Egypt: Biggest protest in history?

Summary

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More or Less: Egypt—Biggest Protest in History?

BBC Radio 4 | Host: Ruth Alexander | July 13, 2013

Episode Overview

This episode of More or Less investigates the widely reported claim that Egypt’s 2013 uprising was the “biggest public protest in history.” With millions said to have taken to the streets against President Mohamed Morsi, various crowd estimates—from 14 million to an astonishing 33 million—spread across global headlines. Host Ruth Alexander and guests explore the origins and validity of these numbers, unpick the motivations behind their use, and delve into the real challenges of measuring mass demonstrations.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Origins of the “Biggest Protest” Claim

• Media and Social Media Amplification
  • The episode opens with Ruth Alexander referencing widely circulated statements—including one on Fox News and a Slate magazine investigation—tracing the claim back to the BBC via Twitter, though the source within the BBC remains unconfirmed.
    • “It's certainly been a massive show of people power, but the biggest public protest in history. It's an audacious claim that would be hard to prove, and yet many have been making it, including our friends at Fox News. But who was the first to say it? Well, apparently it was the BBC. Awkward.” – Ruth Alexander (00:13)
• Confusion About BBC Involvement
  • After internal checking, BBC journalists in Cairo deny having reported or endorsed the 30 million figure.
    • “We rang the people who we thought should know—staff at the corporation's Cairo bureau. Did you say that? We certainly hope not. They said, in fact, they don't even buy the 30 million figure…” – Ruth Alexander (01:38)

2. Scrutiny of the Numbers: Where Do They Come From?

• Citing and Debunking Specific Claims

  • A political science professor on another BBC show claims, “You can't disagree with the fact that 30 million people were in the street resisting his rule.” – Mona MacRamerbaid (01:31)
  • BBC Middle East Correspondent Wyre Davies strongly disputes these numbers:
    • “I think that's a gross exaggeration. That's rubbish, really. It doesn't feel any bigger than it did back in 2011 when we had the revolution. About half a million people can fit into Tahrir Square... Nothing like the 30 or 40 million people that some people quoted. That's 45% of the population. That's impossible because there are too many young people in Egypt.” – Wyre Davies (02:09-02:38)
  • Demographics are analyzed to underscore the unlikeliness of the figures, highlighting that 20% of Egyptians are under 10 years old.

• Proliferation and Contradiction of Crowd Estimates

  • Chris Greenway from BBC Monitoring recounts multiple figures being cited—17 million, 14 million, and later 33 million—with no clear, official source for any.
    • “One figure that comes up a lot is 17 million... However, I've not really been able to pin down the original source for that better than people quoting ‘experts’... Later, state-owned Mina reported the Interior Ministry denied giving any estimate. We have Reuters quoting a military source saying 14 million. ...an Egyptian newspaper said 33 million.” – Chris Greenway (03:19-04:10)

3. Crowd Size in Political Battle and Public Relations

• Numbers as Political Ammunition
  • Wyre Davies explains why inflated numbers serve both sides’ narratives:
    • “It is a numbers game because both sides are trying to claim they have popular support... It’s in the interest of the people who supported the overthrow to say that they had these millions of people supporting them.” – Wyre Davies (04:27)
• General Caution About Crowd Estimates
  • “Since President Morsi was removed from power, both sides have been claiming ever increasing numbers of supporters.” – Ruth Alexander (04:50)
  • “Take every crowd estimation number with a huge heap of salt.” – Hannah Fry, mathematician (05:01)

4. Why Counting Crowds is So Difficult

• Incentives to Exaggerate
  • Hannah Fry details the inherent bias in crowd estimates:
    • “It's very rare that you have the report of a crowd size where there isn't some incentive to exaggerate... Police might claim 10,000; organizers say 60,000.” – Hannah Fry (05:19)
• Methods and Their Limitations
  • Traditional methods (photo analysis, counting along march routes) are described, with Fry noting all are flawed:
    • “If you have a picture of a crowd, you can slice it into sections... But if a crowd is moving, that's a huge problem...” – Hannah Fry (05:50)
  • Even satellite or aerial images are unreliable due to interpretive variance. Example given: The Obama inauguration was simultaneously estimated at 1.8 million and 800,000 from the same image by two different analysts (06:56).

5. Larger Takeaway: The Numbers Game

• The core conclusion is that these crowd estimates are less about factual reporting and more about public relations:
  • “Counting crowds is so much more about public relations and point scoring than a quest for the truth, it seems.” – Ruth Alexander (07:23)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Veracity of Claims:
  • “That's impossible because there are too many young people in Egypt. For those maths to work anyway, he's right.” – Ruth Alexander (02:50)
• On the Importance of Numbers in Politics:
  • “There's no two ways about it and therefore the only justification for that logically is that this was a popularly backed military coup.” – Wyre Davies (04:27)
• On Methodological Flaws:
  • “Using exactly the same image, two different people analyzed the image... almost off by a factor of two, using exact same image, just different techniques on the same image.” – Hannah Fry (06:56)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 00:13–01:38: Introduction; media origins of the protest-size claim
• 01:31: On-air claim of 30 million protestors (Prof. Mona MacRamerbaid)
• 02:05–02:50: BBC’s Wyre Davies debunks the 30 million estimate
• 03:19–04:14: Chris Greenway details the proliferation and politics of protest numbers
• 04:27–05:01: Wyre Davies and Hannah Fry on why the numbers matter
• 05:19–06:37: Hannah Fry on why crowd counting is unreliable
• 06:56–07:23: Satellite images, public relations, and faulty estimates

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Takeaway

The “30 million protesters” figure cited during Egypt’s 2013 protests is unsupported and likely highly exaggerated. While millions certainly demonstrated, definitive numbers remain elusive; the estimates serve more as political tools than as robust factual measurements. Crowd-counting methods—whether via photos, routes, or even satellite imagery—are deeply flawed and susceptible to both error and manipulation by interested parties. As ever, larger numbers in such contexts should be treated with “a huge heap of salt.”

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Transcript

[A]

Thank you for downloading from the BBC. For details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, go to bbcworldserveys.com podcasts

[B]

hello, and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. I'm Ruth Alexander. It's said that Egyptians have taken part in the biggest uprising in history. For weeks, the streets were crowded with demonstrators voicing their opposition to the government of Islamist Mohamed Morsi, the first democratically elected president who the army has since removed. It's certainly been a massive show of people power, but the biggest public protest in history. It's an audacious claim that would be hard to prove, and yet many have been making it, including our friends at Fox News. But who was the first to say it? Well, apparently it was the BBC. Awkward. Slate magazine in the United States tracks the claim back to a post on Twitter which quotes the BBC as reporting this fact. When asked about it, the broadcaster said it could find no record of the claim being made by a BBC source. But that doesn't mean the claim hasn't been made on a BBC programme. Take this example. A professor of political science master Mona MacRamerbaid, was being interviewed on another of the BBC's radio shows recently and this is what she said.

[C]

You can't disagree with the fact that 30 million people were in the street resisting his rule.

[B]

This is the largest revolutionary outpouring in human history. But has any BBC journalist endorsed this claim? Well, the BBC's a big beast, but we rang the people who we thought should know staff at the corporation's Cairo bureau. Did you say that? We certainly hope not. They said, in fact, they don't even buy the 30 million figure, which has been widely quoted by international media and across social websites like Twitter.

[C]

I think that's a gross exaggeration. That's rubbish, really.

[B]

Wirra Davies, the BBC's Middle east correspondent, speaking to me from Cairo.

[C]

It doesn't feel any bigger than it did back in 2011 when we had the revolution. About half a million people can fit into Tahrir Square. So it's impossible to say when there's a big protest in Tahrir Square and it's full, that there are millions of people there, that you simply can't fit them into Tahrir Square. I think nationwide there were millions of people this time protesting against the rule of the Muslim Brotherhood, but Nothing like the 30 or 40 million people that some people quoted. That's 45% of the population. That's impossible because there are too many young people in Egypt. For those maths to work anyway, he's right.

[B]

A fifth of Egyptians are aged under 10. So. So where has the figure of 30 million protesters come from? Well, no matter how hard we tried, we couldn't find a source for it or any other number for that matter because there have been a few. Now we're lucky enough to have a hotline to BBC monitoring a group of journalists who spend all day watching the world's open source media. Problem is they're baffled by all the numbers being reported too. Here's Chris Greenway.

[A]

One figure that comes up a lot is 17 million that was quite widely reported on the 30th of June and the days subsequently. However, I've not really been able to pin down the original source for that better than people quoting quote, unquote experts. However, later that evening, the state owned Mina News Agency reported the Interior Ministry as denying that it had given any estimate. So it doesn't appear to have come from them. We have Reuters quoting a military source that evening evening are saying as many as 14 million. And then we have subsequent reports, including from an Egyptian newspaper on 2 July saying there was another estimate of 33 million. And I've seen that figure of 33 or some cases 30 million widely reported both by Egyptian and foreign sources.

[B]

At least that gives a flavour of how many numbers are coming out of Egypt and how little evidence there is for any of them. But that doesn't mean that not important. Rather they're a vital part of the arsenal in this political battle.

[C]

Wirra Davies it is a numbers game because both sides are trying to claim they have popular support. What we saw last week was a military coup. There's no two ways about it and therefore the only justification for that logically is that this was a popularly backed military coup. And so it's in the interest of the people who supported the overthrow of the president to say that they had these millions of people supporting them.

[B]

Since President Morsi was removed from power, both sides have been claiming ever increasing numbers of supporters on the streets. Wira says, and this is so often the case, I think you have to

[D]

take every crowd estimation number with a huge heap of salt.

[B]

Hannah Fry, a mathematician from University College London who specialises in spatial analysis, or to put it into common speak, counting crowds. She doesn't buy the 30 million protesters number or in fact any other like it.

[D]

It's very rare that you have the report of a crowd size where there isn't some incentive to exaggerate one way or the other. So if you Take the London Stop the war protest in February 2007. The police claim that there were 10,000 protesters. Meanwhile the organisers, their estimate was 60,000. So six times the amount.

[B]

There are a few ways to counter crowd, but even without the seemingly omnipresent problem of exaggeration, Hannah Frey says none of the method perfect.

[D]

Now, if you have a picture of a crowd, you can slice it into sections, count how many people appear in each square and then just multiply by the number of squares. A very, very simple and old technique to count the number of people in a crowd.

[B]

But if a crowd is moving, of

[D]

course it makes it a huge problem. So if a crowd's moving, there are a couple of different techniques. So you can, for instance, be there at the site, be on kind of a main route into or out of a march, and then count the number of people that pass you. But obviously you're going to miss people who join the march later, who leave the march after you, so on. So in any way these ideas are going to be flawed. Even with the pictures, even if you haven't had a sort of perfect picture of the entire crowd, there are people going to be obscured by buildings. And even then, just counting such a large number of people is very, very difficult to do it without making errors,

[B]

because I've seen one report which says that there were more than 30 million people and that this has been verified by satellite images taken by Google. But even if those images do exist, they couldn't corroborate such a claim.

[D]

Well, the problem with images is that if you take the Obama inauguration ceremony as an example, using exactly the same image, two different people analyzed the image and this was a static crowd. So there's none of the problems of people moving in, in or out. The government's unofficial statistics said there was 1.8 million people, while a professor in America came up with a figure of 800,000. So it's almost off by a factor of two, using exact same image, just different techniques on the same image.

[B]

But never mind, eh? Because counting crowds is so much more about public relations and point scoring than a quest for the truth, it seems. If there are any numbers you'd like us to take a closer look at, do email us. Our address is more or lessbc.co.uk. a number of people have emailed about the addition of the programme, which looked at whether American football has a crime problem. One of the sport's star players, Aaron Hernandez of the New England Patriots, has been charged with murder. Not an isolated case. American players have been charged with any number of crimes over the years. So are they more likely to come into contact with the law than the rest of the population? As sports writers have been speculating? No. We concluded in general terms. We found there are about six times as many arrests among the general population of young American men as there are among football players. And even US Women are more likely to be arrested than players, albeit by a small margin. But listener Jim was not alone in contacting us to say you forgot to consider some very important data. Firstly is that the players are mostly college graduates and they're considered wealthy. It's a good point and one we had actually considered, but it's not straightforward. Yes, football players are wealthy, but they're often not from a wealthy background. And yes, many of them have been to college, but they're often there on a sports scholarship, which has very little to do with their studious nature or academic ability. Other listeners, though, wanted to hear an analysis of how arrest rates among football players compares to other sports. Well, we'd have loved to have looked at that too, but we just couldn't find good data. Thanks for all your comments and do keep them coming. And you can also sign up for a free download of our program at our website, bbcworldservice.com more or less.

[A]

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