في مصر... ماحدش فوق القانون

أخذت الفكرة من ستيكر على سيارة في الولايات المتحدة. و لو اني أعتقد أن الكلام اللي بالخط الصغير كان أقل شوية من كدة...

انا عايز أطبع ده على ستيكرات للسيارات. و على تي-شيرتات كمان :) ليه لأ؟


كل انتخابات و انتم طيبين!

Facebook responds to my inquiry on the removal of two Egyptian pro-democracy pages

I contacted Facebook's press office, requesting answers for the removal of two anti-government pages during the course of Thursday.

One of the pages I'm talking is that of Khaled Said, a young man assassinated by the Egyptian police last June and whose murder raised one of the biggest protest movement in the past couple of decades.
The other one is a support group for Mohamed El Baradei, former IAEA director, Nobel laureate, and popular opposition figure.

This came a day before "Anger Friday" - what has been dubbed as the first political flashmob in Cairo, and three days before parliamentary elections expected to be another electoral sham.
Of course, everyone - myself included - assumed it was done under government pressure.

The pages were reinstated by the end of the day, but this remains a particularly worrying event and an example of Facebook showing what seemed like either a strange political bias - and it wouldn't be the first time pages have been removed for political reasons - or a responsiveness to government pressure. Either case is highly disturbing.


So I contacted Facebook requesting an interview with their Europe/Middle East/Africa (EMEA) director, and included a few questions on why the pages were removed, whether they had received a request from the government, and how they dealt with such requests normally.

I got a response from their EMEA director of communication, which is fine by me.

This is what he had to say:



Now given that I hadn't spoken about reports, it felt like a cop-out on their part. So I responded with a couple of very straightforward questions, on whether they had been asked to remove them by the government, and what was their standard policy when they received such requests from governments. This was the follow-up response:


Make what you will of it. Personally, I'm not really buying that it was a freak coincidence that those two pages had script or admin issues - three days before the election.

What do YOU think?