Group items tagged

you must admit that he got the highest viewership in Egypt tonight. Everybody was waiting for the show. Now there is viral status on the Facebook that the number of Youssef’s viewers tonight was more than the number of those participated in the latest constitutional referendum.

you must admit that he got the highest viewership in Egypt tonight. Everybody was waiting for the show. Now there is viral status on the Facebook that the number of Youssef’s viewers tonight was more than the number of those participated in the latest constitutional referendum.

Now speaking about the numbers  , you must know that both Bassem Youssef and “ElBernmag” hashtags as well “MBC Masr” have been trending for hours now in Arabic and English in Egypt. Here is map of the trends from Trends Map showing Egypt and its most popular twitter hashtags now.

The Turkish Radio and Television Corporation (TRT), Turkey’s public broadcaster, has cancelled a radio program featuring Turkish singer Sibel Tüzün because she supported an opposition hashtag after the cancelation of the results of the İstanbul mayoral election

Muhammet Safi, the head of the archives department at the Turkish presidency, on Tuesday tweeted a list targeting celebrities who had supported the opposition hashtag.

Hundreds of Egyptian tweeps began on Monday a new campaign on Twitter against Twitter MENA policies after a wide suspension of opposition and activists’ accounts in the popular social media network. The Egyptian tweeps launched  #WeWillSpeak” and #هنتكلم hashtags to reach out for Twitter in the United States.

several opposition and political activists' accounts were either permanently or temporarily suspended allegedly for violating Twitter policies

Twitter MENA is paying attention only to the bad language of the tweeps including activists opposing the government only in that crackdown.

Today, Twitter has a different story, and it is not one of speaking truth to power. Twitter is no longer empowering its users. Its platform cannot be considered neutral. Twitter’s actions suggest it is systematically suppressing voices in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region.

What started out as an investigation into the mass suspension of accounts of Egyptian dissidents, uncovered a mass censorship algorithm that targeted users who use Arabic flagging their text as hateful conduct. This story is still unfolding. As you read this, mass and unjustified systemic locking and suspension of Twitter Arabic accounts continues. Users are angry and bewildered.

draconian yet lazy algorithms have systematically shut down voices of dissent – and pulled unsuspecting social media users down with them

The fake account is part of a network promoting Russian president Vladimir Putin on Twitter, which used the hashtags #IStandWithPutin and #IStandWithRussia on 2 and 3 March. This led to trending topics in different regions - particularly in the global south, apparently showing support for the war, in countries including India, Pakistan, South Africa and Nigeria.

many other profiles appear to have been inauthentic. They retweeted messages in high quantities, produced few original messages, and were created very recently. "They were likely produced by bots, fake profiles or compromised accounts, artificially amplifying support for Putin in these countries," says Carl Miller, co-founder of CASM Technology, a company that researches online harms and disinformation.

The accounts tweet a mixture of criticism of Western countries, express solidarity between the so-called Brics countries (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa), and offer direct support to Mr Putin. "We default to the idea that information campaigns will be directed to the West. Yet none of the accounts were addressing the West nor claimed to be from the West," says Mr Miller.

It's through such combination of humans and bots that memes emerge

with just some clever manipulation, bots might get you to follow the right humans—and it's the humans, not bots, who would then influence your thinking

The digitization of our public life is also giving rise to many new intermediaries that are mostly of invisible—and possibly suspect—variety

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.

Social media platforms provide a channel for citizens to report events on the ground in a faster way and without the editorial interference of newspapers’ managements and the state. It is the only completely free and independent outlet to spread information.

As long as we have a biased, censored media, which is not just in Egypt but any mainstream media, alternative outlets like Twitter and others will be the tools used by the people and activists to expose the truth.

The role will be that of support group, the way it always has been. It's where you get hope, where you know you have people...who share similar views, no matter what those views are, all over Egypt. In a society that is bound to be more isolationist due to fear, Twitter provides a safe mechanism to interact and meet like-minded others and find comfort in that. We will need all the comfort we can get.

An Egyptian court on Saturday sentenced six people to death, including two Al Jazeera journalists, who were accused of leaking state secrets to Qatar.

The defendants include Ibrahim Helal, former director of news at Al Jazeera's Arabic channel. He is not in Egypt and was tried in absentia. Another, also tried in absentia, is Jordanian citizen Alaa Omar Mohamed Sablan, identified by the prosecution as an Al Jazeera journalist. Asmaa Mohamed al-Khatib, identified as a reporter with the pro-Brotherhood Rassd news outlet, was also sentenced to death in absentia. Al Jazeera has long denounced Egypt's treatment of its journalists with the hashtag #journalismisnotacrime.

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

Journalist Khaled El Balshy — a keen defender of freedom of expression and a democracy advocate, deputy head of the Egyptian Press Syndicate and head of the syndicate’s Freedom Committee — has been vigorously campaigning for the release of jailed journalists in Egypt. This week Balshy himself faced prosecution and risked being imprisoned on charges of “inciting protests, insulting the police and inciting to overthrow the regime.”

On April 6 the Interior Ministry, which had filed the legal complaint against him, was forced to withdraw the lawsuit following an outcry from fellow journalists, free speech advocates and rights organizations

Minutes after hearing of the warrant for his arrest, he boldly declared in a Facebook post: “If they want to arrest me, I’m in my office. I’m not better than those who are imprisoned.”

“The conditions that they are being held in now is much better than before. Definitely a result of foreign media pressure,” tweeted the family members of Greste’s detained colleague, Mohamed Fahmy, from his Twitter account on Feb. 5.

A campaign first begun in Kenya to support Greste and other detained journalists in Egypt is growing daily, expounding the message that “journalism is not terrorism.” Supporters across the world are sharing photos with their mouths taped shut, holding handwritten signs with the hashtag #FreeAJStaff.

Fahmy’s family members also tweeted from his account on Feb. 5 that the three journalists are being held in the same cell. The news comes as a great relief to supporters who have been worriedly reporting on their ill treatment in prison — including the detention of Fahmy and Mohamed in insect-infested solitary confinement cells in a maximum security wing of Tora prison, 24 hours a day, for more than a month without beds or sunlight, sometimes without blankets.

the Egyptian government issuing a press release on Sunday saying that the army has "achieved a scientific breakthrough by inventing systems for diagnosing hepatitis and AIDS without any need to take a sample of blood from the patient". The claims went further, with the C-Fast device supposedly capable not just of diagnosing, but also treating the diseases

Egypt has the highest rate of hepatitis C in the world, with around 20% of people either suffering or having recovered from the disease according to the World Health Organisation. Sunday's announcement has caused a stir, with a video of the inventor being shared 12,000 times on Facebook and an ongoing Twitter discussion under the hashtag "Virus C miracle". A few of the tweets were supportive of the government, but what is striking is that the majority were satirical and questioned the science. "There is no such thing as secret military reports in medicine," TV presenter Khalid Muntasir told his 20,000 Twitter followers. "For a medical discovery to be recognized and be declared as such, it must be revealed to the public."

One user tweeted: "I suggest you inject Al-Sisi with the virus and then cure him using the army's invention as means to inaugurate it and prove its efficacy."

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?

not necessary for a newspaper to run images of the dead and injured in a manner that seemed blatantly disrespectful and dehumanising

Part of the issue people had with the editorial response was that it seemed to imply that the images were published because the attack in Nairobi was a "special" isolated incident, one that required especially gruesome images to depict "the truth" of what happened. 

Kenyans were neither fooled nor placated. Many others in the Global South agreed, as they, too, had experienced - many times over - how powerful news organisations from the geopolitical West present what happens in their communities and countries in two-dimensional ways, often with little regard for how their words and images would affect those who were depicted