Amid Egypt’s mass protests and the government crackdown on communication, a handful of Twitter users have joined forces to track and hopefully find people reported as missing by their families and friends.
A Twitter user based in Lebanon and another in Canada both quickly drew up spreadsheets after friends of a Google Inc. executive, Wael Ghonim, started to tweet that he went missing in Cairo late last week after joining the protests. “I knew that there would be more people not accounted for,” Tamer Salama, an IT consultant, said in an email from Calgary, Alberta.
“Wael’s a part of a circle of young entrepreneurs in the region,” tech entrepreneur Samer Karam said Monday by telephone from Beirut. “I woke up today and saw thousands of tweets about him and thought, ‘If Wael’s missing, God knows how many more are.’”
Messrs. Karam and Salama combined their lists into a single Google Docs spreadsheetthat can be publicly accessed over the Internet. They kept control over updating the information by asking people to message them privately if they had information they wanted to add.
The spreadsheet now lists 10 people as missing and seven marked as “found!!!” For the missing, the list specifies their name, gender, city, details of when they were last heard from online and offline, links to photos, and contact information.
The spreadsheet had been accessed over 9,000 times as of Tuesday morning. Mr. Karam said it is re-tweeted, or rebroadcast on Twitter, around 50 times an hour.
Mr. Karam recognizes the hurdles to collecting verifiable information, especially through online input. One problem is getting people to believe the effort is authentic. “Some people are claiming that these lists aren’t real and it’s just the Egyptian security service collecting names and information and so on,” he said. “This doesn’t really function well if people in Egypt, on the ground, aren’t contributing.”
Access is another obstacle. Egypt on Monday pulled the plug on the last local internet provider, the Noor Group, after authorities last Thursday ordered the country’s four other main Internet service providers to cut off access, according to U.S. Internet monitoring company Renesys.
Still, people on the ground in Cairo and calling in from abroad have participated in the searches. When the keepers of the list get verification someone has been found, they take the name and details off the list to preserve their anonymity as much as possible, Mr. Karam said.
Habib Haddad, a friend of Google’s Mr. Ghonim and founder of the online SMART Arabic keyboard and search engine Yamli, said Twitter users should heed the call to action and help fact check the spreadsheet by putting in calls to contacts in Egypt. He described Mr. Ghonim as “a tech entrepreneur–a true geek–with a very bright future, helping Egypt to create jobs for its youth. And that’s the sad part, to me, at least.”