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Ed Webb

Lebanon: Is Politics a Social Media Taboo? · Global Voices - 1 views

globalvoicesonline.org/...-politics-a-social-media-taboo

blogging politics Lebanon bloggers media socialmedia publicsphere

shared by Ed Webb on 18 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • Bloggers stopped writing about politics because they are becoming Twitter friends, and they are realizing that their sharp divisions are making it awkward to write their real point of view in polite social media company
  • the people DO NOT know how to talk, or accept, the opinions of others
  • there is a thriving online Lebanese political blogosphere, with renowned political bloggers such as Qifa Nabki, Angry Arab,  Nadine Moawad, Land and People, and Beirut Spring himself. The bloggers themselves are not only an indication of an active political discussion. One simply needs to look at the number of comments their posts generate to capture a greater sense of the conversation. Easier to avoid debate There is, however, the counter to this argument - as put forward by Beirut Drive By - that only political bloggers are free to post their opinions, thus making a distinction between political and apolitical blogs: Politics is largely off-limits unless you are a political commentator/blogger. There are a few political angles, women’s rights, or palestinian rights that seem to be acceptable to talk about, that is as long as you agree with what’s being said. It’s just easier to avoid politics and just stick to talking about ads or restaurants or what the traffic is like today.
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • 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
  • Ed Webb on 18 Mar 11
     
    Apathy? Social pressure to conform? Politics moving to a different level/site?
Ed Webb

Blogger becomes latest victim of Turkish Internet bans - Hurriyet Daily News and Econom... - 0 views

www.hurriyetdailynews.com/n.php

Turkey censorship Blogger blogs

shared by Ed Webb on 03 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • A spat over rights to broadcast Turkish football matches has led a local court to issue a blanket ban on the popular blogging platform Blogger, angering Turkish Internet users with what experts said was a disproportionate response.
  • There are more than 600,000 Turkish bloggers actively using Blogger and some 18 million users from Turkey visited pages hosted by the site last month
  • “If two people plan a criminal activity on the phone, should we ban the use of telephones all over the country?” asked Deniz Ergürel, the secretary-general of the Media Association.
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  • Bloggers and their readers reacted angrily and quickly to the court decision, with nearly 9,000 users of the social-networking website Facebook joining a group called “Do not touch my blog” in less than two days after the decision was announced. Similar campaigns have also been created on other websites, such as Twitter
  • No company’s copyrights should come before me expressing my thoughts
  • “We would not see such a phenomenon [like this court decision] in more developed democracies, such as in the EU countries,”
Ed Webb

Tunisia: End prosecution of bloggers for criticizing government's response to COVID-19 ... - 0 views

www.amnesty.org/...overnments-response-to-covid19

Tunisia authoritarianism politics media censorship bloggers rights pandemics

shared by Ed Webb on 23 Apr 20 - No Cached
  • Last week, two bloggers were detained and are facing several criminal charges of "insulting state officials", "causing disturbances to the public" and defamation. They have been charged for posting videos on social media alleging that the government has failed to provide adequate compensation to people struggling financially and address shortage of basic food supplies in the market amid COVID-19 pandemic.
  • Within the region, Tunisia enjoys a relatively high degree of political freedom. However, the past two years have seen a number of criminal prosecutions related to freedom of expression – many of which have used outdated laws from the era of ousted President Ben-Ali to prosecute critics for defamation and insulting state officials and institutions.
  • On 13 April, blogger Anis Mabrouki posted a video on his Facebook page showing a crowd of people standing in front of the building of the closed mayor's office in Tebourba (a town 30 km from the capital Tunis), demanding financial aid which had been promised by the government amid the COVID-19 lockdown. The next day he received a summons letter from the authorities after the mayor pressed charges against him.
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  • charged with "causing noises and disturbances to the public" and "accusing public officials of crimes related to their jobs without furnishing proof of guilt" under Articles 316 and 128 respectively of the Penal Code
  • Another female blogger and political activist, Hajer Awadi, posted a video on her Facebook page on 12 April where she spoke about her documentation of the government's corruption and poor distribution of basic foodstuff in her region, Le Kef, in the North West of Tunisia. In the video, she also alleges that the local police assaulted and threatened to arrest her and her uncle when they went to complain about corruption.
  • charged them with “insulting a civil servant” under article 125 of the penal code and “causing noises and disturbances to the public” under article 316 of the penal code. They face up to a year in prison and a fine
  • Tunisia's 2014 Constitution guarantees the right to freedom of expression under Article 31.  Tunisia is party to the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (ICCPR), which also guarantees the right to freedom of expression
Ed Webb

Tunisian Journalists and Bloggers Suspend Their Hunger Strike : Tunisia Live - 0 views

www.tunisia-live.net/...rs-suspend-their-hunger-strike

Tunisia censorship journalists bloggers law policing

shared by Ed Webb on 12 Jun 12 - No Cached
  • Bettibi announced that he got his cameras back under an initiative from the presidency a few days after he began the hunger strike. “It is not because of the cameras that I started the hunger strike, but because of the principles that we stand for and we are fighting for,” explained Bettibi. Members of the Constituent Assembly requested the bloggers to suspend their strike, saying that they would take up the activists’ cause. Among the representatives supporting Bettibi’s case were Samir Betaib, Abderraouf Ayadi, Karima Souid, and Mahmoud Baroudi.
  • Bettibi said that he and the other bloggers initiated the hunger strike to fight for the people’s right to know the truth about the trial. “We demand to know the truth, it is every Tunisian’s right to know the truth about who killed the protesters and who gave the order to shoot people,” he said. He also added that the trials should be open to the public. “It is every Tunisian’s right to see what is happening inside the court and know the truth,”
Ed Webb

Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...21blog.html

blogging socialmedia generations

shared by Ed Webb on 21 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • bloggers often use Facebook and Twitter to promote their blog posts to a wider audience. Rather than being competitors, he said, they are complementary.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 21 Feb 11
       
      Exactly. Different functions, different niches. Use the right tool for the job, not one tool for everything.
  • Among 34-to-45-year-olds who use the Internet, the percentage who blog increased six points, to 16 percent, in 2010 from two years earlier, the Pew survey found. Blogging by 46-to-55-year-olds increased five percentage points, to 11 percent, while blogging among 65-to-73-year-olds rose two percentage points, to 8 percent.
  • “If you’re looking for substantive conversation, you turn to blogs,” Ms. Camahort Page said. “You aren’t going to find it on Facebook, and you aren’t going to find it in 140 characters on Twitter.”
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  • “The act of telling your story and sharing part of your life with somebody is alive and well — even more so than at the dawn of blogging,” Mr. Rainie said. “It’s just morphing onto other platforms.” The blurring of lines is readily apparent among users of Tumblr. Although Tumblr calls itself a blogging service, many of its users are unaware of the description and do not consider themselves bloggers — raising the possibility that the decline in blogging by the younger generation is merely a semantic issue.
  • Blogger, owned by Google, had fewer unique visitors in the United States in December than it had a year earlier — a 2 percent decline, to 58.6 million — although globally, Blogger’s unique visitors rose 9 percent, to 323 million.
  • some blogging services like Tumblr and WordPress seem to have avoided any decline. Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic, the company that commercializes the WordPress blogging software, explains that WordPress is mostly for serious bloggers, not the younger novices who are defecting to social networking.
Ed Webb

Global Voices Advocacy » Egypt: A Blogger Disappears After His Release - 0 views

advocacy.globalvoicesonline.org/...-disappeared-after-his-release

egypt bloggers blogging rights activism repression censorship

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Apr 09 - Cached
  • Although he was released by the Public Prosecutor, Egyptian blogger Abdel Rahman Fares (25 ) is still missing. Fares who blogs at Lesani Howa Qalami (My Tongue is My Pen) was arrested on April 5, while handing out flyers in his city of Fayoum, calling people to take to the streets and protest against the government, as a part of the “6th April strike”.
  • The missing blogger used to write about activists who have been arrested. He is now one of them.
Amira AlTahawi

Middle East Bloggers: The Street Leads Online - Reports - Committee to Protect Journalists - 0 views

cpj.org/...rs-the-street-leads-online.php

media Blogs bloggers freedoms journalists egypt arabmedia

shared by Amira AlTahawi on 14 Oct 09 - Cached
  • Amira AlTahawi on 14 Oct 09
     
    "Middle East Bloggers: The Street Leads Online In the Middle East and North Africa, where political change occurs slowly, blogging has becomes a serious medium for social and political commentary as well as a target of government suppression. By Mohamed Abdel Dayem"
Ed Webb

Tunisian Bloggers Discuss Open Data Two Years After the Revolution - Tunisia Live : Tun... - 0 views

www.tunisia-live.net/...nges-of-open-data-two-years-on

Tunisia media politics data activism citizenJournalism

shared by Ed Webb on 08 Jan 13 - No Cached
  • Prior to and throughout the popular uprisings that shook Tunisia and ousted former president Zine el Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011, Tunisian bloggers, cyber-activists and social network users took it upon themselves to take on roles unfilled by state-owned media.
  • “A blogger today is expected to change the world,”
  • citizen-journalism
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “Unfortunately, transparency seems to be new to our culture… I am disappointed open data has not become successful nationwide still, since the revolution,”
Ed Webb

یک فتحی » آرشیو وبلاگ » Persian blogs on Bluehost will be going down - 0 views

1fathi.com/...on-bluehost-will-be-going-down

blogs bloggers blogging Iran

shared by Ed Webb on 01 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Since last week, Blue Host, the hosting service which is used for this very blog [and Kamangir as well], and the number one recommendation for Wordpress hosting by Wordpress itself, has adopted a policy of suspending its Iranian users. In some cases the bloggers have been given a short notice in order to back up their data and leave. This is despite Bluehost’s good reputation in the blogosphere. The matter of fact is that many of these bloggers, including Arash Kamangir who blogs at kamangir.net, have no connection to the Iranian administration and have had to take use of a foreign hosting service in order to freely express their opinions. The important factor is that Bluehost is not committing any illegal action. What is being done is exactly what article 13 in Bluehost Terms of Service mandates. The article does explicitly mention Iran among the sanctioned countries, Sanctioned Countries presently include, among others, Balkans, Belarus, Burma, Cote d’Ivoire (Ivory Coast), Cuba, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iran, Iraq, former Liberian Regime of Charles Taylor, North Korea, Sudan, Syria, and Zimbabwe…Each Sanctioned Country, all governmental, commercial, or other entities located therein, and all individuals located in any Sanctioned Country are hereby prohibited from registering or signing up with, subscribing to, or using any service of BlueHost.Com.
  • The Persian Bloggers who use Bluehost are dispersed all over the world and produce content for people from Iran, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and other countries. The action taken by Bluehost, while entirely legal, will harm the Persian blogosphere.
  • Ed Webb on 01 Mar 09
     
    Ownership matters. Pay attention to the infrastructure as well as what it carries, to the medium as well as the message.
Ed Webb

Global Voices Gathers Information From Citizens All Over the Globe - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...14voices.html

socialmedia media journalism bloggers censorship advocacy

shared by Ed Webb on 16 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • “Our job is to curate the conversation that is happening all over the Internet with people who really understand what is going on,” said Rebecca MacKinnon, a former Tokyo bureau chief for CNN who founded Global Voices with Ethan Zuckerman, a technologist and Africa expert, while they were fellows at Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society. “We amplify, contextualize and translate what these conversations are and why they are relevant.”
  • “We don’t parachute in. We are there all the time. “
  • Mr. Sigal said that having editors work with volunteer bloggers brought traditional journalistic values to the operation, like checking facts and sources. “But it is less about a finished story and more about a conversation,” he said. “When we build a story, we include links back to the original sources, so you can follow the story as far down as you want to. We want you to leave our site and go find the original, find more.”
  • ...5 more annotations...
  • “It turns out that it is much more critical than they had imagined because the other international news sources are being dismantled.”
  • 18-hour days for Ms. Hussaini, whose work is now followed closely on the site and on Twitter by journalists from traditional media organizations, including Andy Carvin of NPR, who has been regularly curating and publishing posts on Twitter, creating a news wire about the unrest in the region for weeks.
  • “The citizen media scene is small in Libya,” Ms. Hussaini said. “We find it very difficult to find voices here and in other places where there is a lot of censorship and a lot of fear from the regime. Bloggers being arrested is a fact of life in some countries.”
  • Global Voices Advocacy is run by Sami Ben Gharbia, a highly respected blogger who is a founder of Nawaat, a blog about Tunisia, and an activist who until recently lived in exile from Tunisia for 13 years.
  • “People are not always interested in knowing what is happening in Yemen,” he said. “We have been waiting for people to pay attention to this corner of the world for a long time, and now we are ready to tell their stories.”
gweyman

Tunisia: Bloggers Join Election Race · Global Voices - 1 views

globalvoicesonline.org/...sia-bloggers-joi-election-race

tunisia democracy elections blogger

shared by gweyman on 07 Oct 11 - No Cached
  • gweyman on 07 Oct 11
     
    Bloggers form the vanguard of democratic transition in Tunisia.
Ed Webb

Mapping Iran's Online Public: Politics and Culture in the Persian Blogosphere | Berkman... - 1 views

cyber.law.harvard.edu/...Mapping_Irans_Online_Public

iran berkman blogosphere mapping blogs bloggers politics

shared by Ed Webb on 04 Jun 09 - Cached
  • We label the poles as 1) Secular/Reformist, 2) Conservative/Religious, 3) Persian Poetry and Literature, and 4) Mixed Networks.
  • Surprisingly, a minority of bloggers in the secular/reformist pole appear to blog anonymously, even in the more politically-oriented part of it; instead, it is more common for bloggers in the religious/conservative pole to blog anonymously.
Ed Webb

Notes on Syrian Bloggers Campaign Against Homosexuality « Anarchist Queer Fro... - 0 views

razanghazzawi.com/...campaign-against-homosexuality

blog bloggers blogging Syria identity sexuality sex virtuality politics social

shared by Ed Webb on 18 Mar 09 - Cached
  • Ed Webb on 18 Mar 09
     
    Essential reading
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