“The French managed to storm the Bastille without the help of Twitter — and the Bolsheviks took the Winter Palace without pausing to post photos of each other on Facebook.”
- The New Yorker‘s Malcolm Gladwell.

True, it would be an overstatement to say that Egypt and Tunisia ousted their former governments solely because of social media. During these revolutions, countless citizens put their lives on the line; waving banners in the streets, harassing the pro-government forces and disrupting business-as-usual for their country’s freedom. When considering the power of word-of-mouth and traditional means of communication, social media panned out to be just another platform revolutionaries used to organize and protest.

But even before the earliest demonstrations on January 25th, social media played a critical role in organizing and coordinating the first protests. Wael Ghonim, the Google executive who became a national hero for starting the anti-regime Facebook group, was quoted as saying, “This revolution started online. This revolution started on Facebook.” And while you can make the case that this revolution was many years in the making, starting this Facebook group was a critical step in bringing down the authoritarian Egyptian regime. It linked the movement to real faces with real names.

Imagine the courage it took to “like” that group prior to January 25th.

During the revolution, social media provided another critical function for the protesters’ cause. Egyptian and Tunisian citizens tweeted, posted videos and updated facebook with their first-hand experiences at a time when the countries were veiled by internet outages and press censorship. These ordinary citizens assumed the role of the media and used these platforms to publish their narrative to a listening global audience. In Egypt’s case, the hashtag #Jan25 trended almost every day from the beginning of the revolution until the downfall of former President Hosni Mubarak.

In the end, #Jan25 created enough buzz to keep the international audience talking, which ultimately put pressure on the former Egyptian regime. So while social media didn’t bring down the dictators, it did aid the cause.

Libya, YouTube, and the Internet via FastCompany

Why not call it a Facebook Revolution? via Mashable

Social media plays role in Egypt some expected in Iran via Yahoo News

How social media accelerated the Uprising in Egypt via Fast Company