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they had shared and could recite the viral Facebook memes constructing an alternate reality of nefarious Muslim plots. Mr. Lal called them “the embers beneath the ashes” of Sinhalese anger

the forces of social disruption that have followed Facebook’s rapid expansion in the developing world, whose markets represent the company’s financial future. For months, we had been tracking riots and lynchings around the world linked to misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, which pushes whatever content keeps users on the site longest — a potentially damaging practice in countries with weak institutions.

Time and again, communal hatreds overrun the newsfeed — the primary portal for news and information for many users — unchecked as local media are displaced by Facebook and governments find themselves with little leverage over the company. Some users, energized by hate speech and misinformation, plot real-world attacks.

“Ever since the intifada broke out in Jerusalem, there has been an online virtual war between Palestinians and Israelis. Social networks are flooded with firsthand field news, while campaigns are launched on Twitter on a daily basis to put pressure on Israel and its supporters around the world.”

Raji al-Hams, a prominent presenter at Al-Aqsa TV, said his original Facebook page was closed down after it garnered 90,000 followers. He told Al-Monitor he received “a message Jan. 15 from the Facebook administration saying I had violated the website’s rules by posting [slogans] about the intifada along with pictures of armed Palestinians."

Israel has been urging dozens of Israeli Facebook users to submit reports to the Facebook administration claiming that Palestinian pages are inciting murder. These users mention the name of these pages in the reports and the Facebook administration shuts them down, as they contain posts inciting murder and violence, which violate Facebook’s conditions.

This latest push by Facebook to tie people to one identity across the interwebs is very troublesome.

The problem with tying internet-wide identity to a broadcast network like Facebook is that people don’t want one normalized identity, either in real life, or virtually.

Face it, authenticity goes way down when people know their 700 friends, grandma, and 5 ex-girlfriends are tuning in each time they post something on the web.

the US has found this year that online ads on social media websites like Facebook, rather than posts, are a cost-effective way to fight the propaganda of the Islamic State (IS) and other militant groups

Facebook's detailed metrics for advertisers helps the government campaign reach its targets - people who might be groomed online by militants."Using Facebook ads, I can go within Facebook, I can grab an audience. I can pick country X, I need age group 13 to 34, I need people who liked Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi or any other set, and I can shoot and hit them directly with messages," he said."In some places in the world, it's literally pennies a click to do it," he said.  

Facebook, he noted, offers the government access to affordable amassed and collated user data for singling out target groups and individuals for anti-militant ads the US government runs."The best I can do right now is to have access to big data and to use the analytics tools on the social media platforms, the Facebooks and the others,"

the Arab Network for Knowledge about Human Rights (ANKH), which has conducted the first survey of LGBT+ Arab Facebook users. More than 90% of the 450 Arabic speakers who responded had been targeted by hate speech on the platform, it found. A quarter of online hate speech in the Middle East and North Africa urged violence against LGBT+ people and 15% made direct threats. More than half the respondents reported feeling hopeless or depressed as a result and almost one in four had thought of self-harming.

Activists say Facebook can be an essential tool for LGBT+ people in the Arab world, where many face an oppressive legal and social atmosphere, and vague laws against indecency are often used to criminalize sexual activity. Strong social stigma around homosexuality, amplified by conservative religious entities, has led to low acceptance of gay people across the region. LGBT+ activists in the area risk social exclusion, prison sentences, and violence by security forces, according to Human Rights Watch.

Jillian York, director of international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group, said enforcing policies would require vast investment in language skills to navigate slang and dozens of dialects. "(Social media companies) are really bad at defining and dealing with incitement and dehumanizing language," she said, adding that Facebook "have a dearth of content moderators in a number of languages where they should have a lot more".

The social media giant finds itself under countervailing pressures after the uprisings in the Middle East. While it has become one of the primary tools for activists to mobilize protests and share information, Facebook does not want to be seen as picking sides for fear that some countries — like Syria, where it just gained a foothold — would impose restrictions on its use or more closely monitor users, according to some company executives who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing internal business.

Last week, Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, urged Facebook to take “immediate and tangible steps” to help protect democracy and human rights activists who use its services, including addressing concerns about not being able to use pseudonyms. In a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, Mr. Durbin said the recent events in Egypt and Tunisia had highlighted the costs and benefits of social tools to democracy and human rights advocates. “I am concerned that the company does not have adequate safeguards in place to protect human rights and avoid being exploited by repressive governments,” he wrote.

This is an incredible challenge and an incredible opportunity for Facebook, Twitter and Google,” said Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, where he works on projects about the use of technology and media in the developing world. “It might be tougher for Facebook than anyone else. Facebook has been ambivalent about the use of their platform by activists.

A young man in his twenties wanted to express his gratitude about the victories the youth of 25th of January have achieved and chose to express it in the form of naming his firstborn girl “Facebook” Jamal Ibrahim

While the baby girl could just have easily been called “YouTube,” “Twitter” “Google” or even “Cellphone Camera,” it seems like Facebook has become the umbrella symbol for how social media can spread the message of freedom. There are countless manefestation of this, the above graffiti in Cairo, “Thank you Facebook” protest sign, and Wael Ghonim himself personally expressing his gratitude to Mark Zuckerberg on CNN.

a scandalous abuse of power by Facebook to arbitrarily destroy online communities built up over many months and years

Ultimately, the anti-cuts movement in the UK will need to start organising through self-hosted, open source platforms to avoid reliance upon the very corporate power structures we are aiming to challenge

Chargé de la déontologie des contenus, le nouveau conseil de surveillance du réseau social compte parmi ses vingt membres l’ancienne directrice générale du ministère de la justice israélien. Sous les ordres de la ministre Ayelet Shaked, figure de l’extrême droite, Emi Palmor avait mis en place une cyberunité chargée de contrôler et censurer les posts de Palestiniens.

Sous la houlette d’une ministre qu’un journaliste de Tel-Aviv qualifie de « voix la plus extrémiste d’une extrême droite israélienne qui n’en manque pourtant pas », Emi Palmor se chargeait donc de traquer les Palestiniens sur les réseaux sociaux. Cette haut fonctionnaire dévouée à un gouvernement de guerre et d’occupation avait créé en 2016 une « cyber unit » « pour supprimer, restreindre ou suspendre l’accès à certains contenus, pages ou utilisateurs ».

« a délibérément ciblé et entraîné le retrait de dizaines de milliers de contenus palestiniens, et imposé de sévères restrictions à la liberté d’expression et d’opinion, en particulier en ce qui concerne la Palestine »

A lawsuit accusing Meta Platforms of enabling violent and hateful posts from Ethiopia to flourish on Facebook, inflaming the country’s bloody civil war, has been filed. The lawsuit, filed in Kenya’s High Court on Tuesday, was brought by two Ethiopian researchers and the Kenyan rights group the Katiba Institute.

Among the plaintiffs is Abrham Meareg, who said his father, Tigrayan academic Meareg Amare Abrha, was killed after Facebook posts referring to him using ethnic slurs were published in October 2021.

The lawsuit said the company failed to exercise reasonable care in training its algorithms to identify dangerous posts and in hiring staff to police content for the languages covered by its regional moderation hub in Nairobi.

Most international news organisations have no presence in the country (and, some say, a lack of interest in the protests). Media posted online by Tunisian web activists has been some of the only material that has slipped through the blackout, even if their videos and photos haven't generated quite the same enthusiastic coverage by Western media as the Iranian protest movement did in 2009.

Several sources Al Jazeera spoke with said that web activists had been receiving anonymous phone calls, warning them to delete critical posts on their Facebook pages or face the consequences.

Sami Ben Gharbia, who monitors Tunisia's web censorship for Global Voices, said that Google and Facebook were in no way complicit in the sophisticated phishing technique. The initial signs that something was underway came on Saturday, he said, when the secure https protocol became unavailable in Tunisia. This forced web users to use the non-secure http protocol. The government's internet team then appears to have gone phishing for individuals' usernames and passwords on services including Gmail, Facebook, Yahoo and Hotmail. Web activists and journalists alerted others of the alleged hacking by the government via Twitter, which is not susceptible to the same types of operations. "The goal, amongst others, is to delete the Facebook pages which these people administer," a Tunisian internet professional, who has also been in contact with Anonymous, told Al Jazeera in an emailed interview. The same source, who asked to remain unidentified due to the potential consequences for speaking out, said that in communication with the international group, he had come up with a Greasemonkey script for fireFox internet browsers that deactivated the government's malicious code.

Facebook "is a big, big thing that the Israelis use", says Ehab al-Hussein, a spokesman for the Hamas-run interior ministry. "Many people don't have security sense. They go on the internet and talk about all their personal problems such as with their wives or girlfriends," he says. Israel's intelligence services can then contact people by telephone, e-mail or using existing Israeli agents in Gaza, and use the information to pressure people to become spies.

the intelligence community's current thinking is that using personal information gleaned from the internet to pressure or even blackmail potential informants is not considered effective in recruiting long-term informants

Even Mr Hussein admits he has a Facebook page, "but I'm careful about the information I put on," he says. "I only say I am a Hamas spokesman."

"It would be extremely arrogant for any specific technology company to claim credit" for protest movements in the Arab world

"People are now having the opportunity to communicate" more widely than ever before, he said, adding: "That's not a Facebook thing. That's an Internet thing."

The picture above advertises a popular Turkish soap opera – Harim Soltan (the Sultan's harem).  But there is also a satirical version (below) in which the Sultan's face has been replaced with that of Algeria's president, Abdelaziz Bouteflika. Besides "Sultan" Bouteflika himself, it shows a few members of the president's "harem", including his brother Said, prime minister Abdelmalek Sellal and Amar Saidani, secretary general of Algeria's ruling party, the FLN ...

On October 4 last year, Algerian activist Zoulikha Belarbi posted the Photoshopped picture on Facebook with a comment saying: "I don't know when the Bouteflika soap opera will end and he will wake up from his false dream which has become a nightmare threatening the future of Algeria and her people." On October 20, police raided her family home in Tlemcen, arrested her and seized her computer, mobile phone and SIM card. She was held for 24 hours before being released under judicial supervision. "I was treated like a terrorist," she said later. Her case finally came to court last weekend, and she was fined 100,000 dinars ($905) for "undermining the president of the republic". 

The third weekly issue of Al-Wady newspaper, scheduled to hit the stands on Monday night, did not go to print, editor-in-chief Khaled al-Balshy told the privately owned Al-Masry Al-Youm daily on Tuesday. He added that he did not know why. This is the second time the printing of this issue has been halted after being sent to Al-Akhbar foundation printers, Balshy told privately owned newspaper Youm7.

Al-Wady, owned by businessman Tarek al-Nadeem, had advertised its print issue on its Facebook page, revealing many heated topics.

The issue included an investigation of the controversial AIDS cure announced by the military, a revisiting of the State Security building raids that occurred in 2011, and letters from detained activists Alaa Abd El Fattah and Ahmed Maher.

One takeaway: the debate over what real true role of the Internet (and Facebook, and Twitter) has been in this historic Egypt uprising has to include consideration of what the idea that is the Internet (and Facebook, and Twitter) means to the ones doing the rising up.