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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

As soon as the counting kicked off at the ballot boxes, Turkey’s Twitter timeline was swarming with reports of fraud, power outages, and paper ballots found in trash bins. Calls for people to go to local polling stations to watch the counting were circulating. And the mainstream media, with reports coming in from two news agencies, were reporting totally conflicting results. Journos asked its followers to tweet the results from ballot boxes. Citizens who were already at polling stations started taking pictures of the ballot box results and sent them to Journos, using the hashtag #SandıkTutanağı. Engin says they have never experienced such voluminous response from citizens on one day (bear in mind that they were actively reporting during the Gezi Protests). Thousands of reports reached Journos via Twitter, Facebook, Whatsapp, and SMS messaging only in a couple of hours.

As Journos kept on receiving and documenting those results through the early hours of 31 March, people in front of their television and computer screens witnessed this: in Ankara, where the votes had been swaying between the AKP candidate Melih Gökçek and the CHP’s Mansur Yavaş, vote-count pages stopped refreshing. At the time, a sizeable portion of votes were left to be counted in two neighborhoods that are CHP strongholds, and Gökçek was leading by only three thousand votes. For almost an hour, there was no incoming data. In the meantime, citizens reported that the Interior Minister, Efkan Ala, arrived at a polling station with riot police, while Melih Gökçek went to the building that houses the Supreme Electoral Board (YSK). When the data page was finally refreshed, people saw that all the results were uploaded at once, and Gökçek was leading by twenty thousand votes. Whether or not that pause meant fraud, people’s concerns with the process skyrocketed, and reports of ballot box results soared on Twitter.

the launch of Turkey’s first citizen vote counting system

Members of the collective see themselves as performing an essential storytelling role: providing coverage of police brutality and filling a media "vacuum". "There isn't a free media," founder member Omar Hamilton told me during a visit to the collective's workspace in Cairo. "We have to step in where we can to provide alternative narratives, to provide what we would see as the truth that's not being presented."

"There's nothing you can really do about it except run at the right time. Which is just after everyone else but not before it's too late,"

we needed a space to work out of and to host a library of revolutionary material and to archive everything we can, including mobile phone footage and news-quality material

McNally, of the New York Times, said citizen media was an "instant document" of a news event rather than a replacement for skilled photojournalism. She said: "Most amateur footage does lack the real smart interpretation of what it's like to be there."

The smartphone is more dangerous than Israel to them now.” (In December, Syria banned the iPhone, saying it was detrimental to the country’s stability.)

A report released last week by Paris-based media freedom group Reporters Without Borders (RSF) ranks Syria 176th in the world in terms of media freedom, a drop from last year's already dismal ranking of 173rd out of 179. When it comes to freedom of the media, Syria is now the worst country in the Middle East, ranking just below Iran. And internationally, it fares better than only Turkmenistan, North Korea and Eritrea, described by the report as “absolute dictatorships that permit no civil liberties.”

In a report issued in November, Reporters Without Borders urged foreign journalists to take utmost care in protecting local sources. The non-governmental organization noted: “If a foreign reporter is arrested in Syria, he faces a few days in detention and then deportation. But Syrians pay a much higher price for their involvement.”

while viewership for TV news still easily outpaces those consuming news on YouTube, the video-sharing site is a growing digital environment where professional journalism mingles with citizen content.

Other popular news events included the Russian elections, unrest in the Middle East, the collapse of a fair stage in Indiana and the crash of an Italian cruise ship.

"One of the things that emerges here is the power of bearing witness as a part of a news consumption process,"

Speaking on a panel called "New Media as a Strategic Weapon," Benayahu told the audience in Herzliya that Israeli soldiers are now forced to be more aware of the fact that new media users can be documenting their actions at all times.

"Visual material is what is most compelling online. It's evidence. It's proof in a way that a written statement isn't. If there is a big operation going on and we can provide visual evidence of what's happening, then other people can use that to make arguments and discuss things."

"Our version is supported by named sources and with medical documents. In a properly functioning society, the army's version, which has been spread by anonymous sources, would not be considered worthy of publication,"

For all of our talk about “the world watching”, what good did social media actually do for the people of Iran? Did the footage out of the country actually change the outcome of the elections? No. Despite a slew of YouTube videos and a couple of thousand foreign Twitter users turning their avatar green and pretending to be in Tehran, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is still in power. It’s astonishing, really. Despite how successful ten million actual voters marching through Washington, London and other major cities in 2003 were in stopping the invasion of Iraq, a bit of entirely virtual cyber-posturing by foreigners didn’t lead to real change in Iran.