-- Protesters Find New Tools to Organize
CAIRO (AFP) – The protest movement in Egypt has mobilized the young and the middle classes using the Internet and social networks in a challenge to the authorities that has seen both Twitter and Swedish video-streaming site Bambuser blocked.
Mobile phones too were unable to get a signal on Tuesday in Tahrir Square in the centre of the capital Cairo, which has been a rallying point for thousands of protesters.
Pro-democracy activists countered on Wednesday by disseminating technical advice to overcome these obstacles to enable the mobilization to continue.
Twitter said in a terse "tweet" that it was blocked in Egypt starting about 1600 GMT on Tuesday and that the interruption had derailed Twitter.com as well as applications linked to the service.
Bambuser, a website which provides live streaming of videos from mobile phones and webcams and is very popular in Egypt, was blocked from 1200 GMT on Tuesday, company chief executive Hans Eriksson told AFP in an email.
Herdict.org, a project of the Berkman Centre for Internet and Society at HarvardUniversity in the United States, said it had received a "handful of reports" from users across different Internet service providers in Egypt that they had been unable to reach Twitter.
"From what we've heard from contacts on the ground, Egyptians are still utilising the Twitter service via SMS and third-party apps," a spokeswoman said.
As with the month-long protests in Tunisia which led to the overthrow of veteran strongman Zine El Abidine Ben Ali earlier this month, Facebook and Twitter have emerged as important tools for the Egyptian movement in organising demonstrations and rallying opposition to the regime.
"What happened in Egypt was almost entirely organised on Facebook," political blogger Issander al-Amrani said.
"Young protesters have formulated their grievances while demonstrating."
Spearheading the protests, the "April 6 Movement" launched a Facebook poll a few days before the demonstrations asking: "Will you rally on January 25?"
Nearly 90,000 indicated they would, leading a few days later to the biggest anti-regime protests in President Hosni Mubarak's 30-year rule.
Under a decades-old state of emergency, only officially sanctioned gatherings are legal in Egypt and police have routinely cracked down on unauthorized rallies in the past.
Founded in 2008, the "April 6 Movement" is a group of pro-democracy activists who work primarily on the Internet. It claims tens of thousands of members, mainly well-educated youngsters looking for a modern and open method of self-expression.
Internet usage in Egypt has increased rapidly in recent years, with some 23 million of a population of more than 80 million regular or casual web-users by the end of 2010, an increase of 45 percent in a year.
Mobile telephony is also booming, with 65 million subscribers, up 23 percent year on year according to official statistics.
Much of Egypt's traditional opposition, both secular and Islamist, has been caught off guard by the success of the young web users in bringing large crowds on to the streets of towns across the country.
The Muslim Brotherhood, the most powerful opposition force which is banned but tolerated by the regime within certain bounds, gave no explicit backing to the protest calls although it said that some of its members might take part.
But Amr al-Choubaki, an analyst with the Ahram Centre for Political and StrategicStudies, said the magnitude of the protests of the past two days was likely to mobilize broader swathes of the population in the days to come.
"The unexpected scale of the protests is due to several factors, including the political roadblocks erected by a regime in place for 30 years," Choubaki said.
"The revolution in Tunisia of course, has been an inspiration."
Sourced from AFP
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