Egypt's Facebook Girl
Witness History
BBC
4.5 • 1.6K Ratings
🗓️ 25 January 2021
⏱️ 9 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
A wave of popular anti-government uprisings swept through the Arab world in the early months of 2011. Many of the activists who took to the streets were inspired by social media posts. Israa Abd el Fattah was one of the first Egyptian activists to use social media. In April 2008 she tried to organise a general strike in protest at low wages, and rising prices. She was given the nickname "Facebook Girl". In 2011 she used her experiences with Facebook to help mobilise people before the Egypt's Arab Spring uprising. She spoke to Zeinab Dabaa for Witness History in 2017. She has since been detained by the Egyptian authorities.
Photo: Israa Abd El Fattah in her office in Cairo in 2011. Credit: Khaled Desouki/AFP/Getty Images
Transcript
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| 0:30.9 | Hello. Hello and welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service. |
| 0:40.0 | In 2011, Mass Popular Uprisings took hold across the Middle East and North Africa. |
| 0:46.3 | Together, they'd come to be known as the Arab Spring. |
| 0:50.0 | Many of the demonstrators used social media to spread news about their plans. |
| 0:55.2 | Zain Abdabbar spoke to an early online pioneer who became known as Egypt's Facebook girl. Three years before the Arab Spring, |
| 1:04.0 | Isla Abdel Fattah tried to use Facebook to organize a general strike. |
| 1:09.0 | I created the group on the 23rd of March. By the 6th of April in the morning there were 70,000 members in the Facebook group. |
| 1:18.0 | For me the number was unexpected. It was an unexpected mobilization for the first activist group created on Facebook. |
| 1:26.0 | Estra Abdel Fattah was a young volunteer activist for the gut party |
| 1:30.0 | when she first heard about a planned strike at a large textile factory in Mahalal-Cobra city in northern Egypt. |
| 1:38.0 | The workers wanted to protest against low wages and against the government's decision to raise prices for basic necessities. |
| 1:46.7 | And the Israel knew that the workers in Mahalal-Cobra weren't the only Egyptians worried about |
| 1:52.2 | the cost of living. |
| 1:56.0 | I began talking to supermarket owners and ordinary people and all of them said that prices |
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