![]() That's when Buck thought of Twitter and sent out his message.īuck and Maree were interrogated, released and then detained again by the same police officers. When the men tried to escape, they were detained. "Mohammed and I had a bad sense it was really tense." ![]() ![]() "I was worried about getting arrested, so I made sure to stay at a distance from the protest so there was no way I could be accused of being part of it," Buck said. On April 10, Buck returned to Mahalla, where protests continued. The next day, tensions rose as family and friends of protesters who had been detained took to the streets, eventually throwing Molotov cocktails and setting tires on fire, he said. Buck was working on a multimedia project on Egypt's "new leftists and the blogosphere" as part of his master's degree thesis.īuck found out from a Twitter message that a planned protest against rising food prices and decreasing wages in Mahalla had been shut down by Egyptian authorities April 6. "As long as someone knew where we were, I felt like they couldn't do their worst because someone, at some point, would be checking in on them."īuck began using Twitter as a way to keep up in touch with the bloggers at the heart of his project and the events going on in Egypt that he intended to cover. "The most important thing on my mind was to let someone know where we were so that there would be some record of it. Initially, the Twitter message was a precaution - something people could trace in case anything went wrong, Buck said. "It highlights the simplicity and value of a real-time communication network that follows you wherever you go." "James' case is particularly compelling to us because of the simplicity of his message - one word, 'arrested' - and the speed with which the whole scene played out," Stone said. Buck's entry set off a chain of events that led to his college hiring a lawyer on his behalf. Stone said that as the service got more popular, they began to hear stories of people using Twitter during natural disasters with a focus on activism and journalism.īuck's urgent message is proof of the value of Twitter, Stone said. Watch how Twitter works »īut Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, said he and others knew that the service could have wide-reaching effects early on, when the San-Francisco, California-based company used it to communicate during earthquakes. Twitter is normally used to keep groups of people connected in less urgent situations. "I'm surprised they left James with his phone." "Usually the first thing the police go for is the detainees' cameras and cellular phones," el-Hamalawy said. Buck's Web site, statement and petitionīut Buck was able to send updates every couple of hours saying he was still detained, he had spoken to the prosecutor, he still had not been charged, and he was worried about Maree.See Buck describe what he saw and captured on film during the protests » Nobody was sure how long Buck would be able to communicate. Then, el-Hamalawy took to the Web and wrote regular updates in his own blog to spread the information Buck was sending by Twitter. "At first I was worried about his safety," el-Hamalawy said. Hossam el-Hamalawy, a Cairo-based blogger at UC-Berkeley, was one of the people who got word of Buck's arrest. Twitter is a social-networking blog site that allows users to send status updates, or "tweets," from cell phones, instant messaging services and Facebook in less than 140 characters. Within seconds, colleagues in the United States and his blogger-friends in Egypt - the same ones who had taught him the tool only a week earlier - were alerted that he was being held. On his way to the police station, Buck took out his cell phone and sent a message to his friends and contacts using the micro-blogging site Twitter. Buck, a graduate student from the University of California-Berkeley, was in Mahalla, Egypt, covering an anti-government protest when he and his translator, Mohammed Maree, were arrested April 10.
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