ABSTRACT
In October 2010, shortly before the Egyptian legislative elections of November 2010, a group of young cyber citizens established a page on Facebook called “Rassd Network News” to monitor the elections. The page goes by the abbreviation R.N.N., or simply “Rassd,” which means “monitoring.” The page was created to provide a platform to document the anticipated election fraud and to take these infringements to the courts after the elections. The founders of the page introduced themselves as “Egyptian youth who have a desire to present the real practices of the regime during the elections through an alternative media channel since the official media is completely dominated by the political regime.” The slogan of this supposed citizen-driven news network was “Rassd: A media created by the audience.” The page called on all its Facebook fans to monitor the elections in their regions and districts and to send pictures and video shots that documented election irregularities to the page’s email account to be published on the page’s virtual wall.
