Skip to main content

Home/ Media in Middle East & North Africa/ Group items tagged guardian

Rss Feed Group items tagged

1More

Like? Iran's supreme leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei 'joins Facebook' | World news | guar... - 1 views

  •  
    He also joined Pinterest very recently, but hasn't posted http://pinterest.com/khameneiir/
1More

One World Media :: One World Media Week - 1 views

  •  
    RT@Tahrir_Square: Social Media Lessons for Development from the #Arab Spring 6.30-8pm Overseas Development Institute 111 Westminster Bridge Road, London SE1 7JD Three months on from the dramatic events in Egypt, ODI and One World Media bring together an expert panel to explore what changes to the media landscape in developing countries could mean for the future of development. Social media opens up new possibilities for getting around restrictive media laws, disseminating information and mobilising political movements. More established forms of media will also continue to empower citizens and encourage accountability. Access to technology is giving millions of people a chance to communicate beyond long established boundaries, but what will this mean for the role of media in developing societies? Chair Bettina Peters, Director, Global Forum For Media Development Panel James Deane, Head of Policy, BBC World Service Trust Mark Harvey, Executive Director, Internews Europe Ian Douglas, Technology Writer, The Telegraph Jonathan Glennie, Research Fellow,ODI and blogger, Guardian Development
3More

Syria's Twitter spambots | Jillian C York | Comment is free | guardian.co.uk - 1 views

  • In Morocco, Syria, Bahrain and Iran, pro-revolution users of the site have found themselves locked in a battle of the hashtags as Twitter accounts with a pro-government message are quickly created to counter the prevailing narrative
  • Another set of accounts, however, managed to inundate the #Syria tag. Using a Bahraini company, EGHNA, bots are sending messages – sometimes several a minute – using various Syria-related search terms.Under the heading "Success stories", the EGNHA website says:"LovelySyria is using EGHNA Media Server to promote interesting photography about Syria using their Twitter accounts. EGHNA Media Server helped LovelySyria get attention to the beauty of Syria, and build a community of people who love the country and admire its beauty. Some of their network members started translating photo descriptions and rebroadcasting them to give the Syrian beauty more exposure.LovelySyria is using their own installation of EGHNA Ad Center to generate the Twitter messages, their current schedule is two messages every five minutes."Other accounts, such as @SyriaBeauty, @DNNUpdates and @SyLeague, perform similar functions. Their messages are sometimes political, sometimes not, but all were created recently and all serve the purpose of diverting attention from the Syrian protests.
  • although Twitter shies away from moderating content and removing users, the search functionality favours users with a complete username, profile and photograph, and users who automate their tweets can be removed from search.
1More

Egyptian media gloats over fabricated Guardian articles | Mada Masr - 0 views

  •  
    I know Mayton a little. He always had a bad reputation among fellow journalists in Cairo. Note how innacurate the Egyptian media reports are on this story: treating it as a propaganda gift to justify the local line that foreign media are biased against Egypt.
2More

Arab spring leads surge in events captured on cameraphones | World news | The Guardian - 0 views

  • 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."
    • Ed Webb
       
      A quotation so good they used it twice? Editing matters, people!
6More

Off the record? Why online publishers should be careful with the delete key - 1 views

  • When I noticed their disappearance a few weeks ago I wrote to Huffington, asking the reason, and so far I have had no reply. Although deleted web pages can sometimes be retrieved from web archives such as Wayback, that is only feasible if you know they once existed and have the relevant URL. I'm not suggesting that articles on the internet should never be deleted or changed but that it should not be done lightly, and when it does happen, publishers should be prepared to justify their decisions in public. When I worked at the Guardian there were strict rules about this because it understood the need to have a record of published material that was as complete and un-tampered-with as possible. Once published, articles could be removed only  in very special circumstances (such as legal requirements) and if something was changed (because of factual errors, for example), readers had to be made aware of the change and when it happened. If we don't want to end up in book-burning territory, that is how it should be.
  • When I noticed their disappearance a few weeks ago I wrote to Huffington, asking the reason, and so far I have had no reply. Although deleted web pages can sometimes be retrieved from web archives such as Wayback, that is only feasible if you know they once existed and have the relevant URL. I'm not suggesting that articles on the internet should never be deleted or changed but that it should not be done lightly, and when it does happen, publishers should be prepared to justify their decisions in public. When I worked at the Guardian there were strict rules about this because it understood the need to have a record of published material that was as complete and un-tampered-with as possible. Once published, articles could be removed only  in very special circumstances (such as legal requirements) and if something was changed (because of factual errors, for example), readers had to be made aware of the change and when it happened. If we don't want to end up in book-burning territory, that is how it should be.
  • There's no doubt that today's social media contain a welter of trivia, often of no interest to anyone except the person who is posting. To view social media entirely in that light, however, is to grossly underestimate their power and importance. Social media also provide a running commentary on major events – through the eyes of ordinary people rather than elites.  There is no precedent for this. For the first time in history we have a vast public record of what masses of people are saying and thinking. This can be a valuable resource for current and future generations of researchers – if we preserve it intact.
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • Visitors to Huffington's website last May could have seen  this page (preserved here by the Wayback Machine) which lists Narwani's articles. Look at the same page today and they have all been deleted except for one which she co-authored with someone else. It's as if the other articles never existed.
  • concern about Facebook's deletion of various pages connected with the Syrian opposition, possibly at the behest of pro-Assad elements. Some of them have been listed by Felim McMahon of Storyful and the blogger, Brown Moses. McMahon points out that some of these have helped Storyful to corroborate (or not) various claims about the Syrian conflict, while Brown Moses notes that "nearly every Facebook page" reporting on the chemical attacks in Damascus last August has now gone. Alongside the fighting on the ground, there's also a propaganda war being fought over Syria – mostly via the internet. At first sight this might seem like a sideshow but, as in all wars, it's an integral part of the conflict. One individual heavily involved in the Syrian propaganda war on the pro-Assad side, through Twitter and various websites, is Sharmine Narwani (who I have written about previously, here,  here, here, and here). Among other things, Narwani wrote a dozen highly contentious articles for Huffington Post, some of them about Syria. Whether you like them or agree with them is beside the point. Whatever their merits or de-merits, they were examples of the sort of arguments being used by Assad supporters and the fact that Huffington, a major American website, saw fit to publish them at the time is also interesting and relevant. 
  • I'm not suggesting that articles on the internet should never be deleted or changed but that it should not be done lightly, and when it does happen, publishers should be prepared to justify their decisions in public.
5More

Egyptian state media backs military action as rival organs attacked | World news | The ... - 1 views

  • In an atmosphere of extreme polarisation, the country's state and many independent news organisations are now solidly backing the interim president Adly Mansour, who was installed by the army last week. TV channels sympathetic to Morsi's Muslim Brotherhood have been shut down.
  • Following the fall of Hosni Mubarak in February 2011, Egyptian state media first moved to support the military and then, after his election last June, to back Morsi. Al Ahram's current editor, Mamdouh al-Wali, was appointed as part of a process known as the "Brotherhoodisation" of key institutions. He has not been seen at the paper since the president's removal.
  • "The story of the state-owned media is really shameful," said Hani Shukrullah, who was sacked as editor of al-Ahram online this year. "You have the same administration and the same people who before 2011 were defending Mubarak and describing revolutionaries as depraved troublemakers moving to support the military and the revolution and then moving to the Brotherhood once Morsi came to power. Now they are moving back again.
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Newspapers backing the army's version of events this week – such as al-Dustour and al-Watan – were only a fortnight ago attacking Morsi every day.
  • The private TV stations don't tell the story. With the closure of the Islamist stations you really have to turn to CNN or al-Jazeera to see what the Islamists are saying and doing – except the footage of them committing atrocities
1More

Egyptian election: Politicians don't realise they could be tweeted out | Amira Nowaira ... - 0 views

  • The ruling National Democratic party, however, seems hopelessly out of touch with the times. It doesn't realise that the day might come when it could be tweeted out of power. Nor is it able to understand that it won't be able to station the country's security forces on the information superhighway as it does on Cairo's ring-roads.
1More

Shelina Zahra Janmohamed: I wanted to write about my experiences | guardian.co.uk - 0 views

  •  
    Muslim Woman fighting ignorance and manichaeism.
1More

Iran's hegemonic venture guardian.co.uk - 0 views

  • In the Arabic media, editorials condemned "Iranian irredentism" and drew comparisons with Saddam's ambitions and their catastrophic end.
1More

The BBC's Twitter slip: Peter Horrocks' lesson on private messages | Media | guardian.c... - 0 views

  •  
    More lessons in how not to use Twitter
2More

Voice from the grave: Sri Lankan journalist's final editorial | Comment is free | The G... - 0 views

  • When finally I am killed, it will be the government that kills me.
  • This is an edited version of an article published in the Sunday Leader editorial column on 11 January. Its author, who co-founded the paper in 1994, was killed three days earlier by unidentified gunmen as he drove to work. He is believed to have written the editorial just days before his death.
1More

Angry words on Twitter to be prosecution evidence in New York murder trial | Technology... - 0 views

  •  
    "Angry words on Twitter to be prosecution evidence in New York murder trial\n\nProsecutors intend to present court with tweets between victim Kwame Dancy and accused man Jameg Blake"
‹ Previous 21 - 40 of 104 Next › Last »
Showing 20 items per page