You are exaggerating the role of social media in Egypt?

A lot is said about the role of social media, Facebook, especially mobilizing and fueling the popular revolt in Egypt. Some are already calling it a revolution of Social Media. Wael Ghonim, activist Internet 30-year-old who has become one of the most recognizable faces of the movement in Egypt, dubbed Egypt 2.0 in an interview with CNN on Friday.  It is difficult to say how much of that credit is earned and how much it is pure hyperbole.

But a quick look at some numbers is instructive.

For a popular movement, the basis of Facebook in Egypt is rather small, if considered as a percentage of the total population. The Egypt has currently approximately 5.2 million users of Facebook, according to SocialBakers a site that maintains detailed statistics on Facebook use around the world. That is less than 7 percent of the total population of Egypt. In other words, less than 7 out of every 100 Egyptians are Facebook users.

On the contrary, in Tunisia, close to 21 percent of the population have Facebook accounts, Quatar use about 33%, Kuwait about 21 percent, while in Facebook in the United Arab Emirates is used by 37 per cent of the population. Even conservative of Saudi Arabia has 12 percent penetration, going by the numbers of SocialBakers.

Sure, the Egypt ranks an impressive 23 213 countries in terms of number of persons from a country who have signed up for Facebook. However, when this number is treated as a percentage of the total population, Egypt drops to 127 place in General.

The statistics are not a lot different from another perspective as well.  Only approximately 31 percent of those who have access to the Internet in Egypt have signed up for Facebook accounts--a lot of them the last few weeks. On the contrary, almost 60 percent of those with Internet access in Tunisia have Facebook accounts, while the number is close to 50 percent in the UAE.

What the figures show that is the hallmark of social media in Egypt--at least as measured by Facebook use--Tis less than one might imagine from everything that is said. It would be interesting to look at the numbers of Twitter, if those were available to see how you stack up.

For a tool that allegedly helped to topple a Government, using Facebook in Egypt seems to be relatively small, even compared to countries in the region. Even if it wasn't, that's really beside the point.

At the end of the day, Facebook and Twitter and YouTube and all other social media services are just tools that enable better communication.  Just as newspapers and radio and TV. They are the means not the message.

Social media has certainly played a role in the dissemination of information about what was going on in Egypt to citizens and to the rest of the world. When the Egyptian police in Alexandria allegedly beat 28-year old Khaled Said to death last June, was the photo of his face changed into a Facebook page called we all Khaled Said, which may have sowed the seeds for the popular dissent. Social media amplified what was happening, because he gave a few citizen journalists a way to show and tell others what they were seeing and experiencing.

The question is how many of those tens of thousands of singing in Piazza Tahir also in recent weeks has seen those images, or messages to Twitter or YouTube videos?  How many still had access to the Internet to know these things? After all, revolutions that occurred throughout history without Twitter or Facebook or TV or newspapers. When people get pushed around long enough, these things tend to happen. And all you need is often only a small spark to turn the whole thing.

This was a victory for the people of Egypt. Not social media.