Study Says Egypt "Second Most Addicted" to Facebook

According to this report, Egypt, though it has fewer Facebook users than other countries, ranks second in the world in number of posts per Facebook user, after only Brazil:

With Facebook crossing the one billion user-line, Socialbakers has released the results of statistics showing the most Facebook-addicted countries on Facebook. Egypt came in second on the list.

 

While the US is one of the most populous countries with a high percentage of its people connected to the internet and having the greatest number of registered Facebook pages, other countries like Brazil and Egypt topped the list of the highest activity on the social networking website.

 

According to the Sociabakers, their findings were based on the number of posts published in each country. Brazil which topped the list publishes a total of almost 86 thousand posts per month, with an average of 103 posts for every registered Facebook page every month.

 

While Egypt has six times fewer pages registered on Facebook than Brazil and eight times fewer than the US (which came third on the list), pages in Egypt publish an average of 380 posts per month for every registered page.

The US ranked third. The only other Middle Eastern country to make the top ten is Turkey.

Glitch or New Policy? Iranians Have Access to Facebook and Twitter, Today at Least

Iran shut down access to both Facebook and Twitter during the 2009 post-election troubles and both have remained inaccessible, even though President Rouhani has a Twitter account.

Until today, when Iranians discovered they could access both sites. There has been no announcement so it's unclear whether this is just a glitch of some sort or a quiet bit of liberalization. It isn't clear if it's working throughout the whole country or even on all ISPs. Or, of course, if it will still be there tomorrow.

King Khufu's Flash Drive

I'm not sure what the object in this photograph via Facebook really is, but the caption, "King Khufu's Flash Drive," seems appropriate. If you've forgotten, Khufu (Cheops to the Greeks) was the builder of the Great Pyramid.

"E-Militias of the Muslim Brotherhood"

Here's another post that's mostly just a link: Linda Herrera and Mark Lotfy at Jadaliyya on "E-Militias of the Muslim Brotherhood: How to Upload Ideology on Facebook." It provides a fairly detailed look at how the Muslim Brotherhood uses websites and social media, including both the official sites but also those that appear to have no link to the MB but do.

Not Revolution 2.0: Social Media as Lynch Mob in the Kashgari Case

I haven't commented up to now on the case of Hamza Kashgari, the Saudi journalist who had to flee the Kingdom due to his Twitter tweets about the Prophet Muhammad, and who was then seized in Malaysia and extradited back to Saudi Arabia for possible trial, which could even entail the death penalty. The basic issues of freedom of expression seem clear enough, and the case is even more dismaying because of Malaysia's role in delivering him back to KSA after he had made his escape. Certainly Kashgari's tweets were ill-advised for someone living in Saudi Arabia (what parts of "Commission for the P:romotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice" and "Religious Police" did he not understand?), but the potentially draconian punishment is provoking justifiable outrage. Background stories here and here if you haven't been following it.

But there's another side to the whole Kashgari issue that is worth noting amid all the talk over the past year of the Arab uprisings as "social media revolutions," "Revolution 2.0," and so on. In the Kashgari case, it is the social media that have been baying for his scalp.

As this piece in Canada's MacLeans notes,  the Internet has been playing the role of lynch mob in the Kashgari case. YouTube videos call for his death; chat rooms demand it.

Then there is the battle of the Facebook groups. As of this writing, the "The Saudi People Demand Retribution from Hamza Kashgari (Arabic)" Facebook page has 26,711 members.  "Free Hamza Kashgari," on the other hand, has 6,700. Of course there are other pages and other forums, but it seems clear that supporters of the Saudi religious establishment are using social media to demand punishment. Though the page itself does not immediately call for his death, many of the posters do. (In contrast, the Grand Mufti of Egypt has noted, "We don't kill our sons; we talk to them.")

Yes, social media can be a major organizing tool for revolutionary change. It can also be the modern equivalent of the lynch mob.

The Evanescence of a Social Media Revolution: A Year Later, 10% of Data, Images are Missing

 As someone whose discipline is history, I have naturally wondered about how the history of the past year will be written. At first glance the vast library of YouTube videos, live tweets as events transpired, cell-phone photos of events from hundred of sources, etc. would seem to mean the revolutions would have been well documented.

But endurance of these media may be an issue. Here's an important article I think: "Losing My Revolution: A year after the Egyptian Revolution, 10% of the social media documentation is gone." Using several aggregation sites, Storify, etc., a test study showed that up to 10% of the content, especially photos and videos, is no longer available. And that's after only a year.

This raises some interesting questions for digital archivists. I commended it to historians, techie geeks of various stripes, and anyone with an interest in social media.

Ban Now, Why Take Chances?

Google +, Google's attempt to take on Facebook, isn't even available to the general public yet. Not to worry: Iran has already blocked it anyway.

Over 2 million new Egyptian Facebook Users in 3 Months

When 2011 began. 4.7 million Egyptians had Facebook accounts. By April 1, the number was 6.65 million, fueled presumably by Facebook's reputation as one of the major engines of the revolutrion.

In related news, supporters of the Re4volurtion have urged the Minister of Culture to invite Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg to Egypt.

The Brotherhood's Facebook Clone and Other MB Online Sites

I'm a little late to the discussion but there's been some blogosphere talk about the Muslim Brotherhood's own version of Facebook, IkhwanBook, and why the Ikhwan doesn't just use tjhe regular Facebook. (Short answer: it does.) Starting from this article in The National, there are discussions by Brian Whitaker, who notes the following: (many of the links don't work):

The Muslim Brotherhood (known in Arabic as "al-Ikhwan") is engaged in a rather curious project to duplicate some of the world's most popular websites with its own "Ikhwan" versions.

So far, these include Ikhwan Wiki (resembling Wikipedia), Ikhwan Tube and Ikhwan Web Tube (YouTube lookalikes), Ikhwan Google (which searches the Brotherhood's websites) and – the latest addition – IkhwanBook which resembles Facebook.

The interesting and slightly puzzling question is what the Brotherhood hopes to achieve by this. It's hard to imagine the Ikhwan sites gaining anything like the popularity of those they replicate, and they look like a move towards exclusivity which is generally uncharacteristic of the Brotherhood.

To which Issander El Amrani at The Arabist adds this:

I think both Matt and Brian miss the point slightly. The first reason for having all these sites — and believe me, there are a LOT of Ikhwan sites out there, practically one for every governorate of Egypt plus many more on specific issues before you reach the Facebook and Wikipedia clones — is that there simply is enthusiasm to build them. Beyond the apparent correlation one notices between tech-savvy and religious inclination (just visit any of the computer malls on Midan Sphinx in Cairo), there are a lot of young talented programmers in Egypt who would love to show their enthusiasm for the gamaa by building websites for it. And there are a lot of young people in the Brotherhood, no matter how elderly the leadership is, for whom these websites may be a way of expressing their views as well as gain practice in the art of political and religious rhetoric.

The second reason is that this resonates with the groupthink and in-group mentality that the Muslim Brotherhood cultivates. These sites won't replace Facebook or Wikipedia, they are a virtual gated community (gated, that is, by strong symbolic references and imagery that are likely to alienate those not already versed in the Ikhwan universe) for like-minded people, where they can create a more orderly version of the sites that they copy and where the membership is self-selecting. The Muslim Brothers tend to socialize together, marry within each others' families, work together (or for each other) and a whole lot more. It's a support group as much as a political organization. It makes sense that, online, they will tend towards a closed ecosystem — alongside the open internet, not instead of it.

The original article offers some of the Brothers' own rationale:

But defenders of the site say they envision IkhwanBook as a complementary parallel – not a replacement – for Facebook. The organisation, members say, wants a social networking site of its own that can be tailored to its unique need for privacy, security and decency.

“I think that it’s important that we have channels which are not contradictory to the original Facebook but which are parallel to it,” said Ahmed Said, an engineer and a member of the Brotherhood’s media development team. “We will not be isolated. Many groups have their own social network on the net. The name is Ikhwan, but it is not limited to Ikhwan. It is open to everyone.”

They also note that when the real Facebook receives a lot of complaints about a site or user, it may take it down, and that this is used by Egyptian and other security services to attack Ikhwan sites on Facebook.

I suspect at least some of these sites may have problems with trademark infringement. The URL for IkhwanBook is www.ikhwanfacebook.com, though it now just calls itself IkhwanBook.

Facebook Has More Arab Members than All Arab Newspaper Readers Combined

A new report says that Facebook now has 15 million subscribers in the Arab world while all Arab newspapers — in Arabic, French and English combined — sell ony 14 million copies.

That link is to a BBC story. You can find the summary from Spot On Public Relations (a Dubai-based PR firm) here. The full report in PDF is here. (And yes, the PR firm is on Facebook.)

Some of their findings from their website:

— MENA’s top five Facebook country markets, Egypt, Morocco, Tunisia, Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates, account for 70% of all users in the region.

— 50% of MENA Facebook users have selected their primary language for using Facebook as English, with 25% preferring French and just 23% Arabic.

— Only 37% of Facebook users in MENA are female (compared with 56% in the USA and 52% in the UK). Only Bahrain and Lebanon Facebook communities approach gender equality with female users accounting for about 44% of total users.

— The GCC has five million Facebook users, which Saudi Arabia and the UAE representing 45% and 31% of that total respectively.

— North Africa has 7.7 million Facebook users, with Egypt accounting for 3.4 million users (or 44% of all North Africa users). Egypt has the largest Facebook community in MENA.

— Francophone countries Algeria, Morocco and Tunisia together account for 3.7 million French speaking Facebook users, equivalent to nearly 25% of all MENA users.

As the BBC report notes, the study doesn't go into just how many of these users are actually choosing to use Facebook: political activism gets a lot of attention but presumably there's a lot of the same kind of social chatter we see in the West; the Middle Easterners I'm linked to on Facebook seem all over the place in what they post.

And of course, if you equate the sale of one copy of a newspaper with its having one reader, you've never been in a Middle Eastern coffeehouse.

Facebook and Middle Eastern Politics

Riffing on the ElBaradei phenomenon, The Arabist contemplates the role of Facebook and Middle Eastern politics. After a period of light posting, he seems to be on a roll lately, and I'm glad to point my readers his way.

It's easy to overstate Facebook's clout: last April the 6 April movement's huge Facebook following led people to expect a major street confrontation in Cairo, but the result was a large police presence and a massive fizzle; ElBaradei's huge Facebook following may be just as ephemeral: but it does show that young Egyptians prosperous enough to have Internet access support reform more than the regime. It tells us nothing about the fellahin. Anyway, read his piece.

The Facebook Fatwa That Wasn't

I'm glad I didn't post anything earlier on this story, since it's now been pretty much denied. There's been a ruckus on the Internet about an alleged Fatwa by an Azhari sheikh in Egypt banning Facebook. It didn't make much sense when I first saw it, given the fact that Egypt has one of the biggest Facebook communities. And as Marc Lynch observes, the sheikh in question and the Fatwa Committee both deny the story. As he also notes, TV preacher Sheikh al-Qaradawi has 82,000 Facebook followers, so it must have some value for Islamists.

Lynch has also found the ideal illustration, which I hereby brazenly steal with due credit given, showing teachers and students in the traditional Azhari turban working on computers.

I have no idea how stories like this get started. Perhaps the sheikh made some remarks about the potential moral dangers of social networking generally and it got turned into a fatwa by some journalist. Westerners tend to assume any sheikh anywhere who issues a fatwa is some sort of Pope speaking for all Muslims, but neither this sheikh nor the Fatwa Committee claim to have issued any such ruling, and even if they had, in Sunni Islam it would be more a guidance than a binding rule, and even so Egypt has a Grand Mufti who wasn't involved in this. (And a "Mufti" is "one authorized to issue fatwas," literally.) And it wasn't just the Western media (though it made the Israeli press); this started in Arab media.

Anyway, Sheikh Qaradawi and others on Facebook, it looks like you don't have to leave.