Foreign Policy’s Turtle Bay reports that former IAEA chief and Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei has been using Twitter to launch a barrage of attacks on Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak’s government. As documented in a terrific New Yorker profile (gated) ElBaradei has ambitions and some measure of support to succeed Mubarak (for example, there is a large Facebook group that supports him).
These pages have seen some debate on past claims about “twittered revolutions” and the plausible theoretical mechanisms behind them (here is a collection of links). If ElBaradei were successful (a longshot at this point) one can be sure that commentators will quickly point to social media as a cause for his success. I hope that tech-savvy social scientists will start collecting some data as the succession debate heats up as it would be great to do more than speculate about the impact of these technological innovations.