A hero of the Egyptian revolution laments the limits of social media and hopes to improve online dialogue.
In 2011, Wael Ghonim was a Google executive in Cairo who helped launch the Egyptian revolution. His Facebook page, expressing outrage about a young man killed by police, became a rallying point for protests that led to the ouster of President Hosni Mubarak (see “Streetbook,” September/October 2011). But the story line of the Arab Spring soon changed. The online movement polarized into factions. The new military-led government figured out how to promote itself online—and a 2013 coup crushed what dissent remained. Ghonim had to leave the country and is now in Silicon Valley working on new social-networking tools. To discuss the promise and limits of using the Internet to facilitate political change, Ghonim spoke with Zeynep Tufekci, an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina who studies online social movements. The discussion was edited by David Talbot, MIT Technology Review’s senior writer.
