Interview with admins of ‘We are all Khaled Said’ Facebook page
Khaled Said graffiti on remains of the Berlin Wall / Wikimedia Commons
(This article excerpt has been republished from TheBostonReview.net)
Editor's Note: On June 6, 2010 a 28-year-old Egyptian named Khaled Mohamed Said was beaten to death by Egyptian police while in custody. Four days later the “We are all Khaled Said” Facebook campaign was launched, fueling a public outcry that eventually led to the overthrow of the Mubarak regime. The following interview with Ahmed Saleh and Nadine Wahab, two administrators of the page, is adapted from Volume 3:1–2 of Middle East Law and Governance.
Editors: What is your favorite story from the online campaign?
Ahmed Saleh: My favorite story was definitely during the revolution when I was administering the page all by myself. It was well known by then that our page was the one that was mainly responsible for the call and the initial mobilization for the revolution. On January 28 the Internet was cut from the whole country, and even cell phones were cut. When access returned I got in touch with Nadine Wahab in the United States, who granted me access to administer the page. I got scared. Everyone was getting online at that moment to check what the Khaled Said page was saying, and I thought “I really don’t want this responsibility.”
When I got online, I discovered that the page membership had increased an additional 40,000 during the Internet block. I guessed that the security apparatus must have had access during this time, and that they installed robots to spam our page, a tactic that they were using since we started. This time it was serious. There was a massive attack on myself as the anonymous administrator of the page. Accusations of being a foreign agent deceiving the masses into turning their country into chaos so that Israel (or sometimes Iran) would take over, were all over the page. Every post I would make, I would receive tens of thousands of comments, mostly attacks against me.
First, I was very defensive, returning accusations against the organized online security robots. It never worked. After a day or two, I switched strategy completely: focus on the people in Tahrir Square (the target of all the slander on the page at that time), utilize humor (which abounded in the Egyptian revolution), focus on the positive. I would go to Tahrir, capture photos of people half naked, writing on their bodies slogans like “(Mubarak) Please, leave ASAP. I ran out of paper begging you to do so!”
The strategy surprisingly worked. People would not attack me anymore and the focus of the conversation was more on the pride of being Egyptian. By the time Wael Ghonim was released and took over administering the page, public opinion was mostly for the people in Tahrir Square rather than against them. I would go to Tahrir Square and see slogans I posted and words I emphasized written with stone on the ground. The number of people visiting Tahrir Square just to watch what was going on for an hour or so increased significantly. They certainly helped increase the numbers and strengthened the show of power we depended upon. They motivated a lot of others to go, knowing and seeing the humanity and normalcy of those living in Tahrir Square.
Nadine Wahab: My favorite story was the flash mobs in Alexandria. It was amazing to see our work come to life. Wael was brilliant in engaging people. He understands the Egyptian mindset, and how to motivate it. I didn't sleep for days, just going through videos, making clips, and following up with media. That was a time of innocence before we came to the attention of the government. The page started getting threats. I didn’t pay much attention, but as a precaution I stopped talking about or writing about it under my name. I would just reach out to trusted reporters, and avoided being quoted, which made it difficult to get stories out.
You can read the rest of this interview on TheBostonReview.net ...
