In Egypt, the tried-and-true tool for opponents of President Hosni Mubarak in recent years has been Facebook.
Most recently, it was Facebook — which boasts 5 million users in Egypt — where youthful outrage over the killing of a prominent activist spread, leading to the protests in Cairo’s Tah rir Square and Mubarak’s promise to step down this year.
But Facebook, which celebrated its seventh birthday Friday and has more than a half-billion users worldwide, is not eagerly embracing its role as the insurrectionists’ instrument of choice. Its strategy contrasts with rivals Google and Twitter, which actively helped opposition leaders communicate after the Egyptian government shut down Internet access.
The Silicon Valley giant has been thrust like never before into a sensitive global political moment that pits the company’s need for an open Internet against concerns that autocratic regimes could limit use of the site or shut it down altogether.
“The movement — in Egypt — was very dependent on Facebook,” said Alaa Abd El Fattah, an Egyptian blogger and activist in South Africa who has a strong following in Egypt. “It started with anger, then turned into a legitimate uprising.”
Anonymity on site debated
The recent unrest in Egypt and Tunisia is forcing Facebook officials to grapple with the prospect that other governments will grow more cautious about permitting the company to operate in their countries without restrictions or close monitoring, according to David Kirkpatrick, author of “The Facebook Effect,” an authorized biography of the company’s history. Facebook also is looking at whether it should allow activists to have a measure of anonymity on the site, he said.
“I have talked to people inside Facebook …, and they are debating this internally,” Kirkpatrick said. “Many countries where Facebook is popular have autocracies or dictatorships, and most of the countries have passively tolerated their popularity.
“But what’s happened in Egypt or Tunisia is likely to change other countries’ attitudes, and they’ll be more wary of Facebook operating there.”
A Facebook spokesman, Andrew Noyes, declined to make anyone at the company available to discuss its role in the Egypt protests or its strategy in politically fraught environments. In a short statement, Noyes said: “Although the turmoil in Egypt is a matter for the Egyptian people and their government to resolve, limiting Internet access for millions of people is a matter of concern for the global community. It is essential to communication and to commerce. No one should be denied access to the Internet.”
Even when Facebook has actively helped protesters work around government intrusions, the company casts its moves as mere technical solutions. Last month, after Tunisian security officials used a virus to secretly collect local Facebook users’ IDs and passwords, the Internet giant took action. It rerouted Tunisia’s Facebook traffic to a site where Internet service providers couldn’t gobble up user information.
In a statement, the company said it viewed the predicament as just a “security problem” in need of a fix.
Facebook seems to be veering in a different direction than Google, which has battled China over censorship, or Twitter, the microblogging site that earned renown in Iran in 2009 for facilitating civil protests in Tehran. Last week, Twitter, Google and SayNow, a voice-based social-media platform, launched a service that provides Egyptians with phone numbers to call and leave messages, which are recorded and posted on the Internet. It’s called Tweet2Speak.
In early 2010, in the wake of Google’s censorship clashes with China, Facebook was one of a handful of companies blasted by Congress for refusing to participate in Senate committee hearings that examined how Silicon Valley companies were operating with foreign governments. Facebook responded at the time by saying it had no employees in China and that it was a different kind of business than Google.
Vulnerable to spying
Some Internet experts say Facebook needs to determine how to protect its users in countries with restrictive regimes, but the company’s terms of use — which require members to use real identities — make protesters vulnerable to government spying.
Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg has insisted on the policy, saying the site would lose integrity if users hid behind phony identities.
“People at Facebook have been asking themselves in the wake of Egypt or Tunisia whether there might be a way they can allow political activities in these spontaneous revolts to acquire a little bit of anonymity,” said Kirkpatrick, the company’s biographer. “The problem is, if they start making it easier for political activists to use Facebook in places like Egypt or Tunisia, those same capabilities are likely to be used by people we don’t admire or pro-government thugs.”
Kirkpatrick added that these choices all come down to the company’s famously private chief executive.
“Inside Facebook,” he said, “there’s really only one person who makes these decisions. He has to decide.”
