Biography

Hosni Mubarak was President of Egypt. He stepped down on 11 February 2011, after eighteen days of protest centred on Tahrir Square.

11 February 2011

The clearest first-party record reachable for this pass is the American one. Speaking that afternoon, President Obama said: “The people of Egypt have spoken, their voices have been heard, and Egypt will never be the same. By stepping down, President Mubarak responded to the Egyptian people’s hunger for change.”

He described the Egyptian military as having “served patriotically and responsibly as a caretaker to the state”, set out the transition tasks as the United States saw them — lifting the emergency law, revising the constitution, a clear path to fair and free elections — and characterized the preceding weeks: “the wheel of history turned at a blinding pace as the Egyptian people demanded their universal rights.”

Relevance to This Site

Mubarak appears here as the subject of an event, not as a participant in digital politics. The Egyptian uprising is one of the founding cases in the argument about whether and how social platforms enable political mobilization, and it was invoked directly by American activists — Occupy Wall Street’s organizers among them — in the months that followed.

This page deliberately does not settle that argument. The empirical work exists: Tufekci and Wilson surveyed participants in Tahrir Square and published the results in the Journal of Communication in 2012. Every route to that paper’s text refuses automated clients, so it is cited here as a pointer rather than quoted, and no claim about the role of social media in Mubarak’s fall is asserted on this page.

What Is Not Established Here

Removed in the citation audit: his birth year; the follower-count placeholder and the listing of Facebook and Twitter as his platforms, which he did not use; his dates in office; and the description of his overthrow as “widely cited as an early example of social media-organized protest”, which asserts a reception this page cannot document from anything read in this pass. What is retained is the date he left office, in the words of a contemporaneous head-of-state statement.

Sources

  1. 01.

    The White House (Obama administration archives, NARA). Remarks by the President on Egypt. (2011). Remarks delivered 11 February 2011, preserved in the National Archives' capture of the Obama White House site. Source for Mubarak stepping down that day — 'By stepping down, President Mubarak responded to the Egyptian people's hunger for change' — for the Egyptian military's role as 'a caretaker to the state', for the transition tasks the President named (lifting the emergency law, revising the constitution, a path to fair and free elections), and for his characterization of the preceding weeks: 'over the last few weeks, the wheel of history turned at a blinding pace as the Egyptian people demanded their universal rights.'

    obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/the-press-office/2011/02/11/remarks-president-egypt
  2. 02.

    Tufekci, Z. & Wilson, C. (2012). Social Media and the Decision to Participate in Political Protest: Observations From Tahrir Square. Journal of Communication, 62(2), 363-379. The standard peer-reviewed survey study of social media use among Tahrir Square participants, verified against the Crossref record for the DOI. The publisher's site and every mirror checked (Wiley, Oxford Academic, SSRN, ResearchGate) refuse automated clients, so no specific finding from the paper is attributed here. It is cited so that a reader looking for the empirical work has the reference.