The Muslim Brotherhood takes Twitter

[tabatha]

Miriam can't stop talking. And when she does, it's mostly to look down at a torrent of emails, SMSs, and tweets flooding her smartphone. It's been a heady nine months for the soft-spoken but sharp-witted 24-year-old Egyptian student turned activist. She's juggling the ordinary demands of a heavy course-load at Egypt's top university with a slew of extracurriculars (she's embarrassed to admit she's an avid squash player), but also working through the existential hangover of heavily participating in a leaderless revolution that's now causing more of a headache than a thrill. While polishing some academic work on the role of social media in Egypt's uprising, she's been ferociously tweeting on the country's virtual front-lines, fielding 140-character blows left and right. And she's doing it for the Muslim Brotherhood.

"Miriam" (she prefers to use a pseudonym, for "security reasons") is one of the admins of @Ikhwanweb, the official English-language Twitter page for Egypt's Muslim Brotherhood, one of the most prominent Islamist organizations in the world. Ikhwanweb, the Muslim Brotherhood's official English website, started the twitter account @Ikhwanweb back in 2009. For years, the account was a robotic-curated Twitter feed which did little more than link to the website's posts. But Miriam has recently helped transform the account into a virtual coliseum for some of Egypt's most heated debates.

http://mideast.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2011/11/18/the_muslim_brotherhood_takes_twitter