New Media and Islamist Mobilization in Egypt

Drawing on almost a decade of public Egyptian Facebook posts, this chapter demonstrates that Islamist actors were particularly successful at gaining visibility and spreading narratives that advance their goals on social media, relative to other political actors. It also explores the political consequences of this online success, suggesting that the same social media technologies that facilitated the Muslim Brotherhood’s mobilization efforts in the post-revolution period may have also undermined the organization by accelerating its fragmentation, amplifying extremist voices, and giving the military regime a new authoritarian toolkit with which to fight the Brotherhood on- and offline. Motivated by resource mobilization theory, the chapter argues that movements with stronger organizational structures, greater access to resources, and more coherent ideologies are able to use new media technologies more successfully than more fragmented and less-well-funded groups.