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“When these people go online, they needed to be treated like trolls,” Amanullah said, “and we keep feeding the trolls.”

it is “impossible for State to know if it’s succeeded or failed at its task”

he initiative was inadvertently creating a dialogue of equals between the US and Isis, distracting from Muslim criticisms of Isis that carry more credibility within the Muslim world

The MENA online ecosystem is not a good place for freedoms or civil debate right now, to say the least. The Digital Authoritarianism collection I edited last year makes for grim reading. Many MENA states have set in place legal frameworks criminalizing online dissent (and a lot more than just dissent). The pervasive use of Israeli-designed digital surveillance tools has turbocharged the ability of autocratic regimes to spy on their citizens (or on anyone else). Online discourse is plagued by armies of bots and trolls. And the suppression of Palestinian activist content shows how social media platforms have proven an uneven playing field when it comes to content moderation. Apocalyptic takes on what Musk might do really do need to grapple with how terrible things already are.

Musk explained his approach to free speech in a recent tweet: “By “free speech”, I simply mean that which matches the law.” That may sound good to some people in an American context, I suppose. But in the MENA, it would play directly into the hands of authoritarian regimes which have spent years constructing elaborate legal and normative frameworks to criminalize online dissent. Those laws don’t just ban violent hate speech, but range from political dissent, criticism of royal family members or the military, human rights monitoring, even dancing on TikTok. Following these cybercrime laws as a guide to content moderation would entail censoring a wide range of legitimate political speech - the opposite, presumably, of what an avowed free speech advocate would want to see.

If new Twitter policies drawn from the right wing understanding of the American online arena were applied consistently in the MENA context, it could potentially ease the suppression of Palestinian voices. I mean, that wouldn’t be the intention and it probably wouldn’t, but it’s worth thinking about.

"It would be extremely arrogant for any specific technology company to claim credit" for protest movements in the Arab world

"People are now having the opportunity to communicate" more widely than ever before, he said, adding: "That's not a Facebook thing. That's an Internet thing."

the region’s authoritarian leaders are using the threat of IS propaganda as a pretext to clamp down on online critics

“A spate of new anti-terrorism laws around the region have overly broad definitions of terrorism that fail to distinguish between speech that incites violence or promotes extremism and the type of free speech posted by online journalists and human rights activists.”

According to the Brookings Institution, a US-based think tank, IS and its supporters ran some 46,000 Twitter accounts last year

the increase in mobile access to news actually leads to higher exposure to diverse content and that ideological self-selection explains only a small percentage of co-exposure to news

more than half of Internet users in the United States do not use online news

the increasing divide between informed citizens and news avoiders

I was invited, along with a significant number of bloggers and online notables to attend one of several meetings with the minister of ICT, Marwan Jumah, who along with a legal aid, presented the law and, to his credit, tackled whatever questions, issues or concerns we had to offer. At the time, no one knew anything about the law so it was quite difficult to effectively argue the points, this is to say nothing of the absent legal background. However, to their credit, the concerns of those presented were taken in to consideration and proper amendments were even made to the memorandum accompanying the actual law before it was presented to the cabinet.

This new cyber crime law is aimed at tackling specific issues related to online crimes, such as hacking, identity theft, financial transaction crimes, etc. And that’s all perfectly fine. The ICT ministry made the argument that this law was “urgent” enough to pass as a temporary law because of the number of cyber related crimes that are being presented before the judiciary every month. However, I am inclined to believe that given the fact that the Internet has been around for over 15 years in Jordan, it is unlikely that the government has just now noticed that crimes concerning its citizens are taking place online and there is a need for various protections.

The mere approval of the law made international headlines and will likely place Jordan firmly on the Internet Enemies list for the first time - putting out that beacon of hope we once took pride in throughout a region of highly regulated and censored Internet.

students would prefer less technology in the classroom (especially *participatory* technologies that force them to do something other than sit back and memorize material for a regurgitation exercise)

participatory media literacy is as much about a literacy of *participation* as it is a literacy of media

Knowing something about privacy and the ways online behavior can have consequences at home, at work, in school, along with some sense of how to determine the credibility of information found online, ought to be taught in high school, or at even younger ages. But one of the big questions I don’t have a clue about is how educational institutions are going to be able to adapt quickly enough to a world in which being able to learn, fine, verify, collaborate, and communicate online requires acquisition of active skills, not an easily transmitted collection of facts.

there is no way the regime can stop information or footage, videos, and images from coming out," said Syrian activist Ausama Monajed

Monajed runs The Syrian Revolution News Round-up, a daily briefing on protests, clashes and killings using eyewitness accounts and leaked footage taken by mobile phones of protesters that is authenticated to the best of their ability.

Major news outlets have regularly aired amateur, grainy footage of rallies and killings, which activists sometimes have to smuggle across the border to neighbouring countries to disseminate, as part of their newscasts

over 1.5 million tweets belonging to journalists and media outlets censored there under Twitter's "country withheld content" (CWC) policy

, 13 countries have used Twitter's CWC tool to effectively censor content, according to the social media platform's transparency reports. Governments usually cite laws around national security, counter-terrorism, defamation, or hate speech when requesting removals.

legal demands to remove content on the platform went from 432 requests in the first part of 2014 to 6,651 requests in the second part of 2017. Turkey and Russia were responsible for 74 percent of all requests during that period

An online radio station catering for the LGBT community, believed to be the first of its kind in the Arab world, started broadcasting in Tunisia on Monday

homosexuality is officially illegal

It intends “to sensitize the people of Tunisia, ordinary citizens and political decision makers about homophobia in society and to defend individual liberties,”