May 11 , 2008
“What do we need to do to have a better Egypt?” |
Is Facebook going to be banned in Egypt?
Several Egyptian human rights organizations have joined forces in a preemptive move to prevent the Egyptian government from banning the social networking website Facebook following the April 6 general strike.
Shortly after the strike, Esraa Abdel Fatah and 20 of her colleagues were arrested on charges of inciting civil disobedience through a Facebook group that advocated the strike and attracted 70,000 users.Asked in an interview if she would go back on Facebook after her release from jail on April 23, Abdel Fataah, 27, replied, “I don’t think so.”
The strike against rising food prices and low wages, lead to the arrest of more than 200 demonstrators.
Andalus Institute for Tolerance and Anti-violence Studies sent a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive officer (CEO) of Facebook, warning him of attempts by the government to “put pressure on Facebook, to get information about opposition members and other political activists.”
“Facebook is an important arena where activists and regular people can gather to discuss and promote human rights and democracy outside the reach of the security forces,” said the letter.
Facebook does not “provide external entities with information about users,” said Zuckerberg.
But the human rights institute became further concerned after state-owned newspapers, Al-Ahram and Rose-El-Youssef within the same four day-period, printed an investigative report warning about the dangers of the internet, specifying YouTube, Facebook, blogs and SMS messages, as the main sources of danger.
“Websites like YouTube and Facebook have become forums for fetish people to post their scandalous images and words of libel that harm Egypt primarily,” said the report, published in the April 21 issue of Al-Ahram.
“We don’t think there will be an overall internet censorship,” said Doaa Kassem, executive secretary of Andalus Institute. “Egypt still has a democratic image of sorts to preserve.”
According to Ahmed Hamed, an official at the Information and Decision Support Centre (IDSC) that operates under the Egyptian Cabinet, if the ministry of interior does decide to block a website, they will send an order to IDSC, which in turn would send simultaneous orders to all internet service providers in Egypt, namely TEData and Link, who would then remove the address of the website from the Domain Name Servers’ database, making it unavailable to Egyptian users.
“Such an order hasn’t been issued to us yet,” said Hamed, who also denied that websites belonging to the Kefaya opposition group and the Al-Ghad party were blocked by the IDSC within the last week, saying he does not know who did it.
Andalus was also concerned because Syria shut down Facebook last November. According to Rasha Halaba, a housewife in Damascus, Syrians still access Facebook by downloading a program called HotspotField, which enables users to enter Facebook through a backdoor.
“But you can only download it if you have ADSL, and most Syrians are still working with a dial-up connection,” said Halaba, 29.
Syrians who are on dial-up use a proxy server through which they can browse Facebook, but not interact with it, added Halaba.
According to Shaheen Pasha, an online journalist who teaches at the American University in Cairo, “that’s the beauty of online…With global media the way it is, the government can close something down but there’s nothing to prevent people finding something new.”
“All my friends outside Egypt are on Facebook,” said Iman Dawood, political science senior. “I’d cry if they shut it down.”
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