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A Twitter account has been attacking journalists, professors, analysts, activists and human rights advocates who do not share its operators' strong views against the Iranian government. It has a modest reach of about 1,650 followers, but until Friday it was funded by the US State Department.

US government suspended funding for the account, IranDisinfo

"They're creating their own echo chamber, and it appears that they're funding it," said Ryan Costello, policy director at the National Iranian American Council (NIAC). NIAC, which advocates an anti-war position with Iran but also denounces human rights abuses by the Islamic Republic, has received the lion's share of the account's attacks on critics of President Donald Trump's hardline Iran policies.

Tunisia has secured greater press freedom than many of the Arab Spring countries, but local journalists told CPJ that with elections slated for this year, challenges including funding, transparency, and government pressure remain

Despite a ban on foreign funding, many of the independent journalists who spoke with CPJ said they believe Gulf money is secretly pouring in to campaigns, although they often lack the means to expose it. Businessmen and politicians are also using privately owned media companies and the government is harnessing public broadcasters to further their political agendas.

Broadcast regulator HAICA (the Independent High Authority of Audiovisual Communication) pulled the license of privately owned TV channel Nesma in July 2018, for pushing the political agenda of its owner Nabil Karoui, who planned to run for president. Police raided the station in April, but the channel is still on the air, only without a license

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.

Al Manthari has paid the price for America’s shoot-first-ask-no-questions-later system of remote warfare. The irreparable damage to his body left Al Manthari unable to walk or work, robbing him of dignity and causing his daughters — ages 8 and 14 at the time of the strike — to drop out of school to help care for him. The psychological impact of the strike has been profound, leaving Al Manthari traumatized and in need of treatment. And the financial impact has been ruinous.

While the U.S. has millions of dollars in funds earmarked for civilian victims of U.S. attacks, the military ignored pleas on Al Manthari’s behalf, leaving the 56-year-old to rely on a GoFundMe campaign earlier this year to save his life

Since at least World War I, the U.S. military has been paying compensation for harm to civilians. During the Vietnam War, solatia payments, as they are called, were a means for the military to make reparations for civilian injuries or deaths without having to admit guilt. In 1968, for example, the going rate for adult lives was $33. Children merited half that.

After Iranian lawmakers suggested last year that face recognition should be used to police hijab law, the head of an Iranian government agency that enforces morality law said in a September interview that the technology would be used “to identify inappropriate and unusual movements,” including “failure to observe hijab laws.” Individuals could be identified by checking faces against a national identity database to levy fines and make arrests, he said.

Iran’s government has monitored social media to identify opponents of the regime for years, Grothe says, but if government claims about the use of face recognition are true, it’s the first instance she knows of a government using the technology to enforce gender-related dress law.

Mahsa Alimardani, who researches freedom of expression in Iran at the University of Oxford, has recently heard reports of women in Iran receiving citations in the mail for hijab law violations despite not having had an interaction with a law enforcement officer. Iran’s government has spent years building a digital surveillance apparatus, Alimardani says. The country’s national identity database, built in 2015, includes biometric data like face scans and is used for national ID cards and to identify people considered dissidents by authorities.

representatives from the Polish Film Institute, which provided Heymann with a grant of NIS 188,000 [$54,500] to make the film several years ago, suddenly insisted upon seeing the film, stormed out in the middle of the screening, and demanded their money back, since the film includes experts who claim it was uncommon for Poles to save Jews during the Holocaust.

Poland finds itself firmly in the grip of an ultra-nationalist right-wing government. Embedded in this regime is a desire to retell the story of the Holocaust by portraying Poland and the Polish people in a better light — and the most effective way of going about this is to clamp down on critics, police the public discourse, and control the historical narrative.

I’m in the throes of an artistic, political, financial, and international crisis. I didn’t know that my film, “High Maintenance,” would create such drama. How could one know? Dani’s work was never executed because of the political situation in Poland. The commissioner of his work, an American Polish Jew living in the United States, was supposed to pay for this big monument. He decided in the end to cancel the project because he realized that the Polish government would take advantage of Dani’s work to convince everybody that Poland was one big righteous nation during World War II, and that everyone was busy risking their lives to save Jews.

a rare public glimpse of how Israel and its American allies harness Israel’s influential tech sector and tech diaspora to run cover for the Jewish state as it endures scrutiny over the humanitarian impact of its invasion of Gaza.

reveal the degree to which, in the tech-oriented hasbara world, the lines between government, the private sector, and the nonprofit world are blurry at best. And the tactics that these wealthy individuals, advocates, and groups use -- hounding Israel critics on social media; firing pro-Palestine employees and canceling speaking engagements; smearing Palestinian journalists; and attempting to ship military-grade equipment to the IDF -- are often heavy-handed and controversial.

Members of the hasbara-oriented tech world WhatsApp group have eagerly taken up the call to shape public opinion as part of a bid to win what’s been described as the “second battlefield” and “the information war.”

The security logic seems to suggest that one cannot be sure that a researcher working on Islamic endowments in the 15th century isn’t really a spy — he might be looking for maps of Siwa, Halayib and Shalatin, the Yaghbub Oasis, or Tiran and Sanafir. Since we have border disputes with all our neighbors, not only can you not copy maps related to any border issue, you can’t conduct research on any topic vaguely connected to borders.

The security logic doesn’t stop at maps and borders. It casts suspicion on every topic. An Egyptian colleague working on Mamluk history was denied a research permit. An American colleague was denied a permit for a project on the history of private presses in the 19th century. A student of mine studies the history of the Labor Corps during World War I; his permit was also rejected

The official’s response (I paraphrase) was:Here’s someone studying the history of irrigation, and we have a dispute with Ethiopia over the Nile waters. We have no doubt that this student is honest and isn’t a spy, but how can we be sure that his thesis won’t fall into malicious hands, that it won’t contain information that could harm us — for example, info about Ethiopia’s right to the Nile waters? Such details could damage our negotiating position. Of course, we know employees at the National Archives are sincere patriots, and the same is true of most professors and students doing research there, but we have considerations that no one understands but us.

“Before the revolution Touati had a pro-Ben Ali editorial line, which showed in the columns that he wrote. Now he is absolutely pro-Ennahdha,”

“I think that we should judge the political intention behind these appointments. It is a strategy to strike down press freedom again. We need reform and not manipulation of the media,”

“I am here to support freedom of the press. We suffered from the same issue, with press being controlled, during the regime of Ben Ali. Now the government is resorting to the same practices once again,”

Ben Ali’s regime deployed the surveillance gear to demonstrate its power, Wagner says. Changing e-mails into nonsense, rather than luring dissidents into ambushes, created a pervasive unease, in which even spam could be perceived as the work of Ammar 404, he says.

“It leaves citizens in a persistent state of uncertainty about the security and integrity of their communications,” he says. Western suppliers used the country as a testing ground. Moez Chakchouk, the post-revolution head of the Tunisian Internet Agency, says he’s discovered that the monitoring industry gave discounts to the government-controlled agency, known by its French acronym ATI, to gain access. In interviews following Ben Ali’s ouster after 23 years in power, technicians, activists, executives and government officials described how they grappled with, and in some cases helped build, the repressive Wonderland.

Saadaoui, who has a master’s degree in computer science from Michigan State University, says he helped procure and set up the system that captured and changed e-mails. It uses a technique called deep-packet inspection, which peers into the content of communications and sends suspect e-mails to the Interior Ministry. During an hour-long interview in his office at the National Telecommunications Agency, he describes a monitoring room with metal bars on the windows and 20 desks, where staffers review the e-mails in an array of languages. “They were able to read why it was blocked and decided whether it should be re-routed to the network or deleted,” he says. “Or changed.”

We all grew up with the standard formula: journalism plays a crucial role in making western democracies work by providing citizens with the information that enables them to make informed judgments about urgent issues of general interest. Therefore, the fundamental question for those who study the western new media is: Do they in fact do what they are supposed, and claim, to do?

The crucial western capitalist context in which the news media operate in Dutch society and which they fundamentally reflect, is the same as that of British and American societies. Economic and foreign policies in the three countries are much more alike than different. The Netherlands too avowedly promotes ‘free trade’ and ‘the spread of democracy’ to less fortunate countries. In the Netherlands too, neoliberal thinking dominates politics. Journalism in the three countries is also very much alike. The ruling professional ideology is ‘objectivity.’ The media are mostly privately-owned and depend on advertising revenue. In the name of ‘freedom of the press’, the government exercises restraint, taking the position that, as much as possible, the market should decide which publications live and die. But journalists and politicians are caught in a symbiotic relationship and the PR industry exerts a lot of covert influence on journalism. It was American journalist Ben Bagdikian, who claimed in his popular The Media Monopoly , now in its sixth edition, that continuing concentration in the American media industry amounts to a de facto news monopoly. As a result, American news reflects the interests of political and economic elites. Just like in the Netherlands, where media markets are dominated by a few big corporations.

The official version of Dutch media history maintains that the partisan journalism which was prevalent until the 1970s fell far short, because it was intimately tied to political parties. In the 1970s, journalism professionalized and since then it has done more or less what it is supposed to do. But this is a very partial account. Indeed, the partisan media hardly practiced journalism as we like to see it done: acting as the watchdog of democracy. But when journalism shrugged off its political ties, the market filled the vacuum, and far from the market functioning as an ‘engine of freedom,’ to use British scholar James Curran’s words - the market in reality amounted to yet another ‘system of control,’ to cite Curran once again. The commercial media’s primary task is not to provide the population with relevant, independently-gathered information. Their primary task is to deliver readers, viewers and listeners to advertisers. As a consequence, the media in the Netherlands are owned by rich corporations and persons who have a stake in maintaining friendly ties with other corporations and also the government, for access to powerful political sources needs to be kept at all costs. No wonder that the journalistic product reflects the interests of elites. The media are the elite, also in the Netherlands, its reputation of a progressive country regarding ‘cultural’ issues like abortion and the death penalty notwithstanding. Dutch journalism thus remains far from independent, at least, if we take Jurgen Habermas’ definition seriously, whereby a public sphere ‘can only approach autonomy if it is independent from both the state and commercial interests’. 

a poster held aloft at the Bakırköy rally: Seni bilen hayran, bilmeyen düşman. “Those who know you are your followers, those who don’t are your enemies.” What struck me about this slogan was that it perfectly summed up the strength of the political message Erdoğan is espousing. It is a mantra that encompasses both support and resistance; it presupposes, even requires, opposition, while simultaneously dismissing that opposition as illegitimate

his narrative becomes even stronger the more he is seen to be under attack by his “enemies.”

Erdoğan’s slogan of the “national will”—a concept that sounds deeply creepy concept to many people—is far more compelling and less nebulous to many Turks than notions such as “the separation of powers” and “the rule of law,” particularly given that law itself has been tainted by the motives of the Gülenists.

Facebook and Twitter might be the media keywords in these "Days of Anger," but in Egypt, television dominates as a way of disseminating information; it is why protests went on even when the government shut down the Internet and cell phone service. Al Jazeera's coverage has been characterized by its scope and commitment, as well as its timeline: on Friday, 28 January, while state TV ignored the protests, Al Jazeera broadcast constant live footage from the 6th of October bridge.

Al-Jazeera's "Gulf War moment"

Over the past twelve days, state television has been providing skewed coverage or willfully ignorant non-coverage of the demonstrations that has amounted to unabashed propaganda. Broadcasts have attempted to evidence some of the most destructive rumors: that protesters morphed into looters as soon as police were withdrawn; that foreign journalists were part of a conspiracy to overthrow the government; that the majority of Egyptians, Mubarak supporters, are being bullied and intimidated by thuggish activists whose uprising has paralyzed Egypt's economy. One protester described state TV to Moheyldin this way: "It would make Nazi propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels proud."

“The decision to try Asmaa Mahfouz is a major attack on free expression and fair trials, using the same abusive laws the Mubarak government used against its critics,” said Joe Stork, deputy Middle East director at Human Rights Watch. “The military is using her to silence potential critics, sending the message that criticizing the current military government will land them in jail.”

The military prosecutor questioned her for over three hours about her comments on Twitter and media interviews during protests on July 23 in which she criticized the military for failing to intervene to protect protesters.

Military courts have sentenced at least 10,000 civilians since January 2011 after unfair proceedings, Human Rights Watch said. All of them should be retried before regular civilian courts.

Iran has organized its own blogging competition, called "The Face of '89," in reference to the Persian calendar year 1389, which just ended on March 20. However, the rules of the competition stated that blogs that are blocked within the country - typically those that criticize the Iranian government - are not eligible to participate

While Iran's opposition and Green Movement has received a lot of attention for its speaking out against the government on blogs and other types of social media, conservative, Islamic and nationalistic blogs remain a prominent force on the Iranian Internet.

he Iranian government has been co-opting many of the online tools that they themselves abhor. In the wake of the June 2009 elections, for example, Iran's Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, began his own Twitter account in both Persian and English.

“in 2015, authorities detained two groups of foreign journalists attempting to report on the treatment of migrant workers in the country.”

Two other German journalists were detained in 2013 after filming the working conditions of migrant labourers.

All the newspapers printed in Qatar are owned by members of the ruling family or others closely connected with the government.

Turkey's media appears to be as divided as the wider country by the outcome of Sunday's local elections, with pro-government newspapers claiming victory for President Recep Tayyip Erdogan even as opposition commentators said that the electorate had handed him a "yellow card".

the opposition’s “Nation Alliance”, made up of the main opposition Republican People's Party (CHP) and the nationalist IYI party, proved resilient against the government's candidates and reclaimed key territories that have been under the control of Erdogan-affiliated parties for more than two decades

Sabah, which is owned by an Erdogan supporter and considered to be close to the government, described the election results as “Erdogan’s 15th victory,” referring to the president's string of election victories over the course of three decades in which the AKP has established itself as the dominant force in Turkish politics.

A federal court has held Syria’s government liable for the targeting and killing of an American journalist as she reported on the shelling of a rebellious area of Homs in 2012. The decision could help ease the way for war-crimes prosecutions arising from the Syria conflict.

awarded $302.5 million to relatives of the journalist, Marie Colvin. Of that sum, $300 million is punitive damages for what Judge Amy Berman Jackson, in her ruling, called “Syria’s longstanding policy of violence” that aimed “to intimidate journalists” and “suppress dissent.”

The large size of the award sends a message, he said, that “the rule of law is still a force to be reckoned with,” even amid a global trend toward authoritarianism and the killing of journalists like Jamal Khashoggi, the Saudi Arabian slain in his country’s consulate in Istanbul.