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Ed Webb

Arianna Huffington: Virality Uber Alles: What the Fetishization of Social Media Is Cost... - 0 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...social-media_b_1333499.html

socialmedia opinion analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 10 Mar 12 - No Cached
  • The media world's fetishization of social media has reached idol-worshipping proportions. Media conference agendas are filled with panels devoted to social media and how to use social tools to amplify coverage, but you rarely see one discussing what that coverage should actually be about. As Wadah Khanfar, former Director General of Al Jazeera, told our editors when he visited our newsroom last week, "The lack of contextualization and prioritization in the U.S. media makes it harder to know what the most important story is at any given time."
  • locked in the Perpetual Now
  • There's no reason why the notion of the scoop can't be recalibrated to mean not just letting us know 10 seconds before everybody else whom Donald Trump is going to endorse but also giving us more understanding, more clarity, a brighter spotlight on solutions
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • We're treating virality as a good in and of itself, moving forward for the sake of moving
  • "Twitter's algorithm favors novelty over popularity."
  • there were too many tweets about WikiLeaks, and they were so constant that Twitter started treating WikiLeaks as the new normal
  • as we adopt new and better ways to help people communicate, can we keep asking what is really being communicated? And what's the opportunity cost of what is not being communicated while we're all locked in the perpetual present chasing whatever is trending?
  • "What it means to be social is if you want to talk to me, you have to listen to me as well." A lot of brands want to be social, but they don't want to listen, because much of what they're hearing is quite simply not to their liking, and, just as in relationships in the offline world, engaging with your customers or your readers in a transparent and authentic way is not all sweetness and light. So simply issuing a statement saying you're committed to listening isn't the same thing as listening.
  • Fetishizing "social" has become a major distraction, and we're clearly a country that loves to be distracted. Our job in the media is to use all the social tools at our disposal to tell the stories that matter -- as well as the stories that entertain -- and to keep reminding ourselves that the tools are not the story. When we become too obsessed with our closed, circular Twitter or Facebook ecosystem, we can easily forget that poverty is on the rise, or that downward mobility is trending upward, or that over 5 million people have been without a job for half a year or more, or that millions of homeowners are still underwater. And just as easily, we can ignore all the great instances of compassion, ingenuity, and innovation that are changing lives and communities.
  • conflates the form with the substance
  • new social tools can help us bear witness more powerfully or they can help us be distracted more obsessively
  • humans are really a herd animal and that is what we are doing on these social sites, Herding up
Ed Webb

Google launches user-led Q&A service in Arabic by AP: Yahoo! Tech - 0 views

tech.yahoo.com/...ml_tec_techbit_mideast_google

google yahoo ejabat Arabic internet news

shared by Ed Webb on 09 Sep 09 - Cached
  • Google Inc. launched an online tool Tuesday that allows Arab users to answer each other's questions, a move designed to boost the amount of Web content available in Arabic.
  • Google decided to launch its tool, called Google Ejabat after the Arabic word for "answers," after discovering many of its Arabic users' searches failed to turn up relevant results. The Mountain View, Calif.-based company estimates that less than 1 percent of information online is in Arabic.
  • The company does not offer a service like Ejabat in English, but has launched similar tools in Russian, Chinese and Thai, Dubai-based spokeswoman Joanne Kubba said. "We pushed it ahead in Arabic since we know it to be a very useful tool to help generate ... content," she said.
Ed Webb

Where Countries Are Tinderboxes and Facebook Is a Match - The New York Times - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...facebook-sri-lanka-riots.html

Facebook socialmedia Sri Lanka violence

shared by Ed Webb on 21 Apr 18 - Cached
  • they had shared and could recite the viral Facebook memes constructing an alternate reality of nefarious Muslim plots. Mr. Lal called them “the embers beneath the ashes” of Sinhalese anger
  • the forces of social disruption that have followed Facebook’s rapid expansion in the developing world, whose markets represent the company’s financial future. For months, we had been tracking riots and lynchings around the world linked to misinformation and hate speech on Facebook, which pushes whatever content keeps users on the site longest — a potentially damaging practice in countries with weak institutions.
  • Time and again, communal hatreds overrun the newsfeed — the primary portal for news and information for many users — unchecked as local media are displaced by Facebook and governments find themselves with little leverage over the company. Some users, energized by hate speech and misinformation, plot real-world attacks.
  • ...23 more annotations...
  • Facebook’s newsfeed played a central role in nearly every step from rumor to killing
  • Facebook officials, they say, ignored repeated warnings of the potential for violence, resisting pressure to hire moderators or establish emergency points of contact
  • the imagined Ampara, which exists in rumors and memes on Sinhalese-speaking Facebook, is the shadowy epicenter of a Muslim plot to sterilize and destroy Sri Lanka’s Sinhalese majority
  • The mob, hearing confirmation, beat him, destroyed the shop and set fire to the local mosque.
  • As Facebook pushes into developing countries, it tends to be initially received as a force for good.In Sri Lanka, it keeps families in touch even as many work abroad. It provides for unprecedented open expression and access to information. Government officials say it was essential for the democratic transition that swept them into office in 2015.But where institutions are weak or undeveloped, Facebook’s newsfeed can inadvertently amplify dangerous tendencies. Designed to maximize user time on site, it promotes whatever wins the most attention. Posts that tap into negative, primal emotions like anger or fear, studies have found, produce the highest engagement, and so proliferate
  • in developing countries, Facebook is often perceived as synonymous with the internet and reputable sources are scarce, allowing emotionally charged rumors to run rampant
  • Last year, in rural Indonesia, rumors spread on Facebook and WhatsApp, a Facebook-owned messaging tool, that gangs were kidnapping local children and selling their organs. Some messages included photos of dismembered bodies or fake police fliers. Almost immediately, locals in nine villages lynched outsiders they suspected of coming for their children.
  • Near-identical social media rumors have also led to attacks in India and Mexico. Lynchings are increasingly filmed and posted back to Facebook, where they go viral as grisly tutorials
  • No organization has ever had to police billions of users in a panoply of languages.
  • Before Facebook, he said, officials facing communal violence “could ask media heads to be sensible, they could have their own media strategy.”
  • Desperate, the researchers flagged the video and subsequent posts using Facebook’s on-site reporting tool.Though they and government officials had repeatedly asked Facebook to establish direct lines, the company had insisted this tool would be sufficient, they said. But nearly every report got the same response: the content did not violate Facebook’s standards. Advertisement Continue reading the main story “You report to Facebook, they do nothing,” one of the researchers, Amalini De Sayrah, said. “There’s incitements to violence against entire communities and Facebook says it doesn’t violate community standards.”
  • Facebook still appears to employ few Sinhalese moderators. A call to a third-party employment service revealed that around 25 Sinhalese moderator openings, first listed last June, remain unfilled. The jobs are based in India, which has few Sinhalese speakers.
  • “We’re a society, we’re not just a market.”
  • Its gamelike interface rewards engagement, delivering a dopamine boost when users accrue likes and responses, training users to indulge behaviors that win affirmation.
  • the greatest rush comes by attacking outsiders: The other sports team. The other political party. The ethnic minority.
  • Mass media has long been used to mobilize mass violence. Facebook, by democratizing communication tools, gives anyone with a smartphone the ability to broadcast hate.
  • Mr. Weerasinghe posted a video that showed him walking the shops of a town called Digana, warning that too many were owned by Muslims, urging Sinhalese to take the town back. The researchers in Colombo reported his video to Facebook, along with his earlier posts, but all remained online.
  • the government temporarily blocked most social media. Only then did Facebook representatives get in touch with Sri Lankan officials, they say. Mr. Weerasinghe’s page was closed the same day.
  • officials rushed out statements debunking the sterilization rumors but could not match Facebook’s influence
  • Despite criticism and concerns from civil society groups, the company has done little to change its strategy of pushing into developing societies with weak institutions and histories of social instability, opening up information spaces where anger and fear often can dominate
  • From October to March, Facebook presented users in six countries, including Sri Lanka, with a separate newsfeed prioritizing content from friends and family. Posts by professional media were hidden away on another tab.“While this experiment lasted, many of us missed out on the bigger picture, on more credible news,” said Nalaka Gunawardene, a Sri Lankan media analyst. “It’s possible that this experiment inadvertently spread hate views in these six countries.”
  • government officials said, they face the same problem as before. Facebook wields enormous influence over their society, but they have little over Facebook.
  • Facebook had turned him into a national villain. It helped destroy his business, sending his family deeply into debt. And it had nearly gotten him killed.But he refused to abandon the platform. With long, empty days in hiding, he said, “I have more time and I look at Facebook much more.”“It’s not that I have more faith that social media is accurate, but you have to spend time and money to go to the market to get a newspaper,” he said. “I can just open my phone and get the news instead.”“Whether it’s wrong or right, it’s what I read.”
Ed Webb

Building an Internet Culture - 0 views

polaris.gseis.ucla.edu/...internet-culture.html

culture internet politics development education

shared by Ed Webb on 24 Mar 09 - Cached
  • ten conclusions that might guide a country's development of a culturally appropriate Internet policy
  • Do not spend vast sums of money to buy machinery that you are going to set down on top of existing dysfunctional institutions. The Internet, for example, will not fix your schools. Perhaps the Internet can be part of a much larger and more complicated plan for fixing your schools, but simply installing an Internet connection will almost surely be a waste of money.
  • Learning how to use the Internet is primarily a matter of institutional arrangements, not technical skills
  • ...4 more annotations...
  • Build Internet civil society. Find those people in every sector of society that want to use the Internet for positive social purposes, introduce them to one another, and connect them to their counterparts in other countries around the world. Numerous organizations in other countries can help with this.
  • Conduct extensive, structured analysis of the technical and cultural environment. Include the people whose work will actually be affected. A shared analytical process will help envision how the technology will fit into the whole way of life around it, and the technology will have a greater chance of actually being used.
  • For children, practical experience in organizing complicated social events, for example theater productions, is more important than computer skills. The Internet can be a powerful tool for education if it is integrated into a coherent pedagogy. But someone who has experience with the social skills of organizing will immediately comprehend the purpose of the Internet, and will readily acquire the technical skills when the time comes
  • Machinery does not reform society, repair institutions, build social networks, or produce a democratic culture. People must do those things, and the Internet is simply one tool among many. Find talented people and give them the tools they need. When they do great things, contribute to your society's Internet culture by publicizing their ideas.
Ed Webb

Facebook Officials Keep Quiet on Its Role in Revolts - NYTimes.com - 3 views

www.nytimes.com/...15facebook.html

facebook twitter youtube middleeast privacy activism

shared by Ed Webb on 15 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • The social media giant finds itself under countervailing pressures after the uprisings in the Middle East. While it has become one of the primary tools for activists to mobilize protests and share information, Facebook does not want to be seen as picking sides for fear that some countries — like Syria, where it just gained a foothold — would impose restrictions on its use or more closely monitor users, according to some company executives who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were discussing internal business.
  • Last week, Senator Richard J. Durbin, Democrat of Illinois, urged Facebook to take “immediate and tangible steps” to help protect democracy and human rights activists who use its services, including addressing concerns about not being able to use pseudonyms. In a letter to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, Mr. Durbin said the recent events in Egypt and Tunisia had highlighted the costs and benefits of social tools to democracy and human rights advocates. “I am concerned that the company does not have adequate safeguards in place to protect human rights and avoid being exploited by repressive governments,” he wrote.
  • This is an incredible challenge and an incredible opportunity for Facebook, Twitter and Google,” said Ethan Zuckerman, a senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University, where he works on projects about the use of technology and media in the developing world. “It might be tougher for Facebook than anyone else. Facebook has been ambivalent about the use of their platform by activists.
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  • Twitter and YouTube, which is owned by Google, have been more willing to embrace their roles in activism and unrest, Mr. Zuckerman said. After the Internet was shut down in Egypt, Twitter and Google actively helped protesters by producing a new service, speak2tweet, that allowed people to leave voicemail messages that would be filed as updates on Twitter. Biz Stone, one of Twitter’s founders, used it as an opportunity to emphasize the positive global impact that comes with the open exchange of information. When the Internet was back up, YouTube, working with Storyful, a social media news curation service, took the thousands of videos pouring in from the protests in Tahrir Square to help people access and share the information as quickly as possible on CitizenTube, its news and politics channel.
  • the Global Network Initiative, a voluntary code of conduct for technology companies created in 2008 that requires participating businesses to take reasonable steps to protect human rights
Ed Webb

Arab Media & Society - 2 views

www.arabmediasociety.com/?article=901

shared by Ed Webb on 21 Jan 16 - No Cached
  • tool in the hands of Arab states
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 21 Jan 16
       
      Media as tool of states
  • a subversive force was seen in the 1970s, when cassette tapes of preachers denouncing governments for tyranny and corruption spread in Egypt and Iran
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 21 Jan 16
       
      Subversive possibilities also, long pre-dating social media. In fact, subversive media are as old as grafitti and pamphlets, at least, not to mention some kinds of folk songs.
  • Arabic satellite news and entertainment media established by Gulf Arab states
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 21 Jan 16
       
      Satellite TV was the first revolution, breaking the monopolies of state-owned TV stations around the region. Before that only radio (e.g. BBC) and sometimes newspapers had provided a regional or cross-border voice.
  • ...9 more annotations...
  • “new Arab public sphere”
  • two distinct political positions that characterized Arab politics in the period up to the Arab Spring uprisings in 2010-11: an approach on Al Jazeera sympathetic to Islamist groups across the region and more conservative pro-Western approach in Saudi controlled media
  • The Arab uprisings came at the moment of a third stage in the development of modern Arab media: that of social media
  • bitterly contested conflicts between youth-driven protest movements and governments who were caught absolutely unawares due to a variety of factors: close cooperation with Western governments, elaborate security apparatus and the arrogance that comes with being in power unchallenged for so long
  • Media in the post-Spring Arab world currently has been targeted by the forces of the state in their counter-revolutionary pushback
  • Since the military coup that removed the elected post-uprising government, the Egyptian government has used traditional preferred instruments of television and print media for propaganda and control
  • Gulf governments have focused on social media in particular
  • Another important feature of Arab media is how it has become an arena for the Sunni-Shia sectarian schism
  • media has been revamped and brought back into action as one element of a multi-faceted campaign involving the law, religion, surveillance and forces of coercion to face a range of internal and external enemies seen as challenging the very survival of governing elites. New media were momentarily a weapon against these entrenched systems of rule; for now, the rulers have mastered the new array of technologies and are back in command
gweyman

Jared Cohen: Is "Social Media" Really Changing the World? - 1 views

www.huffingtonpost.com/...-media-really-ch_b_327164.html

shared by gweyman on 21 Oct 09 - Cached
  • "Social media" is merely a way to describe new tools in an old and narrow paradigm where we measure success by how many people are reached.
    • gweyman
      gweyman on 21 Oct 09
       
      I tend to agree that the term social media is used most on twitter by marketers interested in boosting hits, traffic, retweets, followers etc. but not really improving understanding or information flows.
  • The term "social media" as we know it today appeared in July 2004 as a reference to participatory media like blogging, wikis, social networks, and related technologies. This is all well and good if technology was still primarily about connecting people to information, which is really the essence of media. However, this term has become obsolete in a world where technology has become a critical tool for connecting people not only to information and ideas, but also to other individuals, entities (NGOs, companies, governments, etc.), and more recently actual resources
    • gweyman
      gweyman on 21 Oct 09
       
      I don't understand the argument here. 'Social' necessarily defines something that is between people and groups. Why doesn't he suggest an alternative phrase?
Ed Webb

Journalism, Social Media and Packs & Cascades: Lessons from an Error | technosociology - 0 views

technosociology.org/?p=638

journalism social media social media journalists analysis opinion andycarvin twitter

shared by Ed Webb on 07 Dec 11 - No Cached
  • It’s not that we need social-media journalists, but beat journalists who know how to incorporate social-media as a key resource. Journalism schools need to classes which teach these skills, and news organizations have train people on them. Some of these skills echo those of traditional journalism, while others are novel ones. (How to detect sockpuppets (developing a “sockdar”), how to triungulate citizen reports, how to find conversations about a particular topic, etc., for example.)
  • Many tools are needed and someone needs to create them. I was happy to recently hear that Columbia school of journalism has five students majoring in journalism and computer science. May this model spread, and may developing new platforms for journalism also be seen properly as journalism–as it requires a proper understanding of the craft and process of journalism, not just how to code, to create these tools.
  • the importance of beat –I trusted Rasha’s reporting, for example, because she is a a fellow professor, social scientist and a colleague and I know her to be careful with facts. For me, it wasn’t about “oh, here’s a tweet” but more about “oh, here’s a person with a solid reputation.” This is no different than what traditional journalism does.
Ed Webb

Iranian Police Seizing Dissidents Get Aid Of Western Companies - Bloomberg - 0 views

www.bloomberg.com/...-aid-of-western-companies.html

Iran surveillance technology middleeast ICT

shared by Ed Webb on 06 Nov 11 - No Cached
  • About half the political prisoners he met in jail told him police had tracked their communications and movements through their cell phones
  • Stockholm-based Ericsson AB, Creativity Software Ltd. of the U.K. and Dublin-based AdaptiveMobile Security Ltd. marketed or provided gear over the past two years that Iran’s law enforcement or state security agencies would have access to, according to more than 100 documents and interviews with more than two dozen technicians and managers who worked on the systems.
  • When Iranian security officers needed to locate a target one night in late 2009, one former Ericsson employee says he got an emergency call to come into the office to fix a glitch in an Ericsson positioning center.
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  • AdaptiveMobile, backed by the investment arm of Intel Corp. (INTC), proposed a system in partnership with Ericsson for Iran’s largest mobile provider in 2010 that would filter, block and store cell phone text messages, according to two people familiar with the discussions. An Ericsson spokesman confirmed the proposal. The Irish company still services commercial gear for a similar system it sold in 2008 to Irancell. Police have access to the system, say two former Irancell managers.
  • Texting has become the predominant means of digital communications because more than 70 percent of Iranian households have a mobile phone -- four-times greater than the percentage with internet access.
  • Hundreds of people have been convicted by Iranian courts for offenses related to election protests, according to New York-based nonprofit group Human Rights Watch.
  • “My mobile phone was my enemy, my laptop was my enemy, my landline was my enemy,” says Shojaee, who turned to using pay phones.
  • Iran is one of many authoritarian countries across the Mideast and North Africa employing Western surveillance tools for political repression. In Bahrain, for instance, communications monitoring centers sold by Siemens AG (SIE), and maintained by Espoo, Finland-based Nokia Siemens Networks and then its divested unit, Trovicor GmbH, have been used to track and arrest activists, according to a Bloomberg News investigation.
  • Much of NSN’s gear in Iran has since been swapped out in favor of China’s Huawei Technologies Co.
  • A rapidly growing global business, the “lawful interception” and information intelligence market now generates more than $3 billion in annual sales
  • The 3.9 million-euro ($5.5 million) system AdaptiveMobile proposed could handle more than 10,000 messages per second and archive them for a period of 180 days, according to a company proposal. The archive would contain 54 terabytes of storage, according to the document. That’s big enough for all the data gathered by the Hubble Space Telescope over 20 years.
  • “Ultimately, telecom is a force for good in society,”
  • Police arrested him on the outskirts of a rally that December, beating him with fists and a baton and jailing him for 52 days. Security agents interrogated him 14 times, presenting transcripts of text messages plus an elaborate diagram showing all the people he’d called -- and then everyone they’d called.
  • The system can record a person’s location every 15 seconds -- eight times more frequently than a similar system the company sold in Yemen, according to company documents. A tool called “geofences” triggers an alarm when two targets come in close proximity to each other. The system also stores the data and can generate reports of a person’s movements. A former Creativity Software manager said the Iran system was far more sophisticated than any other systems the company had sold in the Middle East.
  • “A lot of people were not happy they were working on a project in Iran,” he says. “They were worried about how the product was going to be used.” Gokaram says he worked only on commercial products and didn’t share those concerns. He declined to discuss specifics about any technology deployed in Iran. Creativity Software, which is privately-held and partly funded by London-based venture capital firm MMC Ventures, announced last November that it had made four sales in six months in the Middle East for law enforcement purposes without identifying the mobile operator clients. Saul Olivares, market development director at Creativity Software, declined to discuss sales of law enforcement technology, but in an e-mail he pointed to its practical benefits, such as locating individuals during disasters, for ambulance crews and in other emergencies.
  • The European Union took aim at Iran’s growing surveillance capabilities in October 2010, enacting new sanctions that include prohibitions for goods that can be used for “internal repression.” The regulations, however, focused mostly on low- tech items, such as vehicles equipped with water cannons and razor barbed wire. In September, the European Parliament broadened its surveillance concerns beyond Iran, voting for a block on exports of systems if the purchasing country uses the gear “in connection with a violation of human rights.”
  • After his arrest early last year, Pourheydar, the opposition journalist, says police accused him of speaking to foreign media such as BBC and Voice of America. Their evidence: unbroadcast mobile phone calls captured, recorded and transcribed, he says. They also had transcripts of his e-mails and text messages. He never learned which companies provided the technology that made it possible.
  • “All these companies, which sell telecommunications services and listening devices to Iran, directly have roles in keeping this regime in power,”
Ed Webb

Survey Says: Journalists Are Old White Cowards | VICE United States - 0 views

www.vice.com/...rnalists-are-old-white-cowards

US USA journalists journalism media

shared by Ed Webb on 09 May 14 - No Cached
  • Ed Webb on 09 May 14
     
    Via Nick Toole on Twitter
Ed Webb

Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...21blog.html

blogging socialmedia generations

shared by Ed Webb on 21 Feb 11 - No Cached
  • bloggers often use Facebook and Twitter to promote their blog posts to a wider audience. Rather than being competitors, he said, they are complementary.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 21 Feb 11
       
      Exactly. Different functions, different niches. Use the right tool for the job, not one tool for everything.
  • Among 34-to-45-year-olds who use the Internet, the percentage who blog increased six points, to 16 percent, in 2010 from two years earlier, the Pew survey found. Blogging by 46-to-55-year-olds increased five percentage points, to 11 percent, while blogging among 65-to-73-year-olds rose two percentage points, to 8 percent.
  • “If you’re looking for substantive conversation, you turn to blogs,” Ms. Camahort Page said. “You aren’t going to find it on Facebook, and you aren’t going to find it in 140 characters on Twitter.”
  • ...3 more annotations...
  • “The act of telling your story and sharing part of your life with somebody is alive and well — even more so than at the dawn of blogging,” Mr. Rainie said. “It’s just morphing onto other platforms.” The blurring of lines is readily apparent among users of Tumblr. Although Tumblr calls itself a blogging service, many of its users are unaware of the description and do not consider themselves bloggers — raising the possibility that the decline in blogging by the younger generation is merely a semantic issue.
  • Blogger, owned by Google, had fewer unique visitors in the United States in December than it had a year earlier — a 2 percent decline, to 58.6 million — although globally, Blogger’s unique visitors rose 9 percent, to 323 million.
  • some blogging services like Tumblr and WordPress seem to have avoided any decline. Toni Schneider, chief executive of Automattic, the company that commercializes the WordPress blogging software, explains that WordPress is mostly for serious bloggers, not the younger novices who are defecting to social networking.
Ed Webb

Ian Bogost - Beyond Blogs - 0 views

www.bogost.com/...beyond_blogs.shtml

blogging blogs bogost meta digital humanities

shared by Ed Webb on 23 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • I wish these were the sorts of questions so-called digital humanists considered, rather than figuring out how to pay homage to the latest received web app or to build new tools to do the same old work. But as I recently argued, a real digital humanism isn't one that's digital, but one that's concerned with the present and the future. A part of that concern involves considering the way we want to interact with one another and the world as scholars, and to intervene in that process by making it happen. Such a question is far more interesting and productive than debating the relative merits of blogs or online journals, acts that amount to celebrations of how little has really changed.
  • Perhaps a blog isn't a great tool for (philosophical; videogame) discussion or even for knowledge retention, etc... but a whole *blogosphere*...? If individuals (and individual memory in particular) are included within the scope of "the blogosphere" then surely someone remembers the "important" posts, like you seemed to be asking for...?
Ed Webb

When Stars Twitter, a Ghost May Be Lurking - NYTimes.com - 0 views

www.nytimes.com/...27twitter.html

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Mar 09 - Cached
  • The famous, of course, have turned to ghostwriters for autobiographies and other acts of self-aggrandizement. But the idea of having someone else write continual updates of one’s daily life seems slightly absurd.
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 27 Mar 09
       
      Agreed, if that's how you're using Twitter. But it doesn't have to be that way. I'm fairly sure the return will be greater for those who do their own tweeting - @bruces @neilhimself @stephenfry @warrenellis etc.
  • for candidates like Mr. Paul, Twitter is an organizing tool rather than a glimpse behind the curtain.
  • the truth is, they are a brand.
  • ...1 more annotation...
  • “Basically, for 99.9 percent of people on Twitter, it is about updating friends and colleagues about how the cat rolled over,” he said. “For a tenth of a percent it is a marketing tool.”
    • Ed Webb
      Ed Webb on 27 Mar 09
       
      Uh, no. Guy, you're seriously missing quite a large demographic there, who use it neither for trivial life reporting nor for marketing. You should know better.
  • sean lyness on 27 Mar 09
     
    I feel like ghostwriting defeats the purpose of the direct link that twitter provides, you might as well just visit one of 50 cent's fan websites, no?
Ed Webb

World Day Against Cyber-Censorship: new "Enemies of the Internet" list - Reporters With... - 0 views

en.rsf.org/-borders-11-03-2011,39776.html

censorship internet MENA RSF

shared by Ed Webb on 27 Mar 11 - No Cached
  • “One in three of the world’s Internet users does not have access to an unrestricted Internet,”
  • At least 119 people are currently in prison just for using the Internet to express their views freely
  • “Tunisia and Egypt have been removed from the list of Enemies of the Internet following the fall of their governments,” Julliard added. “These countries nonetheless remain under surveillance, as does Libya. The gains of these revolutions must be consolidated and the new freedoms must be guaranteed. We have also placed some democracies – including Australia, South Korea and France – under surveillance because of various measures they have taken that could have negative consequences for online free expression and Internet access.”
  • ...2 more annotations...
  • Last year saw the Internet and social networks conclusively established as tools for protest, campaigning and circulating information. It also saw a growing tendency for traditional and new media to complement each other, as witnessed not only during the Arab Spring but also in the way WikiLeaks released the leaked US diplomatic cables in coordination with several leading international media.
  • an area of freedom in the most closed countries. Its potential as a tool for circulating news and information angers dictators and renders traditional censorship methods ineffective. The Internet is used not only by dissidents but also by governments, which employ it to circulate their propaganda and to reinforce surveillance and control of the population.
Ed Webb

Washington Times - Senate OKs millions to combat Iran's Internet censors - 2 views

www.washingtontimes.com/...print

censorship Iran twitter facebook USA foreign_policy election

shared by Ed Webb on 25 Jul 09 - Cached
  • The Senate has authorized up to $50 million for the development of Web-based tools to help Iranians evade their government's attempts to censor the Internet. The Victim of Iranian Censorship Act, or VOICE Act, was added to the Senates Defense authorization bill Thursday evening as a response to mass protests following Iran's disputed June 12 presidential elections and concerns that Western companies have sold Iran technology used to monitor dissidents. Internet-based tools such as Facebook and Twitter have become key means for Iranians to communicate with each other and the outside world about protests over what many believe to be a fraudulent victory by incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The U.S. legislation would require President Obama to issue a report on "non-Iranian companies, including corporations with U.S. subsidiaries, that have aided the Iranian governments Internet censorship efforts." Such identification would make it easier to pressure firms to cease such business with Iran.
  • the Voice of America has an office devoted to anti-filtering technology and anti-censorship technology, but its total budget is less than $5 million. It has invested in a Farsi-language version of the Web browser, Firefox, embedded with TOR, a program originally developed by the U.S. Navy, which cloaks the users Web browsing from state monitors.
  • when there is money, people will come, and you are seeing a lot of companies retooling themselves to become circumvention providers.
Ed Webb

How Turkey silences journalists online, one removal request at a time - Committee to Pr... - 0 views

cpj.org/...nalists-online-one-removal.php

Turkey censorship media socialmedia twitter Facebook google journalists journalism analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 15 Jan 19 - No Cached
  • 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
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  • In the second part of 2017 in Turkey, more Twitter accounts were withheld and Facebook content restricted than in any other country
  • "I challenge both Twitter and the Turkish government to [find in my tweets] anything that can be considered illegal or harmful. My only crime is being a journalist."
  • "Twitter, Facebook, [and] Google...are responsible to their shareholders primarily, I don't consider them as guardians of the free speech. But the imbalance in the tools they offer to users versus governments make them complicit in the authoritarian rulers' crackdown against opposition."
  • Getting a court order to censor journalists is not a hard task in Turkey which, according to CPJ research, is the world's worst jailer of journalists. Human Rights Watch said in 2014 that "Turkish courts have tended to accede to government requests to block websites with apparent minimal, if any, scrutiny."
  • Amendments to law 5651 in 2014 gave authorities power to block sites without a court order. Google transparency reports show that since the amendments came into effect, the majority of removal requests came from judicial rather than executive orders. Law 5651 is "a very fast-track system [to block content] with almost no checks,"
  • In his U.N. report on regulation of user-generated online content published earlier this year, David Kaye, the U.N. special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, recommended that "companies should recognize that the authoritative global standard for ensuring freedom of expression on their platforms is human rights law, not the varying laws of states or their own private interests."
Ed Webb

Egypt's Ministry of Religious Endowments boosts its imams' media skills - 0 views

www.al-monitor.com/...ing-media-skills-of-imams.html

Egypt Islam religion politics awqaf Al-Azhar azhar sermons fatwas media rhetoric training

shared by Ed Webb on 02 Nov 19 - No Cached
  • Will a one-week training enable Egypt’s imams to sound more reassuring, more emphatic and appear more camera-friendly on television? The Ministry of Religious Endowments certainly hopes so.
  • Courses include teaching the imams how to speak in talk shows, telephone interviews and TV debates. It also teaches them body language for interviews on TV as well as writing sound bites for various types of televised interviews. 
  • the course aims to develop the media skills of the imams so that they can “dominate the religious discourse,” counter extremist views expressed by the Salafists and efficiently debunk false interpretations on religion in TV programs.
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  • In 2017, the parliamentary Committee on Religious Affairs approved a draft law that banned issuing fatwas through the media unless prior authorization had been obtained from Al-Azhar, the country’s top religious institution. The draft still has to go through the General Assembly to become law.
  • The Ministry of Religious Endowments — known locally as Awqaf — objected that the right of authorizations should rest with Al-Azhar, saying that this bypasses the ministry, which should be the appropriate authority to grant permissions. The ministry argued that as all of its imams are graduates of Al-Azhar, they were fully equipped to give this permission.
  • Parliament has shelved the draft law until an agreement is reached between Al-Azhar and Awqaf, which has so far failed to materialize. 
  • According to Hosni Hassan, media professor at Helwan University, the main purpose of the trainings is to ensure that the Friday sermons — delivered by imams of Awqaf — are efficient tools to spread the Egyptian state’s version of Islam and to persuade the public.
  • The state — represented by the Ministry of Religious Endowments — is paying close attention to Friday sermons and religious lessons in mosques so they can become tools of improving social and religious behavior
  • “The rate of extremist fatwas has declined since 2013 after the fall of the Muslim Brotherhood, after the group was designated as a terrorist organization and its sheikhs were arrested,”
  • The ministry announced in 2014 that only preachers licensed by the ministry were allowed to deliver the Friday sermons or teach religious classes in mosques.The ministry organizes a number of exams every year for those wishing to obtain such licenses. In 2015, a new law stipulated that unlicensed preachers who deliver the Friday sermons or teach religious courses in mosques shall be sentenced to imprisonment from three months to a year or pay a fine of 20,000-50,000 pounds ($1,238-3,097).
  • The Ministry of Religious Endowments also issued in 2016 a decision that the imams in the mosques deliver a unified Friday sermon.
Ed Webb

The dwindling promise of popular uprisings in the Middle East - 0 views

www.972mag.com/popular-uprisings-middle-east

Egypt Tunisia Iran Israel Palestine israelpalestine Syria Yemen analysis opinion uprisings surveillance technology repression

shared by Ed Webb on 03 Dec 22 - Cached
  • The scenes emerging from Iran today elicit a mix of reactions across a region still reeling from the dark legacy of the “Arab Spring,” which itself came on the heels of the “Green Movement” protests in the wake of Iran’s 2009 presidential election. Many Arabs cannot help but recall the sense of hope that reverberated from Tunisia to Yemen, only to be shattered by unyielding repression, war, and the resurgence of authoritarianism. Subsequent protest waves, including those that began in 2019 in Lebanon, Iraq, and Sudan, were similarly met with brutality, co-optation, and dissolution.
  • Over a decade on from the Arab uprisings, the path toward democracy and freedom for youth across the Middle East has become more treacherous than ever, as liberation movements find themselves fighting against stronger, smarter, and more entrenched regimes that have adapted to modern challenges to their domination.
  • Technologies that many hoped would help to evade state censorship and facilitate mobilization have been co-opted as repressive surveillance tools.
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  • many of the region’s youth have become immobilized by revolutionary fatigue left by the tragic, violent trauma of the Arab Spring’s aftermath
  • Breakthroughs in surveillance methods are allowing intelligence outfits across the Middle East to infiltrate just about every crevice of civil society, making it almost impossible to communicate or organize without the government’s knowledge. Some of the most sinister of these weapons have been manufactured in Israel, which has emerged as a leading global exporter of surveillance technologies that are now being deployed against oppressed populations worldwide.
  • with the United States declining as a global hegemon, authoritarians are selling their allegiances to the highest bidder, with human rights, democracy, and accountability falling further by the wayside.
  • While arming themselves with the latest repressive tools, autocratic regimes across the Middle East continue to be encouraged by their external benefactors to prioritize security and foreign interests at the expense of democracy and human rights at home
  • The prospect of acquiring dystopian surveillance tech like Pegasus has become a driving motive for authoritarian Arab leaders in their rush to normalize relations with Israel, against the will of their people
  • Since 2011, Russia has doubled down on its support for some of the most brutal regimes in the region.
  • About 60 percent of the region’s population are under 25 years old, and the dire socio-political and economic conditions that much of the Middle East’s youth face have changed little since the thwarted revolutions of 2011. Youth unemployment has, in fact, worsened over the past decade, increasing from 23.8 percent in 2010 to 27.2 percent in 2020. The lack of opportunities continues to fuel brain drains and mass migration across the region.
  • dictators driven by paranoia have continued to hollow out civil society, ensuring that no viable political alternative to their rule exists. Press freedom across the region has declined drastically; Egypt, for example, has become one of the world’s top jailers of journalists since President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi came to power in a military coup in 2013. In Tunisia, President Kais Saied has undone many of the country’s democratic advances by dissolving the government and enhancing his powers through a new constitution.
  • This aggressive trend has intensified in Palestine, too. Following the 2021 Unity Intifada, Israeli forces arrested hundreds of political activists and are now stepping up efforts to target civil society and human rights groups that expose Israeli war crimes and rights violations. Meanwhile, the Palestinian Authority has entrenched its role as a subcontractor of the Israeli occupation, stepping up arrests of political activists and resistance fighters alike across the West Bank at Israel’s behest.
  • A recent study by The Guardian and YouGov found that although a majority of respondents in Sudan, Tunisia, Algeria, Iraq, and Egypt do not regret the uprisings, more than half of those polled in Syria, Yemen, and Libya say their lives are now worse
  • By shutting down spaces for Iranians to realize their imagined future, Iran’s leaders have ensured that any substantial transfer of power will be violent
Ed Webb

Social media helps dictators, not just protesters - The Washington Post - 3 views

www.washingtonpost.com/...-dictators-not-just-protesters

authoritarianism resilience socialmedia social media autocracy analysis

shared by Ed Webb on 30 Mar 15 - No Cached
  • In a recent article (ungated), I document the co-option of social media by governments in Russia, China, and the Middle East, and find four different ways in which they have begun to use social media to prolong their rule.
  • social media is increasingly being used to actually boost regime stability and strength, transforming it from an obstacle to government rule into another potential tool of regime resilience
  • social media is becoming a safe and relatively cheap way for rulers to discover the private grievances and policy preferences of their people
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  • social media is a reliable way to gauge the effectiveness of local officials, who are often unaccountable to their constituencies. Since they usually operate through opaque and byzantine institutions, the central government often knows little about the competence and popularity of their local representatives, who have every reason to lie about their performance
  • Cracking down on local corruption in turn makes the central government appear more responsive, increasing its effectiveness and legitimacy
  • social media provides an effective way to reach out to the regime’s supporters. Just as opposition leaders use social media to mobilize protesters, regimes can use it to organize and rally their own domestic allies – military or business elites, but also regular citizens motivated by patriotism or ideology
  • social media offers a convenient way to shape the contours of public discourse among the public at large. Governments have always used mass media – newspapers, radio, and TV – to disseminate regime-friendly propaganda. Social media, however, has the added benefit of being inherently decentralized, interactive, and non-hierarchical, and can thus more easily avoid the appearance of artifice
  • The opposite of Internet freedom may not be brute-force censorship but a deceptive blend of control, co-option, and manipulation
  • By shaping dominant narratives and mobilizing supporters, social media can help incumbents to guard themselves not only from domestic unrest but also from external pressures for reform
  • Autocrats have proven to be remarkably adaptive and resilient in the face of new challenges, and their subversion of social media could mean long-term problems for the future of democracy
Ed Webb

Political Party Leader Buys Tunisia's Most-Watched TV Station - Tunisia Live : Tunisia ... - 1 views

www.tunisia-live.net/...ys-tunisias-leading-tv-station

Tunisia media politics regulation ownership television TV

shared by Ed Webb on 17 Apr 13 - No Cached
  • questions about the relationship between political parties and Tunisian media
  • He asserted that the channel will maintain editorial freedom, and emphasized that it will be a wholly Tunisian-owned enterprise
  • Ettounisya is a popular television station that, like most of its Tunisian competitors, devotes a large amount of airtime to political talk shows
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  • established shortly after the 2011 revolution and now is the most-watched channel in Tunisia
  • ongoing legal proceedings against the channel’s director, Sami Fehri, who has been held in jail for months on corruption charges
  • Riahi is the leader of the Free Patriotic Union party, which he founded in 2011. It has a secular, pro-business agenda and gained one seat in National Constituent Assembly (NCA)
  • symptomatic of the problems regarding regulation of Tunisian media. “The government has created a legislative vacuum,”
  • advertising revenue for Tunisian television stations is too meager to actually fund their operations. He questioned why a businessman such as Riahi would want to enter such an unprofitable sector, suggesting that the real motivation is to gain control over a powerful tool to disseminate one’s own messages to the public
  • The creation of the High Authority for Audiovisual Communication (HAICA) was called for in a November 2011 law. The statute calls for a nine-person body representing the Tunisian government, the journalists’ union, and the audiovisual communications industry. The HAICA would be tasked with regulating the Tunisian media sector, supervising the media during electoral campaigns, and nominating directors of public radio and television stations. The announcement of this body has been repeatedly delayed, however, leaving the sector largely free from regulatory restrictions.
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