The Making of a YouTube Radical - The New York Times - 0 views
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Mr. Cain, 26, recently swore off the alt-right nearly five years after discovering it, and has become a vocal critic of the movement. He is scarred by his experience of being radicalized by what he calls a “decentralized cult” of far-right YouTube personalities, who convinced him that Western civilization was under threat from Muslim immigrants and cultural Marxists, that innate I.Q. differences explained racial disparities, and that feminism was a dangerous ideology.
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Over years of reporting on internet culture, I’ve heard countless versions of Mr. Cain’s story: an aimless young man — usually white, frequently interested in video games — visits YouTube looking for direction or distraction and is seduced by a community of far-right creators. Some young men discover far-right videos by accident, while others seek them out. Some travel all the way to neo-Nazism, while others stop at milder forms of bigotry.
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YouTube and its recommendation algorithm, the software that determines which videos appear on users’ home pages and inside the “Up Next” sidebar next to a video that is playing. The algorithm is responsible for more than 70 percent of all time spent on the site
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'The End': Anti-normalisation, Islamofuturism and the erasure of Palestine - Middle Eas... - 0 views
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The End (El-Nehaya), the Egyptian dystopian science fiction thriller series, has captured the imagination of audiences throughout the Arab world this Ramadan TV season. It is ranked the third most popular series this season, and has generated a lot of discussion in social media about its futuristic technology and debt to Hollywood science fiction and dystopian films.The End was also lumped into the debate over normalisation in this year’s Ramadanic TV programming and was attacked by the Israeli Foreign Ministry for its anti-normalisation stance. The End is premised on the fictional idea that the Arab world would become a superpower and that Israel would be destroyed less than a century into its establishment — that is, in less than thirty years. In its place, Al-Quds conglomerate will be created and will be under total Arab control.
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Some contrasted the daring futuristic scenario with the utter impotence of the Arab world today, to offer any viable solution to the Palestinian struggle for freedom and the ongoing Nakba. Others thought it was enough that the series managed to provoke and infuriate Israel.
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The series does not only substitute one form of domination in Al-Quds conglomerate for another. More importantly, the Palestinians are completely erased from Al-Quds conglomerate itself.
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U.S. Needs to Look Beyond Russia for Disinformation Culprits | Time - 0 views
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Russian disinformation may come first to mind for interfering in U.S. politics, but some of the most damning evidence of efforts to influence the American public leads to Washington’s allies in the Middle East. Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates are at the forefront of undermining democratic deliberation–from manipulating the impact of Donald Trump’s tweets, to tricking editors across the world into publishing propaganda.
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The FBI in 2019 found evidence that employees at Twitter’s San Fransciso headquarters, groomed with bribes such as luxury watches, were co-ordinating with members of the Saudi royal family to obtain private information from Twitter users. In August 2022, a jury found one of these men guilty. Two others couldn’t be tried because they were in Saudi Arabia.
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Cambridge Analytica’s parent company, SCL Social Limited, worked with the UAE to create a social media advertising campaign attacking Qatar, a Gulf rival that’s home of the largest U.S. military base in the region. Though better known its use of “soft power” through projects like Al Jazeera, Qatar has also been reported to use disinformation, as well as allegedly hacking the email of the Emirates’ powerful ambassador to Washington.
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A New History for a New Turkey: What a 12th-grade textbook has to say about T... - 1 views
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Rather than simply serving as crude propaganda for Erdoğan’s regime, Contemporary Turkish and World History aspires to do something more ambitious: embed Turkey’s dominant ideology in a whole new nationalist narrative. Taken in its entirety, the book synthesizes diverse strands of Turkish anti-imperialism to offer an all-too-coherent, which is not to say accurate, account of the last hundred years. It celebrates Atatürk and Erdoğan, a century apart, for their struggles against Western hegemony. It praises Cemal Gürsel and Necmettin Erbakan, on abutting pages, for their efforts to promote Turkish industrial independence. And it explains what the works of both John Steinbeck [Con Şıtaynbek] and 50 Cent [Fifti Sent] have to say about the shortcomings of American society.
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Turkey has long had competing strains of anti-Western, anti-Imperialist and anti-American thought. In the foreign policy realm, Erdogan’s embrace of the Mavi Vatan doctrine showed how his right-wing religious nationalism could make common cause with the left-wing Ulusalcı variety.[5] This book represents a similar alliance in the historiographic realm, demonstrating how the 20th century can be rewritten as a consistent quest for a fully independent Turkey.
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Ankara is currently being praised for sending indigenously developed drones to Ukraine and simultaneously criticized for holding up Sweden and Finland’s NATO membership. Contemporary Turkish and World History sheds light on the intellectual origins of both these policies
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Ukraine, Hamas wars provide unprecedented boom in violent video - The Washington Post - 0 views
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The wars in Israel and Ukraine have fueled an explosion in videos online showcasing the horrors of modern war, bringing killings and cruelty to a global audience of viewers who are unprepared — or all too willing — to watch.
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fighters use cellphones and GoPro cameras to record or live-stream footage from a point-blank perspective, either for purposes of military strategy or propaganda
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Basem Naim, the leader of Hamas’s international relations arm, told The Washington Post in an interview that the footage was shared on social media both to gain global attention and to embolden Hamas militants for the war ahead.“Who is terrorizing whom? We are the victims … of this huge killing machine,” he said. The videos “show that we can do something. It is not only we who are beaten all the time. No, sometimes we can also hit back.”
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Muzzled by the Bots - www.slate.com - Readability - 0 views
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It's through such combination of humans and bots that memes emerge
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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
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The digitization of our public life is also giving rise to many new intermediaries that are mostly of invisible—and possibly suspect—variety
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New Magazine Aims to Improve Education in the Arab World - Global - The Chronicle of Hi... - 0 views
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On Wednesday, Mr. Khalil canceled a higher-education conference that was to launch the new online publication because of concerns about academic freedom in the United Arab Emirates, where the event was to be held this weekend. That step came less than a week after a similar move by the London School of Economics and Political Science, which canceled a conference it had planned in Dubai after Emirati authorities requested that a presentation on Bahrain, which is facing political upheaval, be dropped from the program. A scholar on Arab politics from the London institution who was to speak at the event was briefly detained at the Dubai airport and barred from entering the country
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"We can't talk about upholding academic freedom and launch in Dubai. I don't think it sends the right message."
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Al Fanar will start as planned on March 3. It is the first major project of the Alexandria Trust, the charity Mr. Khalil founded in 2012 to improve education in the Middle East and North Africa
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Twitter and the Anti-Playstation Effect on War Coverage | technosociology - 1 views
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I’d like to argue that Television functions as a distancing technology while social media works in the opposite direction: through transparency of the process of narrative construction, through immediacy of the intermediaries, through removal of censorship over images and stories (television never shows the truly horrific pictures of war), and through person-to-person interactivity, social media news curation creates a sense of visceral and intimate connectivity, in direct contrast to television, which is explicitly constructed to separate the viewer from the events.
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the construction of the role of the anchor or the curator, and the role of content filtering.
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a very surreal and disorienting experience unless one has been thoroughly conditioned into accepting them as normal. All this positions the anchor between us and the event and signals to the viewer that the event is merely something to be watched, and then you move on.
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Arab Media & Society - 2 views
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tool in the hands of Arab states
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a subversive force was seen in the 1970s, when cassette tapes of preachers denouncing governments for tyranny and corruption spread in Egypt and Iran
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Arabic satellite news and entertainment media established by Gulf Arab states
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Turkey Detains 32 as Hacking Suspects - NYTimes.com - 1 views
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Turkey’s directorate of telecommunications, whose Web site was taken down on Thursday as part of a protest against what Anonymous says is government censorship of the Internet
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Turkey, whose ruling AK Party won a national election on Sunday, plans to introduce a new Internet filtering system in August, under which users will have to sign up for one of four filters: domestic, family, children and standard
Is Iran's halal internet possible? - Opinion - Al Jazeera English - 3 views
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though it is uncommon for a government to back down on censorship, there is precedent: In 2010, when Tunisia's government blocked Facebook, they were quickly forced into submission by street protests. And earlier this year, the Palestinian Authority was shamed into reversing a ban on a handful of opposition sites.
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when the tools of our everyday lives become collateral damage in governmental efforts to block speech, citizens take notice
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Iranians have developed a taste for the global internet. Despite an official ban on the site, Facebook is widely used (through the use of proxies and VPNs, which a reported half of Iran's population uses) and Twitter is increasing in popularity. Any attempt to block the social networks Iranians have become accustomed to would surely result in an uproar.
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