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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

maintenance of the pre-revolutionary media landscape: No new TV station has been allowed. Just as no daily newspaper has emerged. New titles are edited by political parties and appear as weeklies, most of which incorporate the standard of the tabloid press. After a 9-days hunger strike by Radio Kalima’s manager, Omar Mistiri, twelve regional radios out of 74 candidates were finally selected in late June by the National Authority for Information and Communication Reform (INRIC), a temporary media advisory board. Now, the selected radios are waiting for the governmental permission. At the institutional level, the disappearance of the Communication Ministry does not lead, right now, to more media autonomy. Pre-revolutionary media managers are mainly the same: CEOs, Editors and Chairmen of Board moved from flattery of the ousted president and his system to a doubtful celebration of the “revolution”. In the state-owned media, the turnover of managers is conducted without any transparency just like under the dictatorship. Changes look more like a consequence of power balance between the different clans in the current government than a nascent process towards a democratic media system.

field reporting, which was longtime banned from or depreciated in the official media

The legal status of old private media, especially those belonging to the former president family, is still unclear. Some of them are under jurisdictional managers, but INRIC excluded them for the moment from any ethical obligations. Hannibal TV, owned by a relative to Leila Trabelsi, was involved in many ethical infringements to the Ethical Code like slandering or fake news, before and particularly after the revolution. Larbi Nasra, the Hanibal TV owner, seems to play a political role by receiving political leaders and airing many reports about his own charitable actions. Fethi Houidi, Information Minister under Ben Ali, is still Nessma TV’s CEO. Moez Sinaoui, former Nessma PR man, was nominated as the Interim Prime Minister’s spokesman

The late Iraqi dictator is lauded on a mysterious satellite channel that began broadcasting on the Islamic calendar's anniversary of his 2006 execution.

The Associated Press tracked down a man in Damascus, Syria named Mohammed Jarboua, who claimed to be its chairman. The Saddam channel, he said, "didn't receive a penny from the Baathists" and is for Iraqis and other Arabs who "long for his rule." Jarboua has clearly made considerable efforts to hide where it's aired from and refuses to say who is funding it besides "people who love us."

Saddam's hanging three years ago was on the first day of Eid al-Adha, the most important holiday of the Islamic calendar. His execution — and the day it was done — remains a sore point for Saddam sympathizers still smarting over images of the defiant leader in his final moments as Shiites in the death chamber shouted curses.

I’d like to argue that Television functions as a distancing technology while social media works in the opposite direction: through transparency of the process of narrative construction, through immediacy of the intermediaries, through removal of censorship over images and stories (television never shows the truly horrific pictures of war), and through person-to-person interactivity, social media news curation creates a sense of visceral and intimate connectivity, in direct contrast to television, which is explicitly constructed to separate the viewer from the events.

a very surreal and disorienting experience unless one has been thoroughly conditioned into accepting them as normal. All this positions the anchor between us and the event and signals to the viewer that the event is merely something to be watched, and then you move on.

the construction of the role of the anchor or the curator, and the role of content filtering.

Social media connected these young Arabs to like-minded individuals, across the region, and beyond, but perhaps most importantly with the media -- highlighting the limitations of parachute journalism, which is as ineffective as it is costly. Instead, it offered them a new source for news-gathering, social-media

Despite social media's challenging of the state's intimidation and targeting of journalists, Bahrain, Syria, and Egypt and many others continue to crackdown on dissent. But through citizen reports and mobilization on social media, their stories could not be suppressed.

Twitter alone has changed the way we, as global citizens, communicate and the way wars are covered, especially when governments ban journalists from entry to the country. Twitter ultimately becomes the wires

Right now there is no internet censorship. I’m against censorship. But in case there is a call for the comeback of censorship, it should be based on legal texts. And for the moment there are no such texts for the Internet in Tunisia. The goal of the agency after the revolution is guaranteeing net neutrality. When we say net neutrality we should not care about the content. Again we do not prefer Internet legislation because we are aware its risks

If there is to be Internet control in Tunisia, this control should be smart, transparent and for security reasons. The agency, used to carry out such control secretly. Today we are advocating absolute transparency. It would be better if a new public agency would be established and take charge of such a task. The ATI cannot guarantee internet neutrality and supervise the Internet at the same time. That is a conflict. This is my personal view as the legal representative of the ATI.

According to the information that I have; the Tunisian Agency for External Communication [known by its French acronym as the ATCE] was involved in taking such decisions (…) the ATCE had important transactions with the ATI. But these transactions were not documented as practices of censorship, but as website surveillance. But there is nothing documented that proves there were censorship related transactions between the two agencies. The former ruling party, the Constitutional Democratic Party, (now dissolved, and known by its French acronym the as RCD) , the presidential palace and the security apparatus, might have been involved in such practices too. I don’t know exactly. There are no documents that reveal exact names and parties.

What the country needs is an interpretation of Islam that embraces freedom and human rights instead of violence and tribal oppression. Everything else is a Band-Aid.

All forms of censorship within "self" and "society" have to be removed because they are obstacles on the path to realization. This means that no individual or group can legitimately dominate another, and that challenging all forms of domination in oneself and others is an ethical responsibility. This Islam is a religion of freedom.

the enormity of the task should not prevent Afghans from undertaking it, as it is impossible to imagine a democratic and developing Afghanistan if the status of women is not confronted. It requires a frontal jihad – a political, intellectual, and spiritual struggle to liberate Muslims and Islamic societies from the addiction to force. This can only be successful when grounded in a freedom-oriented Islam, rather than Western models that seem increasingly alien to many Afghans.

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

The Avant TV video, released on social media five days after protests erupted in Iran, which have thus far spread to dozens of cities and almost every province, carefully stitches together an emotional array of interviews of people unhappy with the economic situation and President Hassan Rouhani’s policies. With scarce public information available about Avant TV, and with the great pains its producers have taken to present it as an independent station, the video is intended to appear to be transparent, a true representation of the will of the Iranian people. Glaringly absent from the video are any criticism of the political establishment as a whole, which has been one of the main themes of the current demonstrations. Avant TV is in fact not independent at all. Al-Monitor has not been able to contact it, but two pro-regime media producers confirmed that it is only the latest example of a new media outlet backed by the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC) seeking to reinforce the narrative of the supreme leader above the politics of Iran.

Avant TV stems from the media wars at the heart of political factionalism both inside and outside Iran

The tactic that producers developed was to move away from content solely made for state television — which potential audiences almost automatically consider regime propaganda — to creating small production studios that develop content not easily identifiable as pro-regime. These ad hoc production studios receive funding from the IRGC and the government's cultural budget, but they remain small and unidentifiable on purpose.

For the last 10 years, Western (and even Arab) pundits have repeatedly questioned the place of Palestine in the pan-Arab psyche. They surmised that the Arab Spring had refocused Arab minds on their problems at home. They assumed that battling tyrannical regimes and their security apparatuses, reforming corrupt polities and decrepit health care and education systems, combating terrorism and religious extremism, whittling back the power of the military, and overcoming economic challenges like corruption and unemployment would take precedence over an unsolved and apparently unsolvable cause.

reforming the Arab world’s political systems and the security and patronage networks that keep them in power and allow them to dominate their populations appears to be just as arduous a task as resolving the Israeli-Palestinian conflict

The difference now is not that Arab populaces have abandoned Palestine. Western and regional observers say the muted outrage over affronts like American support for the annexation of the Golan Heights or recognition of Jerusalem as Israel’s capital, or even the Abraham Accords and the subsequent sycophantic embrace of Israel in the Gulf is an indicator of Arab public opinion, that it signals a loss of interest in the cause.It is not. Arabs are of course not of a single mind on any particular issue, nor is it possible to gauge public opinion under tyrannical regimes. But it is indicative of the fact that these authoritarians no longer see the pan-Arab Palestinian cause and supporting it as vital to their survival. They have discovered that inward-looking, nationalistic pride is the key to enduring in perpetuity. It is the final step in the dismantling of pan-Arabism as a political force, one that will shape the region’s fortunes and its states’ alliances in the years and decades to come.

As blogging becomes more popular, Saudi Arabian authorities are starting to treat it with the same caution and restriction applied to traditional media in the country. Of course this has gotten many bloggers upset, and people have taken to Twitter to protest, with the hashtag #haza3 which refers to the Ministry official’s last name. Public protesting is illegal in Saudi Arabia.

Prior to and throughout the popular uprisings that shook Tunisia and ousted former president Zine el Abidine Ben Ali in January 2011, Tunisian bloggers, cyber-activists and social network users took it upon themselves to take on roles unfilled by state-owned media.

“A blogger today is expected to change the world,”

citizen-journalism

draft laws currently being prepared by various ministries about the right to information and free circulation of information. As a society, we have come a long way on this subject since the 1960s; Military Intelligence (which today we refer to as “sovereign entities”) has loosened its grip on the media, and we have made huge progress in media freedom after the emergence of independent newspapers and satellite channels, blogs, Facebook and Twitter. Nonetheless, the security mentality still controls much of freedom of publication, and I believe we need to launch a serious dialogue about the relationship between national security on the one hand and freedom of opinion and free circulation of information on the other.

Information is vital for the democratic process; if the people don’t know what’s happening and if the actions of government officials and public figures are concealed and secret, then the citizenry would not be able to participate in events in their society.

Availability of information also allows the citizenry to oversee state agencies, and thus effectively contribute to curbing corruption and abuse of power. This makes free information flow vital to raising the efficiency of the government apparatus and improving its performance

The undersigned organizations express their concern regarding the exceptional procedures taken yesterday against Islamist satellite channels, which included the breaking by security forces into offices of those channels, arrest of several of their crew and closing their broadcast in view of their incitement of violence against protesters and mobilizing supporters of former president Mohamed Morsi for civil strife.

providing evidence that a media channel has committed a criminal incitement as defined by national and international law should be provided via transparent procedures and implementation of the law, free of any generalization or arbitrariness. Holding the inciter accountable is mandatory, but the closure of channels is a form of collective punishment, which constitutes a violation of media freedom and one of its main foundations, the allowance for diversity of media contents