success stories
"We did not need a savior, we had to do this ourselves."
--Wael Ghonim
REVOLUTION 2.0
Wael Ghonim and the Egyptian Revolution of 2011
Ghonim writes about how he was first inspired to take up the revolutionary cause, upon looking at the picture of the severely beaten young man, Khaled Said. Ghonim felt a kinship that he translated into this campaign by hiding his identity so as not to bias the message, using the first-person in his Facebook posts, and using colloquial, informal structure of the Egyptian language; these deliberate choices was emotionally grabbing to his audience, which connected his cause to each and every Egyptian who had felt oppressed.
Another important aspect of Ghonim’s effort was education, collaboration with other similarly focused groups, and use of visualizations which depicted the atrocities of the oppression along with verbal accounts. All the methods Ghonim utilized are aspects which contribute to a successful online media campaign; procuring an emotional response and then reinforcing that response with facts is critical to the success of encouraging participation on any issue.
The people on Ghonim’s anonymous Facebook page rose in huge amounts, which allowed him to get more traction as he planned the multiple Silent Stands-- a method characterized by nonviolent solidarity. Ghonim used Facebook and Twitter to get live updates on the protest. Ghonim also wrote Facebook statuses encouraging people to use their artistic, written, and filmmaking gifts to spread news of the Stand against the brutal torture of young Egyptians. Ghonim describes his correspondence with Mohamed Ibrahim, an Egyptian in the UK who helped launch an English version of Ghonim’s website to spread the campaign worldwide.