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Superpowers like China have to engage with the global economy. So for them, the best censorship system is the one that censors the least. Millions of people already disclose intimate social data on Facebook, LinkedIn, Delicious, and their Russian and Chinese alternatives—and that’s all the data governments need to pick the right target. Online friends with an antigovernment blogger? No access for you! Spend most of your day surfing Yahoo Finance? Browse whatever you want. Satisfied Chinese investment bankers will have access to an uncensored web; subversive democracy activists get added to the government watch list.

as a Jordanian, I was part of what I personally believe to be the final generation that actually gave a damn what the government did or did not do. Our relationship with the state was like our relationship with a television – a one-way communication channel, where we are on the receiving end no matter how much we yell at the screen. And that was that

Like everyone else, I have no idea how this conflict will end. But I know that the Web will undeniably play a leading role – and that’s not something anyone could’ve imagined back in 1948. As yet another cycle of violence is upon us, that role is worth studying, and it’s that role that I find myself paying attention to the most.

now people are simply looking for their personal freedom, for food, education, a good life. The days of ideology are over

Syria's state-run media quoted some news reports from Cairo, but offered no comment or analysis on the situation. By Saturday morning life had returned to normal with few signs, on the surface at least, that the authorities were concerned about potential unrest. Socialising by proxy Online, however, it was a different story. Internet users reported a significant slowdown in the web, with searches for news on Egypt often crashing browsers. Heavy user traffic could be an explanation but in Syria, where thousands of websites deemed opposed to state interests are blocked and where Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other social media are banned, authorities denied accusations they had restricted the service to prevent citizens hearing about events in Cairo.

authorities banned programmes that allow access to Facebook Chat from mobile phones, a cheap and easy means of staying in touch that had exploded in popularity among young Syrians

surfing the web at an internet cafe

thousands of young Syrians adept at using proxy servers to get around the official ban on Faceboo

President Bashar al-Assad, who opened Syria up to the internet when he succeeded his late father in 2000, has his own Facebook page

All across Damascus, symbols of a burgeoning middle class are spreading, from a sleek sandstone shopping mall, home to Costa Coffee and a bright new art gallery, to the Lebanese banks opening sparkling new branches for the first time. But as the young doctor put it, looking up at the cameras inside the internet cafe: "Everything here is under control, even if it looks open."

Some private outlets have also thrown their weight behind Egypt’s new leaders. A reporter at one newspaper said that her editor had given his staff explicit instructions not to report on pro-Morsi demonstrations and to make sure that articles indicated that the perpetrators of violence were always Islamists. The reporter requested anonymity, and her claims about the editor’s remarks could not be independently confirmed. A look at Saturday’s articles on the Web site of the newspaper seemed to corroborate her assertions.

State television prepared the public for the earthquake, in soothing segments that made no mention of Mr. Morsi or the Brotherhood, which instead was referred to as “that group.” A host interviewed a retired general, who spoke about the central, critical role of Egypt’s military over decades. Clips of fighter jets screeching through the sky were played, as well as patriotic anthems.

Events stoked the growing sense of victimhood among the president’s supporters at a demonstration in Nasr City, where the sudden loss of privilege was acutely felt. As journalists were warmly welcomed at the sit-in, there was no talk of Mr. Morsi’s own prosecutions of his opponents in the news media, which while less draconian, were just as selective.

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

On the morning of 1 April, when official complaints about elections were due, they documented nearly two hundred and fifty irregularities. “This is the first time citizens counted their own votes in Turkey,” says Engin. “We made a call on social media, and in a couple of hours we have received more than six thousand responses. With software finalized in two hours and a team of two hundred volunteers, we reported the irregularities and challenged results in Istanbul and Ankara,”

“We are quite worried about the current political and media system in Turkey,” Engin adds, “and we want our broadcast to provoke people to interrogate what the system tells them.” I press him a little and remind him that their efforts could not change much, so why continue? At first, he does not even understand my question. He then explains that we need people to stop submitting to the state, capital, and the mainstream media. Until then, Journos will keep on doing what they are doing.

Journos is now working on a web interface that will share all the ballot box results they have received with the public in a way that lets people run their own search. Citizens will be able to detect the discrepancies between the number of votes documented in paper ballots and the official results

by being posited as films that inform, educate and explain what is going on here to audiences over there, these films become central to a pre-existing East-West dynamic—a sphere of knowledge production and image-making that tries to translate the orient to an elsewhere

These are discourses that seek to “save brown women from brown men” or brown liberal men from oppressive brown regimes, or basically to save the Arabs from their Arabness, with all the cultural stereotypes such a term entails.

The problem with these films is that they ignore the interconnectedness of “developed” and “developing” countries, of authoritarianism in the Middle East and liberal democracies in the west, of Islamic fundamentalism and the Cold War, and of metropolitan centers of global capitalism and the dispossession of millions all over the world. The problem gets even more complicated when entitlement and ability to represent becomes unquestioned.

These films portray living stereotypes of actual people, focusing on the elements of their lives that are ‘interesting’ only in so much as they tell us something about clichéd versions of Egypt, Tahrir, Islam, women, art and war, conflict, poverty, dispossession and resistance. These topics are not interesting for those who live in war, conflict, poverty and dispossession, those for whom Tahrir was not a spectacle and resistance is a complicated act. In such a context these issues might be relevant, but they are only interesting somewhere else.

I am skeptical of the act of representation itself, the provision of ready-made, easily translatable narratives about 2011 as if the revolution was a thing, and as if "Arabness" is also a thing. If postmodernism declared the death of the meta-narratives—teleogically oriented, totalizing worldviews that tend to put in a claim for the universal and promise utopian resolutions that are yet to occur—Arab Spring documentaries lie on the opposite side of the spectrum. The conditions of their existence, profitability, visibility and circulation depends first and foremost on their claims to a certain truth about “what really happened” over there. But neither the "Arab Spring" nor the "Arab World" can be explained through the sum of their parts. They are constructed, time and time again, through the very narratives that eclipse alternative imaginaries, historical renditions or analyses by foreclosing the realm of imagination all together.

the government intends to implement an "insular nationwide intranet" isolated from the global internet and heavily regulated by the government. If successful, Iran will have accomplished something few other nations could: full control over its citizens' modern communications

If Iran were to insist on censoring obscenity, it could take different measures - like those employed by Saudi Arabia, which installed a sophisticated keyword filtering system. Though the kingdom's restrictions are severe and infringe on freedom of expression, its filtering system is at least more transparent than Iran’s. Or better yet, it would offer free home-filtering software free of charge to every family, as Jordan's Ministry of Information and Communications Technology recently did. Instead, the government seeks to tear its citizens away not only from the global internet, but from communicating with their families and friends abroad. Such a move will be damaging not only to citizens, but to the country's economy, unsustainable without global connectivity. Those with doubts need only look to Egypt: When that country cut off access to the internet in January 2011, the economy lost an estimated $18 million each day. 

From West to East, dozens of nations have found some reason or another to implement new restrictions. In the United States and Europe, it's copyright. In India, the world's largest democracy, the impetus is religious insults. Across Southeast Asia, the justifications vary, but, as in most of the world, the underlying reasoning appears to have more to do with controlling a nation's populace than with excuses given on the surface. Will Iran succeed in sequestering itself from the online world? For a time, perhaps. But as most authoritarian leaders eventually learn, there are red lines - some which may not seem so apparent at first - that the population won't let them cross. For Iranians, access to the internet may be that line.

low-cost organizational structure and no durable organizational mechanisms are put in place

political evanescence is the inconvenient accompaniment of the open and meritocratic character of social media

The political evanescence of digital activism in the Egyptian revolution needs to be understood in connection with the libertarian ideology of “leaderlessness” and “horizontality” that has provided a cultural framing for social media use among activists

it is apparent that the Egyptian revolution, as any great upheaval in history, was not completely spontaneous and leaderless. Rather it bore the mark of complex direction exercised in concert by multiple leaders, from grassroots groups on the ground as the April 6 Youth Movement, to organized forces such as the Muslim Brotherhood, Left opposition parties and NGOs, to end with digital activists responsible for spreading revolutionary information, recruiting online communities of supporters and publicizing protest events

While Ghonim had some basic activist experience, having done some digital campaigning in support of the presidential campaign of Mohammed el-Baradei in 2010, he was little known within activist circles. From the distance and safety of Dubai where he was working for Google, he collaborated with activists on the ground including Mohammed AbdelRahman Mansour who acted as co-admin on the page, and Ahmed Maher of the April 6 Youth Movement, the group that pioneered digital activism in Egypt. It was only after he was released from prison in the midst of the eighteen-day insurrection, that he suddenly became a famous and respected figure. Yet, Ghonim did not manage, neither he tried, to turn the great influence he had exercised during the revolution into any form of structured political leadership during the transitional phase. Ironically the Facebook fanpage he founded has discontinued its communications with a status message celebrating “the power of the people” on 3 July 2013, the day of the anti-Morsi coup. Ghonim has recently left the country for voluntary exile after a streak of attacks on the news media.

The case of Tamarrod demonstrates how the fluidity in the field of social media in the activist field, dominated by flexible groupings coordinated through social network sites can open space for opportunist groups. Both Wael Ghonim and the main leaders of Tamarrod were secondary figures in the activist scene in Cairo, despite the fact that some of them, had been previously involved in pro-democracy campaigns and in the Elbaradei presidential campaigns. Similarly to what happened with previous political groups it was a great extent this outsider aura that managed to gather so much enthusiasm from Egyptian youth. The group managed to build an extensive network across the country, collecting millions of signature (the exact quantity will remain unverified) to withdraw confidence from Morsi. However, it progressively became clear that Tamarrod was far from being simply a disingenuous and spontaneous citizens groups. It has been publicly confirmed that the campaign received substantial funding from a number of Egyptian entrepreneurs, including Naguib Sawiris. It is also reasonably suspected that the group received financial and operational support from the Egyptian army, and the so-called deep state, which saw in Tamarrod a sort of useful idiot to get rid of the Muslim Brotherhood and create a favorable climate for the coup d'etat. Since the campaign of repression orchestrated by al-Sisi and the new post-coup government, the group has been marred by intestine fight between different factions, and seems to have lost much of its “street cred” among Egyptian youth. It was yet another group falling victim of its own precipitous rise.