Months before the Egyptian Revolution, a group of young Egyptians founded the Rassd News Network (RNN) to document the 2010 parliamentary elections. RNN was not like any other news network, however - it was based entirely on Twitter and Facebook, featured volunteer reporters and editors, and posted its news updates with Twitter's 140-character limit. Against all odds, RNN quickly gained a dedicated following, boasting upwards of 800,000 followers on Twitter and hundreds of thousands of members on Facebook. RNN's reporting became the go-to source of information in Egypt about the revolution as it unfolded, upending conventional assumptions about the role of the media, the importance of Twitter, and unsettling our notions about the difference between reportage and activism. Most importantly, RNN’s success heralds the arrival of a new and unique media form – the social media news network. But how did RNN win the trust of its readers? How did it manage to evolve and create a business model to support its small editorial staff? And how did the editors determine which information was trustworthy and build a network of trusted volunteer participants? Drawing on interviews with the organization’s founders and new metrics of social media readership and influence, this paper will offer a history of RNN and situate the news organization inside the growing ecosystem of Egyptian digital activism and media organizations. In doing so, it will offer unexpected answers to the question, "How can social media undermine authoritarianism?" and add to the growing body of knowledge about how digital media can change power structures in authoritarian media environments. It will also trace how RNN has evolved and thrived under the more open media policies of post-Mubarak Egypt. In the paper, I argue that RNN’s model leveraged the affordances of horizontal online networks of trust and friendship, and that by collaborating with established news media organizations like Al-Jazeera, RNN was able to carve out a unique sphere of influence for Egypt’s young, wired revolutionary generation.