By Tamara Qiblawi
Saturday, February 19, 2011

BEIRUT: Abir Ghattas hurriedly makes a Skype call to her friend Mohammed to learn about the latest from Tahrir Square in Cairo, where huge demonstrations spurred nationwide protests that led to the ouster of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak.

The phone lines were back on after three days of a government-imposed blackout of Egypt’s phone networks, and Ghattas was about to learn that Mohammed had been shot in the leg.

“Do people in Lebanon know about what’s happening here?” Mohammed asked. For Ghattas, a Lebanese social media activist and software engineer, who had been writing micro-blog posts around the clock about events in Egypt, the question came as a shock.

“We were watching Al-Jazeera to get news about Egypt and we were tweeting, and that’s how were able to trend for a whole week,” Ghattas told The Daily Star.

She was referring to the micro-blogging website Twitter that has 190 million users. Egypt was one of the top 10 topics discussed globally on Twitter that week, an occurrence known by Twitter users as “trending.”
Ghattas was one of dozens of young Lebanese people who spread word about the uprising in Egypt using the Internet, which allowed them to cross international borders, in a virtual sense and also a physical one, in order to reach out to Egyptian demonstrators.

“The revolution hasn’t ended. It’s still going on,” said Farah Kobaissy, a Lebanese activist who uses social media. Kobaissy camped out in Tahrir Square during the first week of the Egyptian uprising, before returning to Lebanon where she helped organize sit-ins at the Egyptian Embassy in Beirut.

Kobaissy managed to bypass Internet proxy restrictions as many young activists in Tahrir Square did, and wrote messages on Facebook to describe events that she witnessed. They ranged from stories of poignant gestures of solidarity among the embattled demonstrators to harrowing accounts of the violent crackdowns on Tahrir.
“I have never experienced so much tear gas in my life. We would run around desperately looking for oxygen that was so hard to find. It was crazy,” said Kobaissy.

A seasoned activist and member of the youth-led Leftist Assembly for Change in Lebanon, Kobaissy said she looks forward to going back to Tahrir in coming weeks.

“I remember I pulled out my phone and I tweeted which route I would take out of Tahrir,” said Lebanese social media activist Ali Seifeddine, describing his attempt escape pro-Mubarak forces who infiltrated the square on Feb. 2.

“I got a shower of replies telling me not to take that route because it was filled with thugs. I strongly believe Twitter saved our lives that day, or at least prevented us from being really injured,” he added.

Some other social media users chose to lend a hand to those in Egypt while still in Lebanon, such as Samer Karam, founder of the entrepreneurship incubator Seeqnce group.

On Jan. 31, following the disappearance of Google executive Wael Ghonim, Karam launched The Missing Persons List, a Google spreadsheet that allowed Internet users to list people that had gone missing.

Karam spread word about the list and collected data thanks to his 1,700-person strong Twitter network. Thirty-five of those entered in The Missing Persons List have been found, while 44 remain listed as “missing.”
Karam insists that he has no political stand on uprisings in Egypt and the rest of the region, calling his work a humanitarian issue.

“I was able to facilitate this project because I have a network on the ground in Egypt, contacts that I’ve made with entrepreneurs through Seeqnce,” said Karam. He added that he would not be able to do similar work in other countries in the region because his networks on the ground are not as strong.
“Doing [similar] work for other countries would be Western-style activism – it would be like putting up a poster in a suburb in California and thinking that’s activism. But that doesn’t work,” said Karam.

Karam said he believes that, for the most part, most social media users in Lebanon tuned into events in Egypt late, and that Lebanese support for the demonstrators has not been widespread, an assessment that Ghattas agreed with.

She reported that “many” of her contacts on Twitter began to block her messages after the start of the uprising, complaining that she was sending messages they were uninterested in reading.

Ghattas also does not see effective grassroots organizing taking root in Lebanon, as it has in Egypt. “There is no such thing as couch activism,” said Ghattas about social media users.
“I think social media is not the way to win a revolution; it’s the way to spread word about it,” she added.