VCU news

By Madeline Reinsel

The 2011 Egyptian uprisings — part of what became known by many as the “Arab Spring” — were noted for their heavy social media use, with protesters often broadcasting demonstrations in real time. But a prominent Facebook group’s posting style changed markedly in the subsequent period that brought new leadership to the country, according to a new study led in part by a Virginia Commonwealth University researcher, who said its findings point to the era’s misperceptions about technology, media and freedom.

Mariam Alkazemi, Ph.D., an associate professor in the Richard T. Robertson School of Media and Culture, and colleagues wanted to investigate how one Egyptian activist group shifted its Facebook posting tactics between two periods of protest — the 2011 uprisings, and 2019, when a new wave of protests targeted the rule of Abdel Fattah el-Sissi, who has served as president since 2014. Between these periods, journalism in Egypt was either very limited or controlled by the state.

The study’s findings, Alkazemi said, point to how the early-2010s optimism that the internet and social media would lead to greater social and media freedoms was misplaced. Instead, she asserts that the rise of social media has coincided with a global drop in media freedom. And while social media increased public awareness of the protests in Egypt, it didn’t ultimately lead to greater social freedoms as some originally expected.

“Today, in 2025, we can honestly look back and say that the scholarly community and political commentators got the story wrong,” Alkazemi said. “That’s why this study is exciting.”

Egypt’s political landscape was dominated by a series of massive protests between 2011 and 2014, which initially culminated in the resignation of President Hosni Mubarak and a brief tenure of his successor, Mohamed Morsi. Much of the online discourse during this span was led by the April 6th Youth Movement, an activist organization with several hundred thousand followers on Facebook.

The movement was characterized by its diversity and intense social media usage — so much so that the Egyptian government blocked Facebook in the country for several days in 2011. But Alkazemi’s new study found that the movement’s style and frequency of posting changed notably between the decade’s protest periods, shifting from on-the-ground citizen journalism to general activism.

“In the first time period, when people were protesting the government, they were extremely critical of the media,” she said. “And in the second time period, the narrative really shifts as the government controls social media more.”

The researchers downloaded 661 posts from the April 6th Youth Movement’s Facebook page from February 2011, when the group was posting 22 times per day on average, and 354 posts from February 2019 to October 2019, when the group had slowed its activity to roughly one post every other day. They then categorized the posts into nine categories, such as “nationalistic or revolutionary slogans” or “political demands,” and extracted hashtags from the 2019 posts.

(Alkazemi noted that Facebook has changed considerably since 2011, adding new post “reactions” in addition to “likes,” as well as larger changes to the platform’s algorithm and user base. The researchers’ work is also constrained to one page on one social media platform.)

While the number of posts dropped between the two time periods, the percentage of posts calling for support for the April 6th movement, providing revolutionary slogans and commenting on the impact of the Egyptian revolution did not change, and the percentage of posts criticizing the government and making political demands increased. Posts from 2019 also received more “likes” than posts from 2011.

However, the percentage of posts calling for national unity, expressing Egyptian pride, mentioning the plight of the Egyptian people and providing time-sensitive information to protesters declined.

Most significantly, the group shifted its journalistic and activist roles over time. During the 2011 study period, the group functioned as citizen journalists, posting videos and information about current sit-ins, protests and demonstrations. But by 2019, the group had transitioned to posting bigger-picture, activist messages. The group also moved from criticizing the mainstream media to showing support for journalism.

“In media environments where journalists don’t have access, what do they do?” Alkazemi said. “If you think about how hard the job is, and then you add all these structural pressures, it’s really fascinating to see all the different variations of journalism that come out of it.”