Internet activists in the Middle East, who are used to sharing social media evidence of police crackdowns on dissent at home, spent part of this week drawing attention to the same sort of images flowing from the St. Louis suburb of Ferguson.

Several Egyptian protest veterans pointed to photographs and video from Missouri. Ana Mubasher, a live streaming project founded in 2012 to broadcast video of protests in Egypt as they unfolded, shared links and screengrabs from the feeds of local news stations in St. Louis. Hossam el-Hamalawy, a blogger and journalist in Cairo, shared images posted online by Antonio French, a St. Louis alderman who was arrested while documenting the protests in Ferguson on Wednesday night.