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our audiences that authoritarian state-controlled media seek to influence

The first is regime elites. Authoritarian governments must always worry about their elites because any split among this group could lead to regime collapse. State-controlled media make it a mission to reassure these regime mainstays that the incumbent ruler stands secure

The second crucial audience is the populace at large. State-dominated media work to make mass audiences respect and fear the regime, but breeding apathy and passivity is just as important.

People are more likely to endorse authoritarian values after watching the movie 300, according to new findings published in the journal American Politics Research.

The students who watched 300 were more likely to endorse authoritarian views, the researchers found, while the opposite was true of students who watched V for Vendetta.

we should always be prepared to think critically about the messages we get in media.”“This is particularly the case with entertainment media because we engage with these films and television shows in a relatively passive way, which is to say we do not have our normal psychological defenses up as we might with news media.”

hus, while Chinese censors have declared the word Mubarak (along with “Egypt” and others) to be “sensitive” and have set up filters to delete any message that contains it, Chinese Web users, in their usual cat-and-mouse game, have invented witty substitutes. These include “Mu Xiaoping” and “Mu Jintao”—which, by playing on the names of China’s own autocrats, get around the censors and up the ante at the same time.

The Egyptian uprising is an awkward fact for China’s rulers because it undermines one of their favorite arguments.

The example of Tunisia raises a related question, equally awkward. For China’s rulers, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, the ousted dictator, would have been seen as following their own approach—the so-called “Chinese model” of economic growth combined with political repression—and having much success with it, or so it was assumed for many years. But the Tunisian people took to the streets to overthrow him. Did the people want something more than the Chinese model? How could that be?

The MENA online ecosystem is not a good place for freedoms or civil debate right now, to say the least. The Digital Authoritarianism collection I edited last year makes for grim reading. Many MENA states have set in place legal frameworks criminalizing online dissent (and a lot more than just dissent). The pervasive use of Israeli-designed digital surveillance tools has turbocharged the ability of autocratic regimes to spy on their citizens (or on anyone else). Online discourse is plagued by armies of bots and trolls. And the suppression of Palestinian activist content shows how social media platforms have proven an uneven playing field when it comes to content moderation. Apocalyptic takes on what Musk might do really do need to grapple with how terrible things already are.

Musk explained his approach to free speech in a recent tweet: “By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law.” That may sound good to some people in an American context, I suppose. But in the MENA, it would play directly into the hands of authoritarian regimes which have spent years constructing elaborate legal and normative frameworks to criminalize online dissent. Those laws don’t just ban violent hate speech, but range from political dissent, criticism of royal family members or the military, human rights monitoring, even dancing on TikTok. Following these cybercrime laws as a guide to content moderation would entail censoring a wide range of legitimate political speech - the opposite, presumably, of what an avowed free speech advocate would want to see.

If new Twitter policies drawn from the right wing understanding of the American online arena were applied consistently in the MENA context, it could potentially ease the suppression of Palestinian voices. I mean, that wouldn’t be the intention and it probably wouldn’t, but it’s worth thinking about.

Activists were able to organize and mobilize in 2011 partly because authoritarian governments didn’t yet understand very much about how to use social media

“The activists’ accounts on Twitter and Facebook are very active and they have a lot of followers, but they cannot drive masses,”

governments have also become adept at using those same channels to spread misinformation. “You can now create a narrative saying a democracy activist was a traitor and a pedophile,” says Anne Applebaum, an author who directs a program on radical political and economic change at the Legatum Institute in London. “The possibility of creating an alternative narrative is one people didn’t consider, and it turns out people in authoritarian regimes are quite good at it.”

Modern communications technologies are already being deployed as new forms of repression.

not all blogs are revolutionary. China, Iran, and Russia all have bloggers who are more authoritarian in their views than their governments are. Some of these governments are even beginning to follow the path laid by Western corporations, actively deploying regime-friendly bloggers to spread talking points. Is this “samizdat”? Cold War baggage, in short, severely limits the imagination of do-gooders in the West. They assume that the Internet is too big to control without significant economic losses. But governments don’t need to control every text message or email. There’s a special irony when Google CEO Eric Schmidt suggests—as he did in a speech to the Council on Foreign Relations last November—that China’s government will find it impossible to censor “a billion phones that are trying to express themselves.” Schmidt is rich because his company sells precisely targeted ads against hundreds of millions of search requests per day. If Google can zero in like that, so can China’s censors.

modern authoritarian governments control the web in ways more sophisticated than guard towers

Since the 2013 coup, Egyptian news outlets have mostly served as pro-government propaganda tools, supporting the government right through its worst human rights violations.It may come as a surprise, then, that some Egyptian news coverage has started to take jabs at the government, including, at times, current President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi.

Media personalities are beginning to hold Sisi’s government to account because government repression has started to hit closer to home.Most mainstream Egyptian media personalities are passionately anti-Islamist, and openly supported the 2013 coup that removed Islamist president Mohamed Morsi from office. For nearly three years, Egyptian journalists have been silent about human rights violations against Morsi’s Islamist supporters. At times, Egyptian media have openly supported mass killings, irregular trials and other transgressions.However, in recent weeks, the Sisi government has committed transgressions against non-Islamists, with whom Egyptian media personalities relate. Several prominent writers have been given jail sentences, the judiciary sentenced a toddler to life in prison, an Italian graduate student was tortured to death (most likely by Egyptian security forces), and doctors were roughed up by Egyptian police, among other disturbing violations.

For two years following the coup, both the Egyptian government and its obsequious media apparatus scapegoated the Brotherhood, blaming the group for myriad problems, including floods, power outages, and violence committed by ISIS.Given the time that has elapsed since the coup, and also the fact that the first several tiers of Brotherhood leadership are in jail, it is no longer plausible to blame the Brotherhood for many of the nation’s problems. As a natural course, Egyptians, including media figures, are beginning to turn their attention away from the Brotherhood and toward the government.

The scenes emerging from Iran today elicit a mix of reactions across a region still reeling from the dark legacy of the “Arab Spring,” which itself came on the heels of the “Green Movement” protests in the wake of Iran’s 2009 presidential election. Many Arabs cannot help but recall the sense of hope that reverberated from Tunisia to Yemen, only to be shattered by unyielding repression, war, and the resurgence of authoritarianism. Subsequent protest waves, including those that began in 2019 in Lebanon, Iraq, and Sudan, were similarly met with brutality, co-optation, and dissolution.

Over a decade on from the Arab uprisings, the path toward democracy and freedom for youth across the Middle East has become more treacherous than ever, as liberation movements find themselves fighting against stronger, smarter, and more entrenched regimes that have adapted to modern challenges to their domination.

Technologies that many hoped would help to evade state censorship and facilitate mobilization have been co-opted as repressive surveillance tools.

the central idea of journalism — the conviction, as my old boss Peter Kann once said, “that facts are facts; that they are ascertainable through honest, open-minded and diligent reporting; that truth is attainable by laying fact upon fact, much like the construction of a cathedral; and that truth is not merely in the eye of the beholder.”

the responsibility to separate truth from falsehood, which is never more important than when powerful people insist that falsehoods are truths, or that there is no such thing as truth to begin with

a period in which the executive branch of government is engaged in a systematic effort to create a climate of opinion against the news business

The regime has also been engaging in some rather transparent diversionary tactics which, again, don't look like the actions of an innocent party. 

Apparently based on the time-honoured principle that nobody ever criticises Egypt unless paid to do so, claims also began circulating that the 588 MEPs who voted for the European parliament's resolution had been bribed to support it by the Muslim Brotherhood. Ahmed Moussa, the TV host who had earlier interviewed fake witness Mohammed Fawzi, suggested this on his show and others joined in – including Hamdy Bakhait (a prominent MP, conspiracy theorist and former army general). Egyptian blogger Zeinobia commmented: "I got tons of MPs' statements in my inbox full of similar claims." Meanwhile, the semi-official al-Ahram newspaper published an article telling readers how the European parliament had "fallen into the trap" of the Muslim Brotherhood.

Like social scientists, the Egyptian authorities developed theories for the explosion of popular unrest in 2011. While political scientists have emphasised the spontaneity, courage and agency of ordinary citizens ... Egyptian security forces believe that the unrest was steered by well-organized political forces capable of manipulating the average citizen for political ends ... In the United States, these views are often dismissed as classic authoritarian propaganda. However, my research suggests that such anxieties are real and inform the way the Egyptian regime perceives threats. In particular, they make security forces highly attentive to ties between “foreign elements” and “mobilisable” sectors of society. It is possible that Regeni’s research activities were misinterpreted as groundwork for preparing a new uprising. He had built ties with local actors, attended meetings with labour activists and spoke excellent Arabic — an essential skill for a researcher, yet one that unfortunately tends to raise suspicions. 

A successful Canadian-founded tech company may have helped the Egyptian government block upwards of 34,000 internet domains in Egypt, as part of a co-ordinated state effort to silence opposition during Egypt’s constitutional referendum.

Citizen Lab’s investigation found “devices matching … Sandvine PacketLogic fingerprints were being used to block political, journalistic, and human rights content” in Egypt. Sandvine ultimately denied Citizen Lab’s findings, characterizing the research as “false, misleading, and wrong.” Citizen Lab, however, continued to express confidence in its conclusions, which it claimed had been confirmed by two independent peer reviews.

internet-monitoring organization Netblocks observed the blockage of Batel’s website in realtime. After 12 hours, the website was completely blocked on all four major Egyptian internet-service providers. The speed and efficiency with which the site was blocked rivals censorship regimes only in China and Turkey.

Testimonial narratives are an essential feature of intellectual life in post-totalitarian societies. Post-Soviet Eastern Europe, post-dictatorial Latin America, and post-Apartheid South Africa all witnessed a proliferation of autobiographical accounts by victims of the ancien régime, seeking to reclaim their public voice. Currently, post-Ben Ali Tunisia is witnessing the same phenomenon. More and more activists and intellectuals have begun reflecting on the past, in order to forge the country’s future. What is remarkable about this wave is the increasing number of women, including both activists and intellectuals, who have written autobiographical accounts of the uprising and its aftermath

For Tunisian activists and intellectuals, the urgency of remembering the past, in order to make sense of it, has been driven by the realization that authoritarianism can easily return in a different form

As violence was increasing on the religious right, politicians on the secular left were encumbered by internal disagreements and unable to muster an appropriate response. As a result, the “old left’s” weakness and concomitant rise of the Islamist right have figured prominently in the testimonies of Tunisian women activists and intellectuals. Indeed, the testimonies published so far have mostly been triggered by a fear of an Islamist takeover of Tunisia’s newly-liberated public sphere

Since 2013, Egypt has seen the worst human rights crackdown in the country’s history. The current regime has imprisoned thousands of political activists, criminalized demonstrations, and seized control over the media landscape in a successful effort to limit genuine political discourse. Today it is nearly impossible for any alternative narrative to penetrate conventional modalities of expression. As the state continues to close physical spaces and exert control over traditional media, alternative political voices have been forced to rely on digital platforms as a means to express themselves. In response, the state has turned its attention to these platforms.

Online censorship increased in 2017 when the websites of 21 independent media and political organizations were blocked inside the country in a single day. The number of blocked websites in Egypt has since surpassed 500. Large-scale phishing attacks are also frequently launched against Egyptian civil society, with attacks documented in 2017 and 2019. In 2018, several new laws were passed in Egyptian parliament limiting digital expression and inhibiting the right to privacy.

After compiling a dataset of 333 digital expression violations (including arrests, acquittals, prison sentences, investigations, fines, lawsuits, and pretrial detentions) in Egypt from 2011 until mid-2019, this report found the number of Egyptian citizens targeted by the state for digital expression has been steadily rising. Analysis of this data reveals a yearly increase in the number of digital expression violations, with a surge in the occurrence of these violations beginning in 2016 and continuing until mid-2019, when the data collection for this report ended.

Before the pandemic spread, a number of countries in the Middle East and North Africa had been experiencing a wave of public protests for more democratic and accountable rule akin to the so-called Arab Spring of 2011. "The crackdown started several months before the pandemic, but has been exacerbated by the emergency laws and extrajudicial tools regimes are employing under the guise of the pandemic," Sarah Yerkes, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace Middle East Program. 

"Regimes across North Africa are exploiting the pandemic to crackdown on activists, journalists, and anyone critical of the regime, particularly those using social media."

In Algeria, with the popular anti-government protest movement known as the Hirak put on hold for safety reasons since March, the repressive climate, arguably the worst in North Africa, has worsened with the continued arrests of journalists and activists, which has been a maintained pattern since President Abdelmadjid Tebboune took office in December.

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.

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.

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.

The Saudi woman who was sentenced to 34 years in prison for using Twitter appears to have been denounced to Saudi authorities through a crime-reporting app that users in the kingdom can download to Apple and Android phones.

The user told Shehab that he had reported her on the Saudi app, which is called Kollona Amn, or All Are Safe. It is not clear whether the Saudi officials responded directly to the report, but the 34-year-old mother was arrested two months later.

Her alleged crimes including using a website to “cause public unrest” and “assisting those who seek to cause public unrest and destabilise civil and national security by following their Twitter accounts” and by retweeting their tweets.

Turkey's parliament on Thursday approved a tough pre-election law that could see reporters and social media users jailed for up to three years for spreading "fake news".

cement the government's already-firm grip on the media eight months before a general election that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan enters trailing in the polls.

The Council of Europe said the measure's vague definition of "disinformation" and accompanying threat of jail could have a "chilling effect and increased self-censorship, not least in view of the upcoming elections in June 2023".