Revolution 2.0

The Facebook group was undaunted by these transparently absurd charges. The poet Abdel Rahman Youssef emerged as the campaign manager for the movement created by the group in an effort to try to venture out into the field. In December 2009 the independent newspaper Al-Shorouk published a long interview with ElBaradei, two months before his planned return from the IAEA. Over a span of three days, he told the reporter about his ambitions for change in his country.

The highlight of that interview was ElBaradei’s conviction that change was inevitable in Egypt. He added that he refused to run for president in a sham election, if the regime was to exploit lifeless political parties again to project Mubarak as the country’s only option. ElBaradei’s refusal to grant legitimacy to the regime was his first confrontational step. Yet the constitutional amendments that he urged as necessary before he could run for president were perceived as farfetched by most people.

As the political scene in Egypt was changing, so was my personal life. Ilka was getting very frustrated with life in Egypt. She found it impossible to drive in Cairo’s jungle of a traffic system and simply could not adapt to the pollution. She struggled with Arabic as well, and had trouble managing day-to-day activities. For these reasons, among many others, she was not happy living in Egypt, even after seven years of residency there, and my regular absence from home only served to reinforce her feelings of alienation. At the same time, Google’s Middle East team was beginning to centralize in the UAE, and it was gradually becoming more convenient for my career to move there. When I consulted Ilka, she was strongly in favor of a move. I was quite hesitant, as I preferred to stay in Egypt, yet it was becoming clear to me that this would be a selfish thing to do. Finally, in January 2010, I relocated to Google’s office in Dubai, but fortunately the nature of my work would take me to Cairo on a regular basis. Ilka was thrilled to be in Dubai, and I must say that I enjoyed it as well, although my heart remained in Egypt.

I continued to follow the heated debates back home closely. I accessed the Facebook group on a daily basis to read the discussions, but I was not yet actively involved.

Dr. ElBaradei’s return to Egypt was scheduled for February 2010. Many of the country’s political forces organized a reception for him at the airport, in the form of a few hundred activists who were willing to face the consequences of publicly opposing the regime. Several Egyptian public figures joined them, including the veteran TV presenter Hamdy Kandil, whose show had been taken off the air because of his outspoken criticism of the regime. What was new, alongside the old opposition guard, was the presence of many young people who ventured out for the first time in support of change.

I was still not ready to make a public statement by attending. I had a lot to lose. My employer, Google, was a dream company voted often to be the world’s best employer. I was responsible for Ilka, Isra, and my son, Adam, who had been born in 2008. I also believed, despite my optimistic outlook, that change in Egypt was a difficult challenge that would take time. But so as not to miss out on the chance to be an active part of the movement, I finally decided to leverage my media, marketing, and Internet experience to help develop what later became Dr. ElBaradei’s official Facebook page. My aim was to establish an ongoing communication channel between him and his supporters.

Personally, I have always hated hailing individuals as saviors, and I do not believe in magical solutions. What I do believe is that real change entails a change of policies and methods, not a mere substitution of leaders and individuals. Egypt’s salvation, in my opinion, would never come at the hands of a benevolent dictator. I might not have agreed with Dr. ElBaradei on every single issue, yet I did not hesitate to support him as a presidential candidate. My enthusiasm was for the idea rather than the person, but the only way back then was to support an idea through a person. The regime resembled a wall of steel. It had to be weakened little by little. Egyptians needed to be offered alternatives.

The thing I admired most about ElBaradei was his self-perception. He asserted repeatedly that he was not a savior and that the Egyptian people needed to save themselves. He put himself forward as only a tool in support of the cause. To me, he was a professional, well educated, someone who could speak to the ambitions of Egypt’s youth.

As an experienced Internet user, I knew that a Facebook page was much more effective in spreading information than a Facebook group. As soon as someone “likes” a page, Facebook considers the person and the page to be “friends.” So if the “admin” of the page writes a post on the “wall,” it appears on the walls of the page’s fans. This is how ideas can spread like viruses. A particular post can appear on the users’ walls to be viewed thousands, or even millions, of times. In the case of groups, however, users have to access the group to remain updated; no information is pushed out to them.

So I created a page in February, days before ElBaradei’s arrival, and I began its promotional marketing campaign. The number of fans who “liked” the page exponentially increased because of the sheer number of ElBaradei enthusiasts. I updated the page with excerpts from ElBaradei’s interviews, and I highlighted his vision for reform in Egypt as well as his emphasis on the country’s need for true democracy.

A few days after creating the page, I figured that I needed a co-admin. The nature of my work for Google required me to travel a lot, and I didn’t want the page to be dependent on my personal schedule. I noticed that one of the people on my Facebook friends list was also quite excited about ElBaradei. I had never met AbdelRahman Mansour in person, but we had been virtual friends since August 2009. AbdelRahman was a twenty-four-year-old undergraduate finishing his last year of journalism study at Mansoura University, 120 kilometers away from Cairo. His activism began when he started blogging about Egypt’s political situation. He had covered the rigging of the 2005 elections, among other crucial events at the time. I found his status updates on Facebook and Twitter to be thought-provoking. At one point, when I sent out an open invitation to all my friends to join the page, I received a message from AbdelRahman asking if I was the admin behind it. He instantly became an appropriate choice for a co-admin. On the one hand, I admired his enthusiasm and intellect, and on the other hand, he had now become one of the very few people who either knew or suspected that I had founded ElBaradei’s Facebook page. Without hesitation, AbdelRahman accepted my offer. That day would mark the beginning of a virtual working relationship that still continues today.

Naturally, it took some time to build mutual trust and understanding. Many times I would send private messages asking AbdelRahman to remove content that he posted on the page, and we would occasionally have heated discussions about such matters. Whenever push came to shove, however, I had the final say. The golden rule was to ask ourselves the following question: “Would Mohamed ElBaradei write this post himself?” This made our decision-making process much easier.

Soon after his arrival, ElBaradei met with key opposition figures. Immediately following the meeting, we were surprised to receive an announcement of the establishment of a newly formed body called the National Association for Change. The idea was to bring together everyone known to oppose the Egyptian regime. Members included the former presidential candidate Ayman Nour; the media veteran Hamdy Kandil; Dr. Mohamed Ghoneim; some leaders of the Muslim Brotherhood, such as Muhamed el-Beltagy, a former MP; some political parties, like the Democratic Front, Al-Karama, and Al-Wasat parties; the Revolutionary Socialists; Egyptian Women for Change; the April 6 Youth Movement, and others. The association’s first action was to release a statement entitled “Together for Change,” or what was also known as “ElBaradei’s Seven Demands for Change”:

1 Terminating the state of emergency

2 Granting complete supervision of elections to the judiciary

3 Granting domestic and international civil society the right to monitor the elections

4 Granting equal time in the media for all candidates running for office

5 Granting expatriate Egyptians the right and ability to vote

6 Guaranteeing the right to run for president without arbitrary restrictions, and setting a two-term limit

7 Voting with the national identity card.

It was an ambitious list. It meant freeing the press; it would enfranchise eight million expatriate Egyptians; and it would help create an independent judiciary, among other spectacular achievements. The seventh demand was crucial for fair elections. The standard voting practice in Egypt was that voters were issued “electoral cards” in their respective districts. The card was required at the polling station for a voter to cast his or her vote. Since rigging was significant and consistent, most Egyptians were disinclined to obtain a card. In turn, that made rigging even easier. As a popular joke put it, we were so proud of our democracy that we even let deceased people cast votes. To demand that voting require only a national identity card was to demand free and fair elections.

The great thing about these demands was that the majority of opposition forces agreed to and supported them. Even the regime found it difficult to argue publicly against most of the seven demands. Dr. ElBaradei’s idea to issue this statement as a petition was a great one. It was an excellent new tool of pressure, and it increased the possibilities that the regime might compromise.

To collect signatures in significant numbers, the movement turned to the Internet. The petition was published online, and citizens just needed to enter their name, address, and national ID number to sign. The organizers also helped people overcome their fear by publishing the initial hundred signees, who were public figures willing to use their authentic personal information.

Fear overcame me on the first and second days of the petition. But then I entered all my personal information and signed. I was citizen number 368 to do so. My fear turned into excitement when I realized I was beginning a new phase: I now publicly opposed the regime. I had no doubt that State Security downloaded the list of signees regularly, particularly since it contained everyone’s full name, yet I was excited to be part of the growing crowd.

I was keen to meet Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei, and I tried to schedule a meeting with him during my first trip back home. I sent an e-mail to the Egyptian actor Khaled Abol Naga, whom I had first met at a Google event that we organized for Orphans Day in April 2009. I had seen him endorse ElBaradei on YouTube. I explained that I wished to augment ElBaradei’s efforts with my Internet abilities. Abol Naga’s response came instantly, providing the e-mail address for Ali ElBaradei, Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei’s brother.

I e-mailed Ali ElBaradei, introducing myself and explaining that I managed the ElBaradei Facebook page. He did not know about the page, yet he welcomed any kind of cooperation and promised to set up an appointment with Dr. ElBaradei when I was next in Cairo.

At the same time I e-mailed Mahmoud al-Hetta, who managed the “ElBaradei President of Egypt 2011” group. We spoke on Skype when I was in Dubai and discussed how we could cooperate. I was amazed at how brave this young man was, as were the other activists who used their real names on the Internet. Yet I advised him to hide his name, as Facebook enables you to do, for the sake of the campaign’s sustainability. There was no need to publish names where State Security might see them, I said. It was a brief call, and we agreed to meet up as soon as I was in Cairo.

A couple of weeks later, on my way to meeting Mahmoud, I was paranoid. I remained afraid of State Security. When I arrived at the local café on a small side street where we had agreed to meet, I glanced left and right before I joined both Mahmoud and Abdel Rahman Youssef, the campaign manager for the movement on the ground. The poet sensed my apprehension and tried to reassure me. He argued that our work was for a just cause, and that accordingly we had nothing to hide or be afraid of. I was not convinced, and I argued back that secrecy could never harm us and might even prove beneficial to our battle for democracy at a later point in time. I also requested that both of them keep my identity concealed. We discussed the importance of breaking the psychological barrier of fear and how to campaign for the petition with the seven demands. Signees had barely reached 10,000 at the time, a number that fell significantly below our expectations. Although no clear action plan was born out of our meeting, I was nevertheless thrilled to see such zeal and enthusiasm for the cause.

On April 11, I finally had a chance to meet with Dr. ElBaradei himself. His brother informed me by e-mail of the appointment, mentioning that others would also attend. I asked him if I could invite two other people to join us; he didn’t mind. AbdelRahman Mansour couldn’t make it, as he was out of the country, so I called two other friends who were equally devoted to helping to change Egypt: an engineer, Mostafa Abu Gamra, who owns a technology company that works in content development, and Dr. Hazem Abdel Azim, a senior government official working at the Ministry of Communications. I was quite excited to meet the man whom I had been independently campaigning for.

ElBaradei lives in a villa in one of the private residential compounds on the Cairo–Alexandria Desert Road. I planned to take a taxi, to avoid any potential trouble of being recognized by State Security informants via my car’s license plates. Dr. Abdel Azim, however, decided to drive and offered me a ride. ElBaradei was a prominent Egyptian figure and there should be no problem visiting him, he assured me. We met Mostafa Abu Gamra on the way, and the three of us headed off. The guards at the compound’s gates let us in without any problem.

The villa was beautifully furnished and decorated, yet it was not extravagant in any way. Some of Dr. ElBaradei’s critics claimed he lived a lavish suburban life disconnected from that of ordinary Egyptians. They had portrayed his home as a palace or fortress, with high fences, but this was not the case.

ElBaradei received us in person. Everything he said lived up to my expectations. I was worried that this might change once I offered some criticism; people’s true faces appear under criticism, not under praise. He stood among a group of his guests, which included two young film directors, some senior businessmen, and other prominent figures.

Everyone was involved in a heated debate. ElBaradei was an excellent listener, and it never felt like he was leading the discussion. On the contrary, he seemed to be seriously learning from the opinions of others — just the type of leader I felt Egyptians needed. Then I offered my criticism: I suggested that he needed to speak in a language closer to the hearts of mainstream Egyptians. The jargon of elitist intellectuals would not help our quest for popular support.

I also mentioned ElBaradei’s recently initiated Twitter account. It was new at the time, but he already had 10,000 followers. It took very little time for him to become the most followed Egyptian on Twitter. I suggested that he sometimes seemed too rushed in his posts. Some of his tweets did not sit well with activists and newspaper readers (newspapers regularly published his tweets). His great quality, if you asked me, was that he refused to be considered a savior. He believed in the nation’s youth and in their ability to bring change. I recommended that he tweet about that more frequently. Young Egyptians needed to regain their self-confidence before they could take action.

I also criticized his travels outside of Egypt during these difficult times. Many others viewed this as his worst error. Regardless of the fact that he actually had many scheduled commitments abroad, ElBaradei’s frequent travels hurt the perceived effectiveness of the campaign and gave his opponents a chance to taint him as a tool of the West, or a self-promoter who ignored his homeland.

Everyone had something to say. The two directors, Amr Salama and Mohamed Diab, thought that the seven-demands petition was inviting trouble for ElBaradei. Making it a priority and making the signees’ information publicly available at a time when dissident Egyptians were not yet ready to go public was not right, they claimed. They had a point: a vast gulf separated the total number of potential supporters and the actual signees up to that day.

On that question, however, I defended Dr. ElBaradei’s vision. I found the statement to be an excellent manifestation of the snowball effect. The daily increase in signatures, I believed, made people hopeful. It also prompted community discussions about the statement’s seven demands, adding pressure on the government to implement them.

It was a fruitful meeting that left me both optimistic and energized. I took a picture with ElBaradei and made it the profile image on my Facebook page. The caption under it said, “I am Wael Ghonim. I declare my support of Dr. ElBaradei.” The meeting had helped me partially break my own barrier of fear.

Next I created a Google e-mail group called “ElBaradei” to enable key supporters to communicate effectively. It was a closed group that could be joined only with permission from one of the moderators. I began adding people whom I knew and trusted to the group. Ali ElBaradei forwarded the e-mail addresses of his brother’s other supporters, those whom he thought would add value to the group. Discussions proliferated through this e-mail group, but fieldwork remained limited.

On ElBaradei’s Facebook fan page, both AbdelRahman and I tried hard to improve his public image in spite of the government’s vicious defamation campaigns. We searched through state press archives available online and extracted articles that praised ElBaradei’s efforts. These articles made the recent defamation look absurd: how could a “despised traitor” be a celebrated hero abroad? I found many pictures of ElBaradei with such world leaders as the American president, the French president, the German chancellor, the king of Saudi Arabia, and others. I deliberately published them to stress the fact that ElBaradei was not simply an “apolitical scientist,” as his detractors sought to portray him. AbdelRahman even translated and posted the full transcript of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, in which ElBaradei affirmed his loyalty and allegiance to both his country and his faith.

The core accusation of the smear campaign was that ElBaradei was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, having misled the United States into believing that Saddam Hussein secretly harbored weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. We were adamant about proving this to be a blatant lie. I found an online video of the UN Security Council meeting at which ElBaradei presented his report asserting that Iraq was free of any weapons of mass destruction. The report demanded more time for inspections and rejected the military intervention proposed by the United States. I added Arabic subtitles to the video and published it, hoping it would show ElBaradei’s innocence regarding allegations that he had somehow facilitated the U.S. war on Iraq.

On April 6, 2010, less than three months later, the number of members of Mohamed ElBaradei’s page exceeded 100,000. The April 6 Youth Movement also attempted to celebrate its anniversary on that day by organizing a demonstration, but the attempt failed. The security forces were watchful and well prepared.

Online, AbdelRahman and I were restrained. After all, we were writing on behalf of Dr. Mohamed ElBaradei. Our language was formal. We rarely posted our personal opinions, and we were convinced that the page had to present him in a formal light. Most contributors thought that Dr. ElBaradei was personally managing the page. The experience taught me a lot. I had never before managed a Facebook page.

On April 15, I received an encouraging message from Dr. ElBaradei himself, sent through his son. He wrote: “Spent some time browsing the fanpage today. It is wonderful. Many thanks for a very creative and professional job. Keep it up.” I replied, thanking him for the support and telling him that it meant a lot to me. I cc’ed AbdelRahman Mansour in the e-mail thread and introduced him as the page’s second admin, who deserved as much recognition as I did for all his efforts.

One of the important activities I initiated on the ElBaradei page was the use of opinion polls to make decisions. Despite the fact that Internet polls are far from scientific, they still offer a good means for testing trends of opinion. Besides, in Egypt, offline opinion polls, carried out through actual interviews, were possible only with a permit from the Ministry of Interior. Needless to say, the ministry had no interest in helping political activists gather information from the public.

I located a good polling site that supported Arabic and subscribed to its services. The first poll I developed aimed to measure the page members’ level of satisfaction with Egypt’s status quo and to explore why many of them had not signed the seven-demands petition. More than 15,000 participants completed the questionnaire. I aggregated and analyzed the results, then sent a message to the e-mail group as well as to Dr. ElBaradei with many recommendations to help increase public support for the petition.

After I provided these comments, Dr. ElBaradei invited me to meet a group of young men who had been working to promote the petition. First I met Dr. Mostafa al-Nagar, who had succeeded Abdel Rahman Youssef as the general coordinator of the “ElBaradei President of Egypt 2011” campaign. Mostafa came across as a sincere person who had a real desire for change. We became good virtual friends. We chatted online frequently about current events, encouraging each other and sharing disappointments. Mostafa was a dentist and political activist of my age who was quite dynamic, and State Security used the emergency law to arrest and detain him for his political dissidence on more than one occasion. He certainly had an abundance of street smarts, and I was admittedly lacking in that department.

We constantly argued about the role of the Internet in the process of change. He believed that the Internet was a virtual world with limited impact on reality, while I found it to be the key vehicle to bringing forth the first spark of change. The Internet is not a virtual world inhabited by avatars. It is a means of communication that offers people in the physical world a method to organize, act, and promote ideas and awareness. The Internet was going to change politics in Egypt, I wrote on Facebook and Twitter, and the 2011 elections would not be similar to those in 2005.

I will never forget the cynical remarks I received in response. A friend joked that the Egyptian regime would change the Internet before the Internet managed to change anything. Many actually believed that the regime would censor the Internet if it represented any sort of threat. Egypt would follow the Saudi Arabian example, they thought, where accessible websites are strictly controlled and citizens are unable to visit antigovernment sources. I did not agree. The Egyptian regime needed to be seen as a progressive, welcoming country to the outside world. Its economy depended in part on tourism, and the regime cared deeply about its global reputation.

Things were moving quite slowly with Dr. ElBaradei’s campaign, and most of my recommendations were not implemented. My frustration increased, particularly as the rate of new signatures dropped. Yet I separated my personal feelings from the Facebook page. There I tried to spread hope. Both AbdelRahman and I followed all of ElBaradei’s news stories and his field campaigns. We published photos of his campaign visits to places like Old Cairo and Fayoum, and we continued to write his opinions and track the number of signatures on the statement as well as expose the political situation in the country. Many comments on the page demanded that Dr. ElBaradei take more practical steps on the ground and not limit himself to Facebook and Twitter.