AI Performance Task

The Network and the Revolution

In late 2010, a young Tunisian street vendor named Mohamed Bouazizi set himself on fire to protest his treatment by local authorities. Within days, video of the protests that followed had spread across Facebook and Twitter, reaching audiences far beyond Tunisia's borders. In Egypt, what started as online outrage quickly became something else entirely. Activists used Facebook pages — among them a page called "We Are All Khaled Said," created to protest police brutality, which had accumulated nearly 400,000 followers before the uprising began — to coordinate protests that brought hundreds of thousands of people into Tahrir Square in Cairo. Organizers posted meeting points, shared real-time updates about which streets were blocked by police, and used Twitter to reach international journalists who amplified their message. After eighteen days of demonstrations, President Hosni Mubarak — who had ruled Egypt for thirty years — resigned. Many people called it the "Facebook Revolution," crediting social media with doing what decades of political organizing had failed to accomplish.

But the story didn't end there. Within two years, Egypt's military had reasserted control, and by 2013 a coup had returned the country to authoritarian rule. Some scholars argued that social media made it easier to start a revolution than to finish one — it could bring people into a square but couldn't build the political structures a lasting democracy requires. Others pointed out that governments learned quickly. Egyptian security services monitored activist Facebook groups and Twitter accounts, using posted locations and tagged photographs to identify protest organizers. In one documented case, activists coordinating online were identified, arrested, and charged before protests could begin. The government also used social media to spread competing narratives — state-affiliated accounts flooded platforms with claims that protesters were foreign agents or paid provocateurs, fragmenting public trust at the moment opposition movements needed it most. The technology that seemed to shift power toward ordinary citizens turned out to be available to everyone.