Facebooking the Egyptian elections: Framing the 2012 presidential race

Abstract

Abstract While most previous research on cyberactivism in the Arab Spring, in general, and the Egyptian revolution, in particular, focused on analysing the role of social media in mobilizing the masses for political action, coordinating protest movements and rallying support for regime change. Other aspects of social media use for different purposes, such as online campaigning and framing the image of presidential candidates who are running for office and competing in elections after regime change, have been largely understudied. Similarly, most previous research which tackled framing focused on ‘news framing’, rather than ‘image framing’, or how different media can be used to create images and conceptions of different individuals or groups. Therefore, this study tries to fill these gaps in prior research through conducting a content analysis of the Facebook pages of the five top runners in the Egyptian presidential race of 2012 to find out how and why they used them to frame their own images online before, during and after the elections. In doing so, it revealed how this process was influenced by several factors, such as emerging events, and how it had distinct functions, such as asserting the unique identity of each candidate, juxtaposing and comparing the ‘self’ to the ‘Others’, and launching attacks on other candidates.