The white men responsible are Larry Page and Mark Zuckerberg. That's already in the standard western version. And Obama (yes, I know he's not really white...) for giving the Cairo speech that started the whole thing (If you think this is off the wall, think of Reagan's "Tear down this wall!" bringing down the Soviet Union). One hardly needs Gene Sharp if you want to make up a U.S-based myth for the uprising.

More likely, the NYT just wanted to find an angle nobody else had covered, to make up for having otherwise missed the whole story. It's a lot easier covering a story where most of the material is already in English....