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social media is a reliable way to gauge the effectiveness of local officials, who are often unaccountable to their constituencies. Since they usually operate through opaque and byzantine institutions, the central government often knows little about the competence and popularity of their local representatives, who have every reason to lie about their performance

Cracking down on local corruption in turn makes the central government appear more responsive, increasing its effectiveness and legitimacy

social media provides an effective way to reach out to the regime’s supporters. Just as opposition leaders use social media to mobilize protesters, regimes can use it to organize and rally their own domestic allies – military or business elites, but also regular citizens motivated by patriotism or ideology

social media offers a convenient way to shape the contours of public discourse among the public at large. Governments have always used mass media – newspapers, radio, and TV – to disseminate regime-friendly propaganda. Social media, however, has the added benefit of being inherently decentralized, interactive, and non-hierarchical, and can thus more easily avoid the appearance of artifice

The opposite of Internet freedom may not be brute-force censorship but a deceptive blend of control, co-option, and manipulation

By shaping dominant narratives and mobilizing supporters, social media can help incumbents to guard themselves not only from domestic unrest but also from external pressures for reform

Autocrats have proven to be remarkably adaptive and resilient in the face of new challenges, and their subversion of social media could mean long-term problems for the future of democracy

existing efforts "focus on the interpretive responsibilities of the individual,"

"if bad actors intentionally dump disinformation online with an aim to distract and overwhelm, is it possible to safeguard against media manipulation?"

A 2012 meta-analysis by academic researchers found that media literacy efforts could help boost students' critical awareness of messaging, bias, and representation in the media they consumed. There have been small studies suggesting that media-literacy efforts can change students' behaviors—for example, by making them less likely to seek out violent media for their own consumption. And more recently, a pair of researchers found that media-literacy training was more important than prior political knowledge when it comes to adopting a critical stance to partisan media content.

the roles of institutions, technology companies, and governments

low-cost organizational structure and no durable organizational mechanisms are put in place

he political evanescence of social media activism raises issues of accountability and democratic control on the new emerging leaders of social movements, because of a certain opacity that accompanies the fluidity and partial anonymity of online interactions

The political evanescence of digital activism in the Egyptian revolution needs to be understood in connection with the libertarian ideology of “leaderlessness” and “horizontality” that has provided a cultural framing for social media use among activists

it is apparent that the Egyptian revolution, as any great upheaval in history, was not completely spontaneous and leaderless. Rather it bore the mark of complex direction exercised in concert by multiple leaders, from grassroots groups on the ground as the April 6 Youth Movement, to organized forces such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Left opposition parties and NGOs, to end with digital activists responsible for spreading revolutionary information, recruiting online communities of supporters and publicizing protest events

While Ghonim had some basic activist experience, having done some digital campaigning in support of the presidential campaign of Mohammed el-Baradei in 2010, he was little known within activist circles. From the distance and safety of Dubai where he was working for Google, he collaborated with activists on the ground including Mohammed AbdelRahman Mansour who acted as co-admin on the page, and Ahmed Maher of the April 6 Youth Movement, the group that pioneered digital activism in Egypt. It was only after he was released from prison in the midst of the eighteen-day insurrection, that he suddenly became a famous and respected figure. Yet, Ghonim did not manage, neither he tried, to turn the great influence he had exercised during the revolution into any form of structured political leadership during the transitional phase. Ironically the Facebook fanpage he founded has discontinued its communications with a status message celebrating “the power of the people” on 3 July 2013, the day of the anti-Morsi coup. Ghonim has recently left the country for voluntary exile after a streak of attacks on the news media.

The case of Tamarrod demonstrates how the fluidity in the field of social media in the activist field, dominated by flexible groupings coordinated through social network sites can open space for opportunist groups. Both Wael Ghonim and the main leaders of Tamarrod were secondary figures in the activist scene in Cairo, despite the fact that some of them, had been previously involved in pro-democracy campaigns and in the Elbaradei presidential campaigns. Similarly to what happened with previous political groups it was a great extent this outsider aura that managed to gather so much enthusiasm from Egyptian youth. The group managed to build an extensive network across the country, collecting millions of signature (the exact quantity will remain unverified) to withdraw confidence from Morsi. However, it progressively became clear that Tamarrod was far from being simply a disingenuous and spontaneous citizens groups. It has been publicly confirmed that the campaign received substantial funding from a number of Egyptian entrepreneurs, including Naguib Sawiris. It is also reasonably suspected that the group received financial and operational support from the Egyptian army, and the so-called deep state, which saw in Tamarrod a sort of useful idiot to get rid of the Muslim Brotherhood and create a favorable climate for the coup d'etat. Since the campaign of repression orchestrated by al-Sisi and the new post-coup government, the group has been marred by intestine fight between different factions, and seems to have lost much of its “street cred” among Egyptian youth. It was yet another group falling victim of its own precipitous rise.

We're treating virality as a good in and of itself, moving forward for the sake of moving

"Twitter's algorithm favors novelty over popularity."

there were too many tweets about WikiLeaks, and they were so constant that Twitter started treating WikiLeaks as the new normal

as we adopt new and better ways to help people communicate, can we keep asking what is really being communicated? And what's the opportunity cost of what is not being communicated while we're all locked in the perpetual present chasing whatever is trending?

"What it means to be social is if you want to talk to me, you have to listen to me as well." A lot of brands want to be social, but they don't want to listen, because much of what they're hearing is quite simply not to their liking, and, just as in relationships in the offline world, engaging with your customers or your readers in a transparent and authentic way is not all sweetness and light. So simply issuing a statement saying you're committed to listening isn't the same thing as listening.

Fetishizing "social" has become a major distraction, and we're clearly a country that loves to be distracted. Our job in the media is to use all the social tools at our disposal to tell the stories that matter -- as well as the stories that entertain -- and to keep reminding ourselves that the tools are not the story. When we become too obsessed with our closed, circular Twitter or Facebook ecosystem, we can easily forget that poverty is on the rise, or that downward mobility is trending upward, or that over 5 million people have been without a job for half a year or more, or that millions of homeowners are still underwater. And just as easily, we can ignore all the great instances of compassion, ingenuity, and innovation that are changing lives and communities.

conflates the form with the substance

new social tools can help us bear witness more powerfully or they can help us be distracted more obsessively

humans are really a herd animal and that is what we are doing on these social sites, Herding up

“new Arab public sphere”

two distinct political positions that characterized Arab politics in the period up to the Arab Spring uprisings in 2010-11: an approach on Al Jazeera sympathetic to Islamist groups across the region and more conservative pro-Western approach in Saudi controlled media

The Arab uprisings came at the moment of a third stage in the development of modern Arab media: that of social media

bitterly contested conflicts between youth-driven protest movements and governments who were caught absolutely unawares due to a variety of factors: close cooperation with Western governments, elaborate security apparatus and the arrogance that comes with being in power unchallenged for so long

Media in the post-Spring Arab world currently has been targeted by the forces of the state in their counter-revolutionary pushback

Since the military coup that removed the elected post-uprising government, the Egyptian government has used traditional preferred instruments of television and print media for propaganda and control

Gulf governments have focused on social media in particular

Another important feature of Arab media is how it has become an arena for the Sunni-Shia sectarian schism

media has been revamped and brought back into action as one element of a multi-faceted campaign involving the law, religion, surveillance and forces of coercion to face a range of internal and external enemies seen as challenging the very survival of governing elites. New media were momentarily a weapon against these entrenched systems of rule; for now, the rulers have mastered the new array of technologies and are back in command

Rajab appears to be missing the mark by taking aim at social media outlets as a source of false news. The state-controlled and pro-government media disseminated its own false reports during the unrest

reign in

Journalists who are worried that their reporting may lead to arrest find it hard to write unbiased reports

Rajab should spend more time attempting to reform mass media outlets and relaxing censorship, rather than enacting legislation to criminalise reports on social media. Given the dominance of the government position in television, radio and newspapers, a move against social media outlets appears designed to simply shut down a vehicle of free expression.

On Nov. 8 and 15, two episodes of the news satire Al-Basheer Show were jammed, as soon as the broadcast began on the German DW channel. Jamming would start at 9 p.m. while the episodes were being shown, and would end an hour later at 10 p.m., when the show was over.

The government clampdown on the media and journalists has taken several forms, ranging from obscure threats to the shutdown of media institutions to jamming channels or not offering security protection. There were also insinuations that media channels have been inciting people to protest.

“I received a text message on my personal phone threatening to kill me and attack my family if I continue to use my phone to contact the channel where I work.”

The Iraqi Media House, a civil society organization in Iraq, reported that “as a result of the internet ban, 90% of Iraqi media coverage was cut off, and 70% of social media coverage was dead. Fears of targeting media channels and journalists also reduced coverage.”

The Press Freedom Advocacy Association in Iraq reported that there had been “89 violations against journalists," 33 death threats and the shutdown of or warnings to 17 offices and headquarters of media institutions.

Syrian activists became adept at crafting a specific message

By focusing only on English-language social media posts, mainstream media have frequently distorted the focus of the Syrian story, the report’s authors claimed.

“We here in Washington, especially, we think that the United States is really important; we think that American policy is the single most important thing about Syria, and what Obama does is what everybody wants to know about,” Lynch said. “The Arabic-speaking community does not care about Obama, for the most part. They don’t think American policy is all that important; they’re focused on other things.”Mentions of President Barack Obama, for example, are sporadic in Arabic tweets. By March 2013, Arabic tweets about Syria only mentioned Obama 0.28 percent of the time, compared to 4.28 percent of English tweets.

foreign media has been equally tarnished, through the partisanship of Arab outlets which are predominantly Gulf-based, such as Aljazeera, Alarabiya and Sky News Arabia

the lack of professionalism and dishonesty of TV channels has driven many to social media for news updates.

Well-intentioned citizen journalists enthusiastically spread rumours and misreported or exaggerated clashes, quickly creating a reputation for dishonesty that stuck to the sector as a whole.

Systematic posting of false information on social media accounts also became a favoured tactic of militias on all sides of the conflicts has become a trademark tactic

People living in the same area are often exposed to completely different realities depending on the media they consume.

A phenomenon new to Libya in this round of conflict is the large-scale attempts by gulf monarchies to fill social media with blatant propaganda in favour of their chosen sides

Haftar has long been backed by Saudi and the UAE, with the latter repeatedly breaching a United Nations arms embargo to provide his forces with attack aircrafts, armoured vehicles, helicopters and other ammunition

Khadeja Ramali, a Libyan data scientist, who has examined and mapped tweets mentioning Haftar since the offensive was launched. Her research has clearly shown a huge pro-Haftar push from accounts based in Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE.

Qatar also joined with the Libya propaganda campaign, a few days late, to broadcast the UAE’s complicity in Haftar’s crimes

Facebook’s newsfeed played a central role in nearly every step from rumor to killing

Facebook officials, they say, ignored repeated warnings of the potential for violence, resisting pressure to hire moderators or establish emergency points of contact

the imagined Ampara, which exists in rumors and memes on Sinhalese-speaking Facebook, is the shadowy epicenter of a Muslim plot to sterilize and destroy Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority

The mob, hearing confirmation, beat him, destroyed the shop and set fire to the local mosque.

As Facebook pushes into developing countries, it tends to be initially received as a force for good.In Sri Lanka, it keeps families in touch even as many work abroad. It provides for unprecedented open expression and access to information. Government officials say it was essential for the democratic transition that swept them into office in 2015.But where institutions are weak or undeveloped, Facebook’s newsfeed can inadvertently amplify dangerous tendencies. Designed to maximize user time on site, it promotes whatever wins the most attention. Posts that tap into negative, primal emotions like anger or fear, studies have found, produce the highest engagement, and so proliferate

in developing countries, Facebook is often perceived as synonymous with the internet and reputable sources are scarce, allowing emotionally charged rumors to run rampant

Last year, in rural Indonesia, rumors spread on Facebook and WhatsApp, a Facebook-owned messaging tool, that gangs were kidnapping local children and selling their organs. Some messages included photos of dismembered bodies or fake police fliers. Almost immediately, locals in nine villages lynched outsiders they suspected of coming for their children.

Near-identical social media rumors have also led to attacks in India and Mexico. Lynchings are increasingly filmed and posted back to Facebook, where they go viral as grisly tutorials

No organization has ever had to police billions of users in a panoply of languages.

Before Facebook, he said, officials facing communal violence “could ask media heads to be sensible, they could have their own media strategy.”

Desperate, the researchers flagged the video and subsequent posts using Facebook’s on-site reporting tool.Though they and government officials had repeatedly asked Facebook to establish direct lines, the company had insisted this tool would be sufficient, they said. But nearly every report got the same response: the content did not violate Facebook’s standards. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “You report to Facebook, they do nothing,” one of the researchers, Amalini De Sayrah, said. “There’s incitements to violence against entire communities and Facebook says it doesn’t violate community standards.”

Facebook still appears to employ few Sinhalese moderators. A call to a third-party employment service revealed that around 25 Sinhalese moderator openings, first listed last June, remain unfilled. The jobs are based in India, which has few Sinhalese speakers.

“We’re a society, we’re not just a market.”

Its gamelike interface rewards engagement, delivering a dopamine boost when users accrue likes and responses, training users to indulge behaviors that win affirmation.

the greatest rush comes by attacking outsiders: The other sports team. The other political party. The ethnic minority.

Mass media has long been used to mobilize mass violence. Facebook, by democratizing communication tools, gives anyone with a smartphone the ability to broadcast hate.

Mr. Weerasinghe posted a video that showed him walking the shops of a town called Digana, warning that too many were owned by Muslims, urging Sinhalese to take the town back. The researchers in Colombo reported his video to Facebook, along with his earlier posts, but all remained online.

the government temporarily blocked most social media. Only then did Facebook representatives get in touch with Sri Lankan officials, they say. Mr. Weerasinghe’s page was closed the same day.

officials rushed out statements debunking the sterilization rumors but could not match Facebook’s influence

Despite criticism and concerns from civil society groups, the company has done little to change its strategy of pushing into developing societies with weak institutions and histories of social instability, opening up information spaces where anger and fear often can dominate

From October to March, Facebook presented users in six countries, including Sri Lanka, with a separate newsfeed prioritizing content from friends and family. Posts by professional media were hidden away on another tab.“While this experiment lasted, many of us missed out on the bigger picture, on more credible news,” said Nalaka Gunawardene, a Sri Lankan media analyst. “It’s possible that this experiment inadvertently spread hate views in these six countries.”

government officials said, they face the same problem as before. Facebook wields enormous influence over their society, but they have little over Facebook.

Facebook had turned him into a national villain. It helped destroy his business, sending his family deeply into debt. And it had nearly gotten him killed.But he refused to abandon the platform. With long, empty days in hiding, he said, “I have more time and I look at Facebook much more.”“It’s not that I have more faith that social media is accurate, but you have to spend time and money to go to the market to get a newspaper,” he said. “I can just open my phone and get the news instead.”“Whether it’s wrong or right, it’s what I read.”

In this democratized media environment, where the authoritative is drowned out by the masses, and immediacy and transparency trump objectivity, videos documenting demolitions and disfigurements expose enough in real time for us to grasp the reality based on sheer volume, even when what we are seeing is not instantly verifiable

Al Jazeera, like social media, played a crucial role in amplifying and accelerating the voices of those protesting in the streets

the fallacy of objectivity and how transparency, participation and empowerment can trump that calling

social media compels users to flock to the most popular point of view for fear of exclusion

an element of caution exists on the Lebanese blogosphere when it concerns political debate

to argue that Lebanese bloggers generally avoid debating Lebanese politics is to narrow the definition of what is deemed political

Social media may have constrained political debate in some corners, but overall it has expanded discourse and given new meaning to what is considered political in Lebanon. Political debate is no longer confined to the daily ritual of politicians insulting each other for a greater slice of the pie, whilst the country wallows in corruption, high unemployment, and a lack of basic services. Indeed, Lebanese citizen journalists have broken the limits of political discourse originally defined by politically engineered mass media and the country's sectarian system. Lebanese bloggers may not be responding to Hariri's rally as they have moved beyond the sectarian nature of Lebanese political life, and have grown increasingly cynical of local leaders who evoke the universal slogans of freedom, reform and democracy. Liliane's and @frencheagle's responses reflect the widespread disappointment in the failure of the 2005 “Cedar Revolution” to engender real change, and have thus lost faith in the political system altogether. A positive development out of the failed Cedar Revolution has been the emergence of online activism in tackling the issues Lebanon's sectarian elites refuse to entertain. There are blogs now on a plethora of issues ranging from migrant workers, gay rights, and women's rights, to local governance and poor basic services.

perhaps it is indeed an indication that the Lebanese blogosphere has fallen deaf to old-fashioned Lebanese political rhetoric, and is in the process of defining a new political landscape that transcends sectarianism and nepotism

In 2018 Egypt adopted a cyber crime law that grants the government full authority to censor the internet and exercise communication surveillance. A media regulation law also allows authorities to block individual social media accounts.

Several women in Egypt have previously been accused of “inciting debauchery” by challenging the country’s conservative social norms, including actress Rania Youssef after critics took against her choice of dress for the Cairo Film Festival in 2018.

Hossam denied any wrongdoing but Cairo University - where she is studying archaeology - said it would enforce maximum penalties against her which could include expulsion.

Egyptian women’s rights campaigner Ghadeer Ahmed blamed the arrests on rising social pressures on women and “corrupt laws”. “[These laws] condemn people for their behaviour that may not conform to imagined social standards for how to be a ‘good citizen’ and a respectful woman,” she wrote in a Tweet.

According to a number of Hamas officials interviewed by Al-Monitor, the movement felt that it lacked the proper venue on other Palestinian, Arab and foreign media outlets to express its views, because those outlets are biased toward either the Palestinian Authority (PA) or Israel and limit their coverage to exposing the movement’s negative aspects, without any mention of its positive ones.

Hamas gives great importance to the media, and has tried on more than one occasion to pressure media outlets into adopting its point of view or political line. Its dispute with Fatah also compelled Hamas to try to control the Palestinian Journalists Syndicate in Gaza, where Fatah controlled the majority of board members. Hamas formed its own Journalists Syndicate board of directors in Gaza, composed of journalists affiliated with the movement and Islamic Jihad. But the experiment quickly proved to be a failure when the board announced its resignation several months later.

“The channel’s discourse will be different from the one adopted by other Hamas-affiliated media outlets. It will express the point of view of the government and will not be similar to that of the Hamas-affiliated Al-Aqsa satellite channel. We will try to focus attention on the human aspect and the suffering of people, as well as the positive qualities of Palestinian society in the Gaza Strip,”

“There was a clear mix-up, in Arab and foreign countries, between the stance of the Gaza government and that of Hamas as a movement, after the ouster of President Mohammed Morsi. As a result of satellite channels abroad being agreeable to the Muslim Brotherhood, and our lack of control over their editorial policies, it became necessary for us to have our own television channel that would target Arab and Western audiences and clarify the government’s stance independently.”

the Gaza government still bars the distribution of West Bank newspapers in Gaza, in retaliation for the PA’s ban on the distribution of Hamas-affiliated newspapers in the West Bank. Hamas continues to forbid Fatah-affiliated media offices from conducting business in Gaza, but has allowed some of their reporters to file from Gaza, in return for the Ramallah government allowing Al-Aqsa TV and Al-Quds reporters to work there

Tehran has previously lodged a complaint against Iran International over its programming, but Ofcom ruled that the London-based television network had not broken any rules.

British newspaper The Guardian reported in Oct. 2018 that Iran International had financial ties to MbS. The Guardian charged that the TV network was "being funded through a secretive offshore entity and a company whose director is a Saudi Arabian businessman with close links to the Saudi crown prince." A month later, Iran International issued a statement denying any links to any governments, including Saudi Arabia, and insisted that it "does not advocate any movement or party or government." Some of Iran International's high-profile staff have stirred controversy for often expressing opinions on social media that may be in contravention of the outlet's editorial guidelines.

Iranian authorities have long taken issued with foreign-based Persian-language news networks, accusing them of being tasked with attacking the Islamic Republic. Salami's warning to the Saudi royal family comes as Tehran and Riyadh are working toward mending relations and re-establishing diplomatic ties. The IRGC commander's apparent criticism of Saudi media indicates that it will be brought up in the anticipated next round of talks between the two sides in Iraq.

The tactic that producers developed was to move away from content solely made for state television — which potential audiences almost automatically consider regime propaganda — to creating small production studios that develop content not easily identifiable as pro-regime. These ad hoc production studios receive funding from the IRGC and the government's cultural budget, but they remain small and unidentifiable on purpose.

The protests that began on Dec. 28 in Mashhad were a response to Rouhani from hard-liners for his remarks on the budget as well as his other attempts to curtail hard-line forces. Much of the analysis on the reasons behind the sudden outpouring of protests points to its origin in hard-liners' attempts to organize anti-Rouhani rallies in the lead-up to the annual pro-regime 9 Dey rally, established by the supreme leader in 2009 to celebrate the suppression of the Green Movement. Indeed, Mashhad is notably home to two of Rouhani’s main rivals in the 2017 presidential elections, Ebrahim Raisi and Mohammad Bagher Ghalibaf. The intent was for the protests to culminate in a large 9 Dey rally, but despite the hard-liners’ intentions, once people went into the streets, they eventually began to chant slogans against the supreme leader and the regime as a whole.

Regime production studios have thus begun to create videos that highlight economic anxieties and attack Rouhani’s handling of the government. These slick new productions are meant to look critical, but in the end, they reinforce a belief in the virtues and the leadership of the supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Avant TV is only the latest example of the ways in which factionalism within the Islamic Republic and opposition to the regime play out in the media landscape.

Egyptian security authorities routinely surveil and target social media posts—particularly Facebook content—as a basis for the arrest and detention of Egyptian citizens. The state relies on provisions such as “spreading false news,” “joining a banned group” and “misuse of social media” to detain citizens for digital expression. These charges are found in the Penal Code, the Counterterrorism Law, and the Telecommunications Law, rather than new and highly publicized laws such as the Cybercrime Law and the Media Regulation Law.

Detainees held for digital expression violations by the SSP spend long periods in pretrial detention due to the unique procedural rules governing this body; many of these cases are never even brought to court

a dramatic increase in the use of a special prosecutorial body, the State Security Prosecution, to investigate digital expression cases.

The SSP is a special prosecutorial body which investigates and prosecutes cases related to national security and terrorism; it is notoriously subject to extraordinary procedural rules.

Egypt’s Prosecutor General issued a decree in 2018 directing prosecutors to focus on cases concerning the spread of false news. A “rumour collection network” was established for citizens to send in reports of false news and rumours to a WhatsApp number—effectively crowdsourcing surveillance to the civilian population.

Egyptian security authorities surveil online expression through technically unsophisticated strategies such as device seizures, observation of social media platforms, and informant networks. Demonstration events on Facebook, particularly during periods of heightened political tension, are routinely targeted by security authorities. Videos are also frequently targeted, as they are easily shared and accessed. Analysis of the dataset found three main types of arrests: mass arrests during periods of increased political tension; high profile figures targeted for their cumulative body of work; and individual posts that cause a citizen to be targeted.