Title:
Egyptians Gain a Voice With Social Media Service
Used by Stars
Description: This is
a VOA Special English Technology Report.
See text below
Text:
Egypt's government faced international criticism
when it blocked Internet service to try to suppress
the uprising there. But Egyptian activists found
other ways to get their message out. Google, Twitter
and a company called SayNow launched a service
called speak2tweet. They wanted to give Egyptians a
way to communicate with the outside world. There are
phone numbers for people to call to record a
message. An audio file is then posted to Twitter.
Anyone can listen to these voice-to-tweet messages
at twitter.com/speak2tweet. The phone numbers are
listed on that page, and people can also call them
to hear the tweets. Ujjwal Singh and AbdelKarim
Mardini launched SayNow as an American-based company
in two thousand five. Thousands of celebrities use
the service to connect with their fans. Google
purchased SayNow at the end of January, just days
before teaming with Twitter to create the new
speak2tweet service.Most of the calls have come from
inside Egypt and most are in Arabic. Volunteers are
translating the messages into English, Spanish and
French at the website Alive in Egypt. People are
also showing their support for the protesters
through pages on Facebook. Facebook says it has five
million users in Egypt, including one million on
mobile devices. Social networks like Facebook,
Twitter and YouTube also played a part in the
protests that forced Tunisia's president from office
in January. Jillian York is with the Berkman Center
for Internet and Society at Harvard University in
Massachusetts. She says the use of social media has
been different in the movements in Egypt and
Tunisia. She says in Tunisia it was used mostly to
spread information about what was happening on the
ground. In Egypt people have been using social media
to organize. Jillian York is also a member of the
OpenNet Initiative, a group that studies Internet
censorship and spying. She says the Egyptian
shutdown had a much wider effect than past Internet
bans in Nepal, Burma and China's Xinjiang province.
She says Egypt's Internet community is about twenty
times the size of those three places combined.
Internet service returned in Egypt after a five-day
shutdown. Experts at the Organization for Economic
Cooperation and Development estimated that the
action cost Egypt's economy at least ninety million
dollars. For VOA Special English I'm Alex
Villarreal.
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personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
