Thousands of words have been written in newspapers and social networks in the past year and a half in an effort to describe the miraculous connection that has arisen between the revolutions in the Arab world and social networks such as Facebook and Twitter.

Time after time it has been contended that were it not for such networks, the Middle East might not have hosted change, and the revolutions might not have erupted. For us, as Western (and also Arab) journalists, Facebook, Twitter and certainly Cairo's Tahrir Square, constituted the "Arab voice." If Wael Ghonim, the local Google executive who emerged as a leader of the protests in January 2011, sent a Twitter message indicating that he supports Mohammed Morsi (as in fact happened), this was proof in our eyes of popular opinion in Egypt.

For us, the thousands of people who went out to demonstrate at Tahrir Square, following a ruling by Egypt's constitutional affairs court to disperse the parliament, represented a nation protesting that "our revolution has been stolen once again."



Yet somehow we overlooked the silent portions of the public which actually did not want to hear about the Muslim Brotherhood, or about the revolution in January 2011. This is almost half of Egypt's public, people who "went underground" due to fears of the raucous, threatening "majority." True, the Muslim Brotherhood candidate Mohammed Morsi won the elections, but he garnered a majority of less than 880,000 votes, in a country with a population of 89 million citizens. Members of this silent population generally did not take to the streets, and when they did so, it was in small groups. Their voices were not sounded on Facebook or Twitter and so they were overlooked in a new era of social networks governed by the principle that if you are not connected, you don't exist.

And here lies what was, in my eyes, the biggest surprise of the second round of presidential elections: the extremely thin margin between the Muslim Brotherhood candidate and Ahmed Shafiq. So many journalists and commentators have become so enamored with Facebook, Twitter and Tahrir Square that we could not see how an entire population sector in Egypt, almost half of the country's citizens, wanted to preserve the old regime. I don't think it would be an exaggeration to say that Morsi might not have won the election had it not been for the constitutional affairs court's controversial ruling, one viewed by many as untoward intervention undertaken by the country's supreme military council in Egypt's democracy. Masses of people, some 25 million citizens, did not take part in the elections; many boycotted the election due to the court decision, and to some extent awarded the victory to the Muslim Brotherhood.

The Muslim Brotherhood also contributed much to the cultivation of despotism in Egypt's new democracy. The square turned into a venue exploited against Shafiq supporters, as did the social networks. The Muslim Brotherhood warned repeatedly that, should its candidate not win, the consequence could be disastrous for the country's stability. They intimidated masses in Egypt, and led people to believe that should Shafiq win the vote, the country would suffer months of sociopolitical instability.

Ultimately, even in the era of blogging (such as this blog), and of Twitter, Facebook and even satellite television stations, we should remember that these are instruments used to shape public opinion – sometimes these instruments are in the hands of the public, and sometimes they are exploited by self-interested political or economic groups.

And what about the people? Only elections can really demonstrate what the people want. In Egypt's case, the election conveyed the will of a little more than half the nation.