THOUSANDS ANSWERED THE CALL FOR A NATIONWIDE DAY OF anger, crowding into Cairo’s Tahrir Square to protest thirty years of corrupt, authoritarian rule. Eighteen days later, on February 11, 2011, President Hosni Mubarak stepped down.
Among those Egyptians facing the riot police with their tear gas and water cannon on that first day of the Arab Spring was twenty-four-year-old Gihan Ibrahim, who goes by Gigi. At the time, she was much like any other young adult. On her Facebook profile, she described herself as “a crazy-funny person, who enjoys company of cool people.” Her musical tastes included Lady Gaga, Justin Timberlake, Coldplay and the trance tunes of Armin Van Buuren. Among her favourite TV shows were CSI, Grey’s Anatomy and The Daily Show. How this young woman became one of the faces of the revolution reveals how some voices rise above the noise and make themselves heard, in both mainstream and social media, while others go unheeded.
In the 1960s, Andy Warhol declared that in the future everyone would be world-famous for fifteen minutes. Now everyone can be famous in 140 characters. Never has it been easier, cheaper or faster to broadcast to millions. The idea of the Internet as a place where anyone can be heard is woven into the lore of the web. Back in 1996, retired Wyoming cattle rancher and former Grateful Dead lyricist John Perry Barlow issued “A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace.” It imagines a world where “all may enter without privilege or prejudice accorded by race, economic power, military force, or station of birth.” In this utopian space, anyone “may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.”
Barlow was overly optimistic. The problem isn’t having a voice; it is getting attention. Being noticed requires the right mix of timing and topicality, as well as of network and audience. During the Egyptian uprising, bloggers, activists and intellectuals tried to grab the attention of the world with their experiences, opinions, photos and videos. Often, they delivered raw emotional testimonies about violence by pro-Mubarak thugs. Thousands of people expressed their desire for a better life using smartphones, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube after decades of state censorship and repression. Gigi threw herself into the protests in Tahrir Square, charting the hopes and fears of the demonstrators on social media. She sent a steady stream of 140-character messages on Twitter, posted photos to Flickr and shared videos on YouTube capturing the struggles and aspirations of a nation demanding change. In an interview with The New York Times, Gigi explained that she was “trying to spread accurate information and paint a picture at the ground for people who aren’t here, via Twitter and Facebook.”
Gigi’s Facebook profile pointed to the activist within. She listed as her key interests politics, news and human rights, as well as watching soccer and being happy. One of her favourite quotes is from Karl Marx: “Every struggle is a class struggle.” She declared her passion for politics and talked about “planning to have a career in it somehow (not a politician) but more as a revolutionary professional (go figure out that).” During those tumultuous weeks in Egypt, Gigi became a “revolutionary professional.” Her voice was heard across the world, rising above the cacophony of dissent during a period that saw the most dramatic increase in freedom of expression in the region.
Her accounts of the struggle for the soul of Egypt reached far and wide. She was one of the group of bloggers, activists and intellectuals who became influential on social media. During this time, people turned to Facebook, Twitter and YouTube for the latest from Tahrir, alongside the reports from journalists from major media outlets such as CNN and Al Jazeera. Gigi was one of these unlikely sources, known on Twitter as Gsquare86. When the Western media reflected on the fall of Mubarak, Gigi was among those featured prominently as representing the protesters. By then, she had gone from being an unknown Egyptian student to being an influencer.
The notion that some people act as filters in the flow of information is one of the most prevailing theories of communication. Sociologists Paul Lazarsfeld, Bernard Berelson and Hazel Gaudet first introduced the idea of key opinion leaders in their 1944 book, The People’s Choice. They came up with a surprising result when they interviewed 2,400 U.S. citizens to find out how they decided to vote in a presidential election. The newspapers and radio weren’t nearly as powerful in shaping political views as they imagined. Most people got their information second-hand, through a two-step flow of communication. A select few within the community acted as a filter between the media and the mass public. They were the opinion leaders to whom others turned for news and information
In the world of marketing, these are the key audiences that can generate buzz for a brand among their social circles. It is why Red Bull recently sent free samples of three new flavours to 17,500 British university students identified as trendsetters. The presumption is that, if the students can be persuaded to adopt the new flavours, then others will follow, regardless of whether the new line is any better or worse than other products. Marketing experts Ed Keller and Jon Berry popularized the idea of Influentials in their 2003 book of the same name. Influentials are the 10 per cent of Americans who are engaged with their communities, have a voracious appetite for news and information, and know lots of people. Keller and Berry identified their Influentials as people in their forties with a college education, married with children, who tend to own their own homes. Reach them, and your message will spread to others. Malcolm Gladwell picked up on the idea in The Tipping Point, with stories of how a few plugged-in individuals could make or break a product or idea.
Social media hasn’t done away with Influentials. It has just made it much harder to predict in advance who will be influential, about what and when. Most things don’t just go viral. One of the most contagious viral videos of 2012 was Kony 2012, produced by the nonprofit campaign group Invisible Children. The video told a compelling story that touched a nerve with audiences. But it didn’t just catch on by accident. By the time of its release, Invisible Children had been around for eight years, building up a robust network of supporters, particularly among college students. The organization targeted its 180,000 supporters on Twitter to amplify its message and urge others to spread the video. Actors and musicians soon took up the rallying call, many at the beck and call of their fans. The hashtags #kony2012 and #stopkony became a worldwide phenomenon on Twitter.
But who would have bet on a Norwegian comedy duo having the top viral video of 2013? Bård Ylvisåker and Vegard Ylvisåker, known as Ylvis, captured the Internet’s attention with the bizarre “What Does the Fox Say?” It was part of a promotional campaign for their talk show on Norwegian TV. The video caught the eye of web comic Jeff Wysaski, who shared it on his popular Tumblr blog, Pleated Jeans. It then appeared on Gawker, was featured on YouTube’s Twitter account and was tweeted by actress and self-confessed new media geek Felicia Day. And suddenly, everyone seemed to be asking, “What does the fox say?” And then wondering how to get the infernal tune out of their head.
The secret to becoming an Influential on social media is that there isn’t one. The alchemy of influence is erratic and elusive. Scientists who study how information spreads through social networks have found that it is difficult to predict with any certainty whose content will be most shared. One of them is Duncan Watts, a network theory scientist who joined Microsoft Research in 2012, after five years at Yahoo! Research. Watts has made a name for himself by questioning the whole idea of Influentials. “A rare bunch of cool people just don’t have that power. And when you test the way marketers say the world works, it falls apart,” he argues.
During his time at Yahoo! Research, Watts worked with fellow scientists Sharad Goel and Daniel Goldstein to test how information spread on different online services. One experiment involved leaving comments about acts of kindness on a website and sharing those with friends. Another looked at videos shared by instant messaging. One involved the circulation of news stories and video on Twitter. Information tended to travel only from an individual to close friends and no further. Regardless of the different experiments, the comments, videos or tweets didn’t spread like an epidemic across the Internet. “Our findings,” they concluded, “indicate that strategies based on triggering ‘social epidemics’ are likely unrealistic.” It explains why your friend’s cute cat doesn’t become an overnight sensation when he or she posts yet another amusing video to YouTube.
Standing out among the millions of messages flowing on Twitter is even harder. For another study, Watts and other scientists at Yahoo! Research tried to identify opinion leaders on Twitter by analyzing how information spread on the network. They examined 1.6 million users who shared an average of forty-six links each. They came to two seemingly contradictory conclusions. Some influencers are easy to identify; they are those who have been influential in the past and amassed a substantial following, so they are more likely to be influential in the future. They tend to be personalities who enjoy a high profile in the world of politics, business or culture, such as Felicia Day. The actress has built up a core and loyal fan base through her appearance on the TV show Eureka and her work with Joss Whedon. When she urged her more than two million followers on Twitter to find out what the fox said, they listened.
Once we look beyond celebrities, politicians or TV personalities, it becomes much harder to predict who will be the loudest voice on Twitter at any particular time. The research casts doubt on the strategies of companies who attempt to target specific individuals on social media to help promote their brand. Posting on Twitter is like dropping a pebble in the ocean; most tweets barely cause a ripple, let alone amount to anything like a wave. Information tends to go no further than a close circle of friends and acquaintances, regardless of the importance of the message.
That’s what happened to Aja Dior. On Saturday, February 11, 2012, the American teenager heard from her aunt that Whitney Houston had died. She forwarded the news immediately, tweeting: “omgg, my aunt tiffany who work for whitney houston just found whitney houston dead in the tub. such ashame & sad :-(.” Dior was the first person to break the news. Given the forty-eight-year-old Houston’s fame—based first on her career as a singer and actress and latterly on her drug problem and abusive marriage—Dior’s scoop should have caught on. It appeared to cite a credible source, and the poor grammar and typos gave the tweet an authentic feel. Yet the message faded into Twitter’s archive.
It wasn’t until forty-two minutes later that the world learnt of the passing of Whitney Houston, when the Associated Press agency sent out a news alert on Twitter. “Breaking: Publicist Kristen Foster says singer Whitney Houston has died at age 48.” The AP message spread far and wide, with at least ten thousand people retweeting it. Celebrities like Justin Bieber, Lil Wayne and Katy Perry immediately brought hundreds of thousands of fans into the loop. In the first hour after the news broke, there were almost two and a half million tweets as people expressed their sorrow and paid tribute.
Aja Dior’s message languished in obscurity until researchers went back to analyze how news of Whitney Houston’s death spread on social media. One of these researchers was Gilad Lotan, who wondered why no one had picked up on Dior’s tweet. At the time, he was vice-president of research and development at the social media marketing company Social Flow, earning a living by making sense of the flows of information through social networks. When he looked at the data, he found that Aja Dior’s news only reached fifteen people. The teenager was part of a tight-knit set of friends. None of them was well connected or prominent enough for the news to travel beyond the group. Aja Dior had three of the ingredients for success: a topical piece of information at the right time for a receptive audience. But she didn’t have the connections to make it go beyond her immediate social network. Her tweet was lost in the sheer volume of experiences, opinions, photos and videos shared on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.
Infinite information competes for finite attention. To paraphrase Thomas Hobbes, the life of an idea on social media is brutish and short. Indiana University researchers created a virtual Twitterverse to examine the lifespan of an idea, based on 120 million retweets from 12.5 million users and 1.3 million hashtags. Rather than look at the sharing of one piece of information, they tested what happens when multiple ideas are trying to catch on simultaneously. It was as if they were constantly releasing a bunch of diseases in a city to see which ones infected the most people.
The results embody a marketer’s worst nightmare. It turns out that an idea can sometimes go viral just by chance. It doesn’t need an influential figure to be promoting it, and it doesn’t need to be particularly clever or quirky. In the survival of the fittest on social media, the personal power of any one personality can be negated by the choices of hundreds of thousands of others. The researchers don’t discount the fact that some messages are more interesting than others, or that some people have greater impact than others. But they caution against overestimating the importance of Influencers. When something goes viral, “you don’t have to assume it’s because some people are influential. You can still get some random thing that gets 50 million views on YouTube,” said Filippo Menczer, one of the co-authors of the study.
It is a problem of demand and supply. More and more is being shared, but the supply of attention is fixed. Social media can only support a limited number of ideas at any one time. As new ideas rise, others become extinct. While some things become extremely popular, the vast majority die off quickly. Rising above the noise is not just about being a well-connected Influential plugged into the right networks. Equally important is saying something that resonates with what people are talking about. For Gigi Ibrahim, the topicality and timing of her work helped her connect with the others who could help to amplify her voice, through a process that involved both traditional mass media and social media.
At the start of January 2011, Gigi attended a candlelit vigil in downtown Cairo for the twenty-one people killed in a suicide bombing of a Coptic Christian church a week earlier. She documented her experience at the vigil on Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, and she came to the attention of Robert Mackey at The New York Times. He writes a blog called The Lede, which reflects on the news and draws on the information from the web and social media. (His blog is named after the term traditionally used to describe the first paragraph of a news story. It dates back to the days of hot metal typesetting, where the alternative spelling was used to distinguish it from the lead using in printing.)
Mackey wrote a blog post about the vigil, based largely on Gigi’s material. When the uprising started on January 25, Mackey included her in his post for The Lede featuring YouTube videos of the protests. Her voice was further amplified when she was featured in a 1,500-word story on the first day of protests by the Associated Press. The AP sends out its news stories to around 1,400 U.S. daily newspapers and thousands of television and radio stations. The article described the clashes between Egyptian police and demonstrators in Tahrir Square, citing Gigi as an eyewitness. Her testimony was picked up by U.S. news outlets like USA Today, The Boston Globe and Fox News, as well as by the BBC. In the coming days, she was frequently interviewed by BBC domestic programs, as well as by the BBC World Service.
Within a month, Gigi Ibrahim became the face of the revolution for much of the Western media. In February, the flagship current-affairs show on PBS, Frontline, aired a short documentary called Gigi’s Revolution. When it was broadcast on NewsHour, host Judy Woodruff touted Ibrahim as “a symbol of the uprising.” Around the same time, she was featured on the BBC’s equivalent news and current affairs show, Newsnight, where she was introduced as one of the unofficial leaders of the protests. She even made the front cover of Time magazine at the end of February as a member of “The Generation Changing the World.”
A woman who describes herself as a revolutionary socialist came to be feted in the U.S., where the term “socialist” is used to smear and discredit politicians. The media chose to ignore her politics and focus instead on aspects of her identity that resonated with audiences in the U.S. For a start, Gigi Ibrahim was no ordinary Egyptian. She came from one of Egypt’s elite families. Though she was born in the southern California coastal city of Long Beach, she was raised from the age of two in Egypt. When she turned fourteen, she returned to California to go to high school and college. But the lure of Egypt drew her back in 2008. “I consider myself as a person with a bipolar identity of part free-spirit American and part just simply angry Egyptian,” she shared on Facebook. In Cairo, she attended the American University in Cairo, becoming a student activist and graduating with a degree in political science in 2010.
As an American-Egyptian woman often described as attractive, Gigi was an ideal bridge between Egypt and the West. She offered journalists a model eyewitness. Finding a good interviewee is golden in journalism. Reporters turn to eyewitnesses to lend authenticity to their reporting, as such accounts have the feel of truth. They are the voices of “real people,” rather than officials in suits.
Given a choice, anglophone journalists will gravitate towards sources who speak English, especially if they work in TV or radio. Gigi was a gift for English-language news outlets. Her English was flawless, as she had grown up in the U.S. and had attended the English-language American University. She made for an eloquent eyewitness who could express the frustrations of a generation in a way that resonated with audiences back in the West.
Like many of the activists in Egypt, Gigi realized the power of speaking in English. Her updates on social media tended to be in English. Others were posting in English to attract international attention and reach people outside the country. Almost three-quarters of the tweets sent from Egypt between January 25 and the fall of Mubarak on February 11 were in English. As has become the norm during major news events, journalists scoured social media for reports, photos and videos of the latest from Egypt. Activists who shared information in English were far more likely to be picked up by the media.
One of the leading media professionals who turned to social media to report on Egypt was Andy Carvin. A former social media strategist for U.S. public radio broadcaster NPR, Carvin became a one-man clearinghouse for news on the Arab Spring. From Washington, D.C., he selected bits and pieces from social media to share, spitting out thousands of messages seven days a week for up to sixteen hours a day on Twitter. He amassed tens of thousands of followers for his personal newswire of minute-by-minute accounts of the Arab Spring. Activists tweeting in English heavily influenced his reporting. During the Egyptian uprising, his most retweeted sources were activists, among them Gigi Ibrahim. Accounts from activists made up just under half of his messages, meaning Carvin gave a higher priority to the messages from citizens who were expressing their demands for social change, recording and sharing their experiences on Twitter.
Language is only part of the story. Activists such as Gigi Ibrahim had a message that the West wanted to hear. She stood as a symbol of a nation struggling to shake off the yoke of three decades of Mubarak’s rule. In many ways, she represented what many in the West want to see in the Middle East: well-educated liberals who aspire to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The media in the West reflected this aspiration in their coverage. The press is presumed to report events accurately and without bias, but media coverage tends to mirror prevailing attitudes in society. News editors strive to be in step with the views and values of their readers, reflecting and reinforcing their view of the world. Media coverage of a topic shifts as attitudes change, such as on the issue of gay marriage.
In Western liberal democracies, the protests in Egypt and across the Middle East were seen as uprisings against unjust and corrupt regimes, and the media echoed this viewpoint. The Guardian and the International Herald Tribune favoured the protesters in their coverage and gave far more space to opposition voices than to pro-government representatives. The state media in China reflected the political agenda of the regime there; the English edition of the People’s China Daily devoted more inches to pro-government voices and avoided writing about corrupt officials or human rights abuses. In contrast, much of the U.S. media was dismissive of the Occupy Wall Street movement rather than portraying it as an uprising against the excesses of an unjust and unbridled economic system.
At the time of the Egyptian uprising, the idea of a technologically savvy youth armed with camera phones and Facebook pages overthrowing a corrupt regime was a seductive one. Individuals like Gigi did play a role, but so did thousands more in their forties and fifties, fed up with years of oppression, economic stagnation and high unemployment. Yet the media tended to highlight youth, such as another young female activist, Mona Seif.
A twentysomething university graduate, Mona grew up in a family of activists. Like Gigi, she took it upon herself to document the fight for freedom. She, too, was cited as an eyewitness by the BBC, The New York Times and MSNBC. The U.K. newspaper The Independent profiled her in a story headlined QUIET HEROINES WHOSE COURAGE HAS HELPED KEEP UPRISING GOING, which also mentioned Gigi Ibrahim. Al Jazeera English featured both graduates as “women of the revolution.”
Gigi, Mona and others like them were the acceptable face of the uprising, rather than the bearded sheikhs associated with Egypt’s banned Islamic movement, the Muslim Brotherhood. Yet when Egyptians voted for a parliament after the fall of Mubarak, they overwhelmingly chose the Muslim Brotherhood’s Freedom and Justice Party. The hardline Salafist Nour Party came second. Liberal and secular parties were trailing in the wake of the Islamic parties. A year later came a military coup.
The public in the West didn’t want to hear the story of Islamic parties coming to power. They wanted to hear about brave young demonstrators who were sharing their experiences on social media. For a message to catch on, it has to resonate with a significant number of people who are receptive to it. An idea has to be timely, topical and reach an audience primed to share it.
Network scientist Duncan Watts likens this to the conditions for a forest fire. A single match is unlikely to start a blaze in damp weather. But it could spark an inferno in a parched forest where brushwood litters the ground. “When this critical mass existed, even an average individual was capable of triggering a large cascade,” he argues, “just as any spark will suffice to trigger a large forest fire when the conditions are primed for it.”
Individuals like Gigi Ibrahim and Mona Seif found fertile ground in journalists hungry for eyewitnesses who could embody the values of democracy. But they also found a willing audience on social media. The newspapers, TV and radio played a part in highlighting their voices, but so did the tens of thousands of people on Twitter. The dynamics of how information flows through social media means ordinary people can collectively affect whose voices rises to the top.
During the winter of 2012, politics in Canada was dominated by demonstrations by the Idle No More movement. The protests were triggered by concerns over the impact of a federal omnibus bill on land, water and aboriginal rights. What started out as an indigenous movement grew to encompass environmentalists and opponents of the Conservative government of Stephen Harper. As with the Arab Spring and Occupy, the movement turned to social media to mobilize supporters and amplify their message under the umbrella of the #Idlenomore hashtag on Twitter. The voices that rose to prominence on the network were in stark contrast to those in the mass media.
Press reports quoted government ministers, MPs, indigenous leaders and experts discussing the significance of the protests. It’s the way the news works. Journalists tend to turn to people in positions of power as sources of information, be they politicians, business leaders or police. They derive their authority and credibility from their institutional status. People in positions of power gain more influence through the media because they are considered influential to start with. On the other hand, the media will tend to marginalize voices considered deviant, for example, members of the Occupy Movement.
Who gets to speak through the media fundamentally affects the way events are interpreted. A police spokesperson commenting on an Idle No More protest will highlight the need for law and order. The demonstrators will have a different perspective, often arguing that police curbed their right to be heard. But the media tend to rely on the police perspective to report on what happened. How the protests are reported and interpreted will be shaped by the police, rather than the activist, perspective.
A different story can emerge from social media coming from different sources chosen by the crowd, rather than by journalists. The act of sharing is a way of assigning influence to particular messages and specific people. Multiply this by thousands of retweets, and collectively, the crowd is casting votes on who should be heard. At the height of the Idle No More protests in December 2011 and January 2012, the most retweeted messages came from activists. People engaged with the cause through #Idlenomore decided who mattered, leading to the rise of some unlikely Influentials such as Patricia Stein, a Lakota from North Dakota.
At the time, Stein’s Twitter handle was @pygmysioux. She later changed it to @SiouxweetNSauer. She had been living in Egypt since 2010, teaching English and art to young children. When she heard of the protests in Canada, she decided to hold her own demonstration outside the Canadian embassy in Cairo. On December 21, 2011, she stood outside the building with two signs. One had the name of the movement over a painting of an indigenous dancer. The other said HARPER WILL NOT SILENCE ME. The Aboriginal Peoples Television Network (APTN) reported on Stein’s protest. The story was posted on the Idle No More Facebook page, further raising her profile among the supporters. Stein went on to become one of the most retweeted voices on #Idlenomore.
Her story illustrates how ordinary individuals can become Influentials through the collective decisions of thousands on Twitter. Sociologist Zeynep Tufekci describes them as networked microcelebrity activists. They are politically motivated individuals who use social media to build support for a cause. Their brand of activism mixes journalism and advocacy. They take part in protests and share their accounts, often using sympathetic and emotional language that resonates with like-minded individuals. At first, they get attention from other people on Twitter, but their microcelebrity breaks out of social media when they are featured in the traditional media.
It’s what happened to Gigi Ibrahim. On the first day of the uprising on January 25, Gigi was one of the people who provided a steady stream of practical tips for the protesters. “People going to Shubra please tell us how you got there. Massara station is not close it is just surrounded with heavy security #Jan25,” she tweeted. Throughout the day, she warned about blocked streets, the closures of metro stations and the location of police, and shared photos of the situation on the ground. She provided details that others considered important and passed on to their circle of contacts. Gigi had timely and topical information for an audience hungry for it.
Her reporting on the day brought her to the attention of prominent Egyptian activists. Within Egypt, respected dissidents circulated her updates to their networks. They included political activists and bloggers Wael Khalil and Alaa Abd El-Fattah. Outside of the country, the Egyptian-American journalist Mona Eltahawy, a prominent speaker on Arab issues based in New York, recommended that others follow Gigi. It meant that her account of the unfolding protest on January 25 was expeditiously exchanged and transmitted to tens of thousands of people inside and outside of Egypt. Gigi became a networked microcelebrity whose status was further enhanced when she was featured in the mass media.
She was part of a group of activists, bloggers and intellectuals that emerged as opinion leaders as their messages were retweeted by thousands. Other influential voices were Wael Ghonim, the senior Google executive who set up the Facebook page that contributed to sparking the uprising, and Mona Seif. People were voting for their alternative sources for news from Egypt. Individual acts across the network were collectively deciding whom to trust for the latest from Tahrir Square.
Influence is complicated when it comes to social media. Some of the old rules still apply, but the dynamics of who decides who is important are far more complex. Some people rise to prominence to become opinion leaders on social media through a layered process that combines old and new media. Once they have reached a certain standing, they benefit from the “rich get richer” feedback loop.
It is just much harder to figure out from the start who will be noticed and become an Influential. Ordinary people can emerge as thought leaders through a bottom-up process. A mass of others on the network can chose whom to listen to. The attention of the media and of prominent figures matters. But the timing and nature of the message is crucial. To survive and thrive in a fast-moving marketplace of ideas, the message needs to find a receptive audience excited to share the news with others.