Facebook's Secret Role in Egypt-Execs took unusual steps to protect the identity of protest leaders

[kpete]

Middle East Uprising: Facebook's Secret Role in Egypt

by Mike Giglio Info
Mike Giglio

Mike Giglio is a reporter at Newsweek.

Emails obtained by The Daily Beast show that Facebook executives took unusual steps to protect the identity of protest leaders during the Egypt uprising. Mike Giglio on how the social media giant scrambled to keep pace with Egypt's revolution.

As unlikely protests swept across Egypt on January 25, an administrator from the Facebook page that was helping to drive the uprisings emailed a top official of the social network, asking for help.

The popular page had sounded the call for the protests 10 days earlier. It then became an online staging ground for the budding movement, beaming a constant barrage of news and updates to the walls of its 400,000-plus fans, along with impassioned pleas for people to join.

Protests swelled into the night. The We Are All Khaled Said administrator worried that the Mubarak regime, clued in to the page’s importance, might respond with a cyber attack—to bring down the page or, worse, uncover the anonymous people running it.

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Email records obtained by Newsweek, conversations with NGO executives who work with Facebook to protect activist pages, and interviews with administrators of the We Are All Khaled Said page reveal the social media juggernaut’s awkward balancing act. They show a company struggling to address the revolutionary responsibilities thrust upon it—and playing a more involved role than it might like to admit.


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the rest: http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2011-02-24/middle-east-uprising-facebooks-back-channel-diplomacy/?cid=hp:mainpromo2

[Desertrose]

1. Wow...that's interesting.

Hmmmmm....

[leveymg]

2. Anything but a secret. Facebook wants to take credit for the whole damn revolution!

Ordinary people died for to gain their freedom from a foreign-imposed dictator. Now, a major corporation from the same foreign country wants to brand the Egyptian uprising the "Facebook revolution." Nice bit of marketing savvy.

Lots of Chutzbah.

Zuckerberg is a total asshole and a world-class thief.