Although the general strikes of April 6 and May 4 drew limited public participation, they have revealed an important new political phenomenon in Egypt: political mobilization by young, second-generation internet users via blogs, YouTube, and Facebook. After two years of intensive government efforts to outmaneuver the opposition, this mobilization caught the regime flat-footed. It highlighted the possible role of interactive non-traditional media in bringing about political change in Egypt, just as the government's heavy-handed response to the strikes revealed its failure to find new forms of political control aside from the usual repression by the security apparatus (Read on the Libanese newspaper, The Daily Star).
The growing role of non-traditional media has pushed the state to try to curb them through various mechanisms. Several bloggers have been arrested, including Moneim Mahmoud (editor of the Ana Ikhwan or "I am Brotherhood" blog). Isra Abdel Fattah, who started a Facebook group calling for Egyptians to join the April 6 strike (over 74,000 joined), was also arrested and held for 16 days. The blogger Wael Abbas (editor of the Al-Wai al-Misri, or "Egyptian Awareness" blog) has been vilified in the government media due to his success in documenting Egyptian police brutality inside detention centers in video clips he posted on YouTube. And in February 2007, blogger Karim Amer was sentenced to four years in prison in 2007 for criticizing President Hosni Mubarak and religious institutions. Yet another area that bloggers are probing is the battle over strategies for various political players. Some recent examples include blogs by members of the Muslim Brotherhood and their debates over the draft party platform put forward by the Guidance Bureau in 2007. In the past, Brotherhood blogs served mainly to express the movement's political ideas and recruit new members, for example students. In discussing the platform, however, the blogs expressed and crystallized the struggle between the reformists (such as Ana Ikhwan) and the conservatives. Most Brotherhood blogs joined the reformist side of the debate, rejecting ideas such as supervision of the executive and legislative branches by a board of religious scholars or exclusion of women and Copts from the presidency. Brotherhood bloggers are also credited with bringing disagreements over the platform out from behind closed doors - as they are now doing with many political topics that were once taboo in Egypt.
