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.