Shahid put their expertise to work,
stationing citizen journalists at voting stations around the country so as to
be able to report findings unhindered and in real time. Their findings were
compiled and uploaded to the U-Shahid website. U-Shahid’s 600 voting station
reports transmitted through social media showed that only in only 5% of
locations voting was occurring without incident. The majority of the reports indicated minor
voting problems such as voting centres opening late (although some reports
indicated considerable delays of more than 6 hours) or missing material
(official stamps and so forth). Thirty-five per cent of the reports were able
to expose serious issues such as illegal campaigning, while 4% indicated
incidents of violence.
[i] Citizens who are active users of internet communities, such as
blogs and social networks.
[ii] Madeline Storck, “The role of Social Media in Political
Mobilisation: A Case Study of the January 2011 Egyptian Uprisings”
(dissertation at the University of St Andrews, Scotland, December 20, 2011), 5-6
[iii] See for example this BBC report from November 28, 2010:
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-middle-east-11855691
[iv] Kristen
Chick, “Volunteers go hi-tech
to map Egypt election irregularities:
President Hosni Mubarak's regime has rejected US calls to allow foreign
observers at Egypt elections this weekend. But volunteers, armed with innovative
software, are undeterred,”
Christian
Science Monitor, November 22, 2010, http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/2010/1122/Volunteers-go-hi-tech-to-map-Egypt-election-irregularities
