After Canadians campaigning for William Shattner for the post of Governor General and Americans expressing their anger for President Obama, Egyptians are signing up on facebook in support of Mohamed ElBaradei in coming Presidential elections. This page at present has 205,822 users liking it. By sending an email to e-contact@elbarad3i.com more people can join the signature campaign.

Egypt is a country with week opposition to ruling government. Police crush even modest protests and where the banned Muslim Brotherhood, the biggest opposition group is banned under a law that blocks any political group based on religion. In such circumstances online activism can initiate change but to bring it in real life people need to come down on streets.

“It’s unrealistic to think that online activism can turn things around without the existence of an opposition that can challenge the state,” said political analyst Amr Hamzawy. “There is a clear lack of constituency building on the ground.”

But on the other hand modest protests in Egypt draw an overwhelming, and often violent, police response. But heavy-handed security has also been part of the reason activists have taken to the Web.

“At one point the dynamism died down and activists found it difficult to mobilize in large numbers … so they shifted to online gatherings,” said blogger Hossam Hamalawy.

But the statistics provided by United Nations indicate that Online Activism can’t bring large changes. Egypt’s population is about 78 million, out of them only 66% Egyptians are literate and 17% of total population use Internet.

Moreover Egyptian government can use some laws in their constitution to block the usage of Internet or social networking sites in the country. Aware of this fact some online ElBaradei supporters have gone offline by gathering signatures for a petition demanding constitutional changes and more freedom. Yusuf AbdelRahman, representing ElBaradei’s Facebook group, said the petition had 54,870 online signatures so far but added that 15,000 Facebook members have volunteered to go on the streets of Cairo and other cities to collect more signatures.

With growing use of internet and social networking it seems that in near future Social Media Campaigning will be taken seriously by all political groups world over, as it is not governed by any ruling government.

via reuters

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