April 6 Youth Movement

April 6 Youth Movement
Arabic: حركة شباب 6 أبريل
Established: 2008
Key members: Ahmed Maher, Asmaa Mahfouz, Israa Abdel Fattah

The April 6 Youth Movement began in 2008 as a Facebook group to support laborers in Mahalla, an industrial town in the Nile delta, who were planning a strike on April 6.

The movement went viral: it managed to coordinate simultaneous nation-wide demonstrations, a first for Egypt. It caught the government completely by surprise and marked Facebook’s entrance into the Egyptian political scene.

Many of its members have been arrested, including founder Ahmed Maher and Israa Abdel Fattah, who was dubbed the ‘Facebook Girl’ after her symbolic arrest in reaction to the April 6, 2008 protests.

Following its original protests, the group became known as a prominent opposition movement in Egypt. The term ‘youth’ can be misleading: the Arabic term, shebab, can refer to a person into their late twenties.

Many of its members have become prominent activists and were instrumental in Egypt’s January 25 Revolution.

In the wake of the revolution, April 6 members were undecided as to how the group should move forward and whether or not it should become directly involved in politics or remain an activist movement. Due to this, the group splintered into different factions.

In April 2014, The Cairo Court for Urgent Matters ruled to ban theApril 6 Youth Movement, citing “espionage” and “activities that distort Egypt’s image.”