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how the young enacted their citizenship in the digital age as a way to both confront power and imagine a different future

While the economic benefits of globalization had bypassed the Middle East’s young generation, the information revolution did not (at least not to the urban centres). The children submerged in the information technology of the 1990s onwards are today’s youth.

El-Sharnouby analysed Egyptian news sources since the turn of twenty-first the century to examine how the government sought to accommodate the "youth bulge." The Mubarak government conceived of youth as prone to laziness and passivity. Moreover, El-Sharnouby highlights that many scholars erroneously thought that disenfranchised youth would turn either to drug abuse or religious extremism. It therefore came as a surprise to them when scores of the “problematic,” “apathetic” and “lazy” youth were the main actors and agents of dissent in the January 25 revolution

students would prefer less technology in the classroom (especially *participatory* technologies that force them to do something other than sit back and memorize material for a regurgitation exercise)

participatory media literacy is as much about a literacy of *participation* as it is a literacy of media

Knowing something about privacy and the ways online behavior can have consequences at home, at work, in school, along with some sense of how to determine the credibility of information found online, ought to be taught in high school, or at even younger ages. But one of the big questions I don’t have a clue about is how educational institutions are going to be able to adapt quickly enough to a world in which being able to learn, fine, verify, collaborate, and communicate online requires acquisition of active skills, not an easily transmitted collection of facts.

What we oppose is the licensing requirement, which requires every publication or website to get permission from the government in order to operate. The requirement to license is one of the oldest tools of government censorship and restriction of freedom of expression. How could it be that in the digital age of self-publishing, social media and citizen journalism, you have to get government permission to publish online? Does it make sense that in order to get that permission, you have to have an editor in chief who  has been a member of the official press association for at least four years?

Attalah is the chief editor of Egypt’s only independent media outlet, with 124,000 followers on Twitter and 241,000 on Facebook. But Mada Masr isn’t alone. It’s among a growing number of independent Arabic digital outlets that are emerging as fresh sources of news in a region where tyrants and oligarchs have for decades controlled the media.

Some, like Al Jumhuriya (The Republic) and Syria Untold, are run by exiled Syrian intellectuals from Germany, Turkey and Lebanon. Others, like Daraj (Stairs) — with 135,000 followers on Facebook — are providing pan-Arab coverage from Lebanon, where most traditional newspapers are party-affiliated. Still others, like 7iber (pronounced “hiber,” and meaning Ink) and Sowt (Voice), are offering nuanced coverage to readers in Jordan despite the threat of censorship. 7iber has 120,000 followers on Twitter and 341,000 on Facebook.

grief, limited resources and threat of censorship haven’t dissuaded these outlets from revolutionizing Arabic-language journalism

exceptional measures taken to support the media sector, including media institutions, in the face of the coronavirus crisis

the State will cover 50% of the broadcasting costs for the year 2020 of all private radio and television channels

The State and public institutions will also undertake to subscribe to electronic versions of newspapers with a budget of 1.2 million dinars

For the last 10 years, Western (and even Arab) pundits have repeatedly questioned the place of Palestine in the pan-Arab psyche. They surmised that the Arab Spring had refocused Arab minds on their problems at home. They assumed that battling tyrannical regimes and their security apparatuses, reforming corrupt polities and decrepit health care and education systems, combating terrorism and religious extremism, whittling back the power of the military, and overcoming economic challenges like corruption and unemployment would take precedence over an unsolved and apparently unsolvable cause.

reforming the Arab world’s political systems and the security and patronage networks that keep them in power and allow them to dominate their populations appears to be just as arduous a task as resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

The difference now is not that Arab populaces have abandoned Palestine. Western and regional observers say the muted outrage over affronts like American support for the annexation of the Golan Heights or recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, or even the Abraham Accords and the subsequent sycophantic embrace of Israel in the Gulf is an indicator of Arab public opinion, that it signals a loss of interest in the cause.It is not. Arabs are of course not of a single mind on any particular issue, nor is it possible to gauge public opinion under tyrannical regimes. But it is indicative of the fact that these authoritarians no longer see the pan-Arab Palestinian cause and supporting it as vital to their survival. They have discovered that inward-looking, nationalistic pride is the key to enduring in perpetuity. It is the final step in the dismantling of pan-Arabism as a political force, one that will shape the region’s fortunes and its states’ alliances in the years and decades to come.

After Iranian lawmakers suggested last year that face recognition should be used to police hijab law, the head of an Iranian government agency that enforces morality law said in a September interview that the technology would be used “to identify inappropriate and unusual movements,” including “failure to observe hijab laws.” Individuals could be identified by checking faces against a national identity database to levy fines and make arrests, he said.

Shajarizadeh and others monitoring the ongoing outcry have noticed that some people involved in the protests are confronted by police days after an alleged incident—including women cited for not wearing a hijab. “Many people haven't been arrested in the streets,” she says. “They were arrested at their homes one or two days later.”

Mahsa Alimardani, who researches freedom of expression in Iran at the University of Oxford, has recently heard reports of women in Iran receiving citations in the mail for hijab law violations despite not having had an interaction with a law enforcement officer. Iran’s government has spent years building a digital surveillance apparatus, Alimardani says. The country’s national identity database, built in 2015, includes biometric data like face scans and is used for national ID cards and to identify people considered dissidents by authorities.

was Bildt's mission to find Al Khalifa on Twitter successful? "Yep," Bildt said. Al Khalifa saw his tweet — Bildt's 1,000th — and got in touch with the Swede, who noted that social media isn't the only way he contacts his peers: "I know which ones are on Twitter."

diplomats are likely to use social media ever more frequently, even in contacting each other, if only to show that they move with the times

When it comes to social networking, Bildt has a strong challenger in Finnish Foreign Minister Alexander Stubb, who has a more casual tone on his Twitter and Facebook accounts and official home page.

It's through such combination of humans and bots that memes emerge

with just some clever manipulation, bots might get you to follow the right humans—and it's the humans, not bots, who would then influence your thinking

The digitization of our public life is also giving rise to many new intermediaries that are mostly of invisible—and possibly suspect—variety

"If you want to understand the emotive universe from which the Arab spring arose, cinema is a good place to start. Look at a film like Elia Suleiman's Divine Intervention: there the director spits out an apricot pit at an Israeli tank and blows it up. The scene is both fantasy and prophecy."

I don't think the idea of Islamic cinema even exists in the west. Islam is presumed not to have a modern culture. I'd argue it's important that these films don't insist on any kind of stylistic unity – and that in nearly all of them Islam is portrayed as quite marginal. They argue against religiosity as a determining force. They're all about change, too, about modernity, which neocons like Francis Fukuyama say the Islamic world is incapable of

"If you want to be thought of as an auteur, you don't want to be categorised according to ethnicity or religion," Ahmad says. "By calling someone 'Islamic', you're meant to be taking away from their universal appeal."

About half the political prisoners he met in jail told him police had tracked their communications and movements through their cell phones

Stockholm-based Ericsson AB, Creativity Software Ltd. of the U.K. and Dublin-based AdaptiveMobile Security Ltd. marketed or provided gear over the past two years that Iran’s law enforcement or state security agencies would have access to, according to more than 100 documents and interviews with more than two dozen technicians and managers who worked on the systems.

When Iranian security officers needed to locate a target one night in late 2009, one former Ericsson employee says he got an emergency call to come into the office to fix a glitch in an Ericsson positioning center.