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.
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Middle East Revolutions: The View from China by Perry Link | NYRBlog | The New York Rev... - 5 views
www.nybooks.com/...le-east-revolutions-view-china
middle_east china revolution protest #jan25 authoritarianism mubarak filtering social_media
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The Egyptian uprising is an awkward fact for China’s rulers because it undermines one of their favorite arguments.
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Is control at the level of the argument? What impact do arguments have in authoritarian countries?
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Even authoritarian regimes require consent at some level, even the consent of silence. This is why the role of dissenter is so important in such societies. Repression alone is too expensive - ideological hegemony is more efficient. So argument/dissent matters.
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Agreed repression is expensive and often only causes more dissent. But the issue is whether ideological hegemony is actually about substantive arguments or a kind of rhetoric which citizens cannot break down, but know is false.
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If you haven't read Lisa Wedeen's Ambiguities of Domination, you should! Great stuff on the power of absurd arguments.
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Absolutely what I was thinking of. This book was quite influential for me. Thanks Ed. (ps back in the day I tried to take forward some of those arguments for Syria here http://users.ox.ac.uk/~metheses/WeymanThesis.htm)
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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?
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The uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt could not have happened without Facebook and Twitter.
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For five days at the height of the protests, Mubarak’s people were able to shut down the Internet and, for a time, cell phone networks as well.
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Chinese sources have revealed that the government spends over 500 billion yuan ($76 billion) a year on domestic “stability maintenance.”
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On February 15, Secretary of State Hilary Clinton delivered a speech on Internet freedom in which she said the US is committed to helping people in China and elsewhere “get around filters, stay one step ahead of the censors,” and in other ways join a free and open Internet. She said the US plans to award $25 million this year in competitive grants to “technologists and activists working at the cutting edge of the fight against Internet repression.”
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And which method—fighting Internet repression or fighting wars—seems more likely actually to bring democracy?
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Washington Times - Senate OKs millions to combat Iran's Internet censors - 2 views
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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.
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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.
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when there is money, people will come, and you are seeing a lot of companies retooling themselves to become circumvention providers.
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Exporting Jihad - The New Yorker - 0 views
www.newyorker.com/...the-fall-after-the-arab-spring
Tunisia jihad Salafism Salafists ennahda politics youth generations policing police authoritarianism transition
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A friend of Mohamed’s, an unemployed telecommunications engineer named Nabil Selliti, left Douar Hicher to fight in Syria. Oussama Romdhani, who edits the Arab Weekly in Tunis, told me that in the Arab world the most likely radicals are people in technical or scientific fields who lack the kind of humanities education that fosters critical thought. Before Selliti left, Mohamed asked him why he was going off to fight. Selliti replied, “I can’t build anything in this country. But the Islamic State gives us the chance to create, to build bombs, to use technology.” In July, 2013, Selliti blew himself up in a suicide bombing in Iraq.
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Tourism, one of Tunisia’s major industries, dropped by nearly fifty per cent after June 26th last year, when, on a beach near the resort town of Sousse, a twenty-three-year-old student and break-dancing enthusiast pulled an automatic weapon out of his umbrella and began shooting foreigners; he spared Tunisian workers, who tried to stop him. The terrorist, who had trained at an Islamic State camp in Libya, killed thirty-eight people, thirty of them British tourists, before being shot dead by police.
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“The youth are lost,” Kamal told me. “There’s no justice.” Douar Hicher, he said, “is the key to Tunisia.” He continued, “If you want to stop terrorism, then bring good schools, bring transportation—because the roads are terrible—and bring jobs for young people, so that Douar Hicher becomes like the parts of Tunisia where you Westerners come to have fun.”
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he condemned the Sousse massacre and a terrorist attack in March, 2015, at Tunisia’s national museum, the Bardo, where three gunmen killed two dozen people. The victims were innocents, he said. Kamal still entertained a fantasy of joining a reformed police force. His knowledge of Islam was crude, and his allegiance to isis seemed confused and provisional—an expression of rage, not of ideology. But in Douar Hicher anger was often enough to send young people off to fight
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“Maybe it’s the Tunisian nature—we like risk,” a former jihadi told me. A million Tunisians live and work in Europe. “A lot of drug dealers are Tunisian; many smugglers of goods between Turkey and Greece are Tunisian; a lot of human traffickers in Belgrade are Tunisian. Online hackers—be careful of the Tunisians, there’s a whole network of them.”
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“The radical narrative tells you that whatever you’ve learned about Islam is wrong, you have to discard it—we have the new stuff. The old, traditional, moderate Islam doesn’t offer you the adventure of the isis narrative. It doesn’t offer you the temptation to enjoy, maybe, your inner savagery. isis offers a false heaven for sick minds.”
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Democracy didn’t turn Tunisian youths into jihadis, but it gave them the freedom to act on their unhappiness. By raising and then frustrating expectations, the revolution created conditions for radicalization to thrive. New liberties clashed with the old habits of a police state—young Tunisians were suddenly permitted to join civic and political groups, but the cops harassed them for expressing dissent. Educated Tunisians are twice as likely to be unemployed as uneducated ones, because the economy creates so few professional jobs. A third of recent college graduates can’t find work. Frustration led young people to take to the streets in 2011; a similar desperate impulse is now driving other young people toward jihad.
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the factors that drive young men and women to adopt Salafi jihadism are diverse and hard to parse: militants reach an overwhelmingly reductive idea by complex and twisted paths. A son of Riyadh grows up hearing Salafi preaching in a state-sanctioned mosque and goes to Syria with the financial aid of a Saudi businessman. A young Sunni in Falluja joins his neighbors in fighting American occupation and “Persian”—Shiite—domination. A Muslim teen-ager in a Paris banlieue finds an antidote to her sense of exclusion and spiritual emptiness in a jihadi online community. Part of the success of isis consists in its ability to attract a wide array of people and make them all look, sound, and think alike.
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Souli wasn’t sure what should be done with returned jihadis, but, like nearly everyone I met, he spoke of the need for a program of rehabilitation for those who come back. No such program exists
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In its eagerness to modernize, the Ben Ali regime encouraged widespread access to satellite television and the Internet. The sermons of Islamist firebrands from the Gulf, such as the Egyptian-born cleric Yusuf al-Qaradawi, entered the homes of Tunisians who felt smothered by official secularism. Oussama Romdhani, who was a senior official under Ben Ali—he was referred to as the “propaganda minister”—told me, “Radicals were able to use these tools of communication to recruit and disseminate the narrative, and they did it quite efficiently.”
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Around 2000, the Tunisian Combat Group, an Al Qaeda affiliate, emerged in Afghanistan, dedicating itself to the overthrow of the Tunisian government. One of its founders, Tarek Maaroufi, provided false passports to two Tunisians who, allegedly on instructions from Osama bin Laden, travelled to northern Afghanistan posing as television journalists and assassinated Ahmed Shah Massoud, the Afghan mujahideen commander, on September 9, 2001. The Combat Group’s other leader, known as Abu Iyadh al-Tunisi, was an Al Qaeda commander; when the Americans overthrew the Taliban, in late 2001, he escaped from Tora Bora with bin Laden, only to be arrested in Turkey, in 2003, and extradited to Tunisia. (Sentenced to forty-three years in prison, he seized the chance to radicalize his fellow-prisoners.)
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The inhabitants of Kasserine, however neglected by the state, were passionate advocates for their own rights. They had played a central role in the overthrow of the dictatorship, staging some of the earliest protests after Bouazizi’s self-immolation. In every coffee shop, I was told, half the conversations were about politics. Although Kasserine is a recruiting area for jihadis, Tunisia’s wealthy areas are so remote that the town felt less alienated than Douar Hicher and Ben Gardane.
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Walid was vague about his reasons for returning to Tunisia. He mentioned a traumatic incident in which he had seen scores of comrades mowed down by regime soldiers outside Aleppo. He also pointed to the creation of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, in April, 2013, which soon engaged in bitter infighting with the Nusra Front. Walid spoke of Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the caliph of the Islamic State, with the personal hatred that Trotskyists once expressed for Stalin. He accused isis of destroying the Syrian resistance and helping the Assad regime. He believed that isis was created by Western powers to undermine Al Qaeda and other true jihadi groups.
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these aged men from the two Tunisias—Essebsi a haughty remnant of the Francophile élite, Ghannouchi the son of a devout farmer from the provinces—began a series of largely secret conversations, and set Tunisia on a new path. In January, 2014, Ennahdha voluntarily handed over the government to a regime of technocrats. Ghannouchi had put his party’s long-term interests ahead of immediate power. A peaceful compromise like this had never happened in the region. Both old men had to talk their followers back from the brink of confrontation, and some Ennahdha activists regarded Ghannouchi’s strategy as a betrayal.
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To many Tunisians, Nidaa Tounes feels like the return of the old regime: some of the same politicians, the same business cronies, the same police practices. The Interior Ministry is a hideous seven-story concrete structure that squats in the middle of downtown Tunis, its roof bristling with antennas and satellite dishes, coils of barbed wire barring access from the street. The ministry employs eighty thousand people. There is much talk of reforming Tunisia’s security sector, with the help of Western money and training. (The U.S., seeing a glimmer of hope in a dark region, recently doubled its aid to Tunisia.) But the old habits of a police state persist—during my time in Tunis, I was watched at my hotel, and my interpreter was interrogated on the street.
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revolution opened up a space that Salafis rushed to fill. There were a lot more of them than anyone had realized—eventually, tens of thousands. In February, 2011, Tunisia’s interim government declared an amnesty and freed thousands of prisoners, including many jihadis. Among them was Abu Iyadh al-Tunisi, the co-founder of the Tunisian Combat Group. Within two months, he had started Ansar al-Sharia.
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“You feel no interest from the post-revolutionary governments in us here. People feel that the coastal areas, with twenty per cent of the people, are still getting eighty per cent of the wealth. That brings a lot of psychological pressure, to feel that you’re left alone, that there’s no horizon, no hope.”
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The old methods of surveillance are returning. In the center of Kasserine, I met an imam named Mahfoud Ben Deraa behind the counter of the hardware store he owns. He had just come back from afternoon prayers, but he was dressed like a man who sold paint. “I might get kicked out of the mosque, because last Friday’s sermon was something the government might not like,” the imam told me. He had preached that, since the government had closed mosques after terror attacks, “why, after an alcoholic killed two people, didn’t they close all the bars?” To some, this sounded like a call for Sharia, and after informers reported him to the police the governor’s office sent him a warning: “In the course of monitoring the religious activities and the religious institutions of the region, I hereby inform you that several violations have been reported.” The imam was ordered to open the mosque only during hours of prayer and to change the locks on the main doors to prevent unsupervised use. The warning seemed like overreach on the part of the state—the twitching of an old impulse from the Ben Ali years.
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“I never thought I would repeat the same demands as five years ago. The old regime has robbed our dreams.”
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According to the Tunisian Interior Ministry, a hundred thousand Tunisians—one per cent of the population—were arrested in the first half of 2015. Jihadi groups intend their atrocities to provoke an overreaction, and very few governments can resist falling into the trap.
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New democracies in Latin America and Eastern Europe and Asia have had to struggle with fragile institutions, corruption, and social inequity. Tunisia has all this, plus terrorism and a failed state next door.
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Ahmed told himself, “If I pray and ask for divine intervention, maybe things will get better.” Praying did not lead him to the moderate democratic Islam of Ennahdha. His thoughts turned more and more extreme, and he became a Salafi. He quit smoking marijuana and grew his beard long and adopted the ankle-length robe called a qamis. He un-friended all his female friends on Facebook, stopped listening to music, and thought about jihad. On Internet forums, he met jihadis who had been in Iraq and gave him suggestions for reading. Ahmed downloaded a book with instructions for making bombs. In the period of lax security under Ennahdha, he fell in with a radical mosque in Tunis. He was corresponding with so many friends who’d gone to Syria that Facebook deactivated his account. Some of them became leaders in the Islamic State, and they wrote of making thirty-five thousand dollars a year and having a gorgeous European wife or two. Ahmed couldn’t get a girlfriend or buy a pack of cigarettes.
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“Dude, don’t go!” Walid said when they met on the street. “It’s just a trap for young people to die.” To Walid, Ahmed was exactly the type of young person isis exploited—naïve, lost, looking for the shortest path to Heaven. Al Qaeda had comparatively higher standards: some of its recruits had to fill out lengthy application forms in which they were asked to name their favorite Islamic scholars. Walid could answer such questions, but they would stump Ahmed and most other Tunisian jihadis.
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“We need to reform our country and learn how to make it civilized,” he said. “In Tunisia, when you finish your pack of cigarettes, you’ll throw it on the ground. What we need is an intellectual revolution, a revolution of minds, and that will take not one, not two, but three generations.”
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shared by Ed Webb on 23 Feb 19
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The battle over the memory of Egypt's revolution | openDemocracy - 0 views
www.opendemocracy.net/...r-memory-of-egypt-s-revolution
Egypt Bahrain memory history revolution #jan25 military authoritarianism
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The once-embattled ancien regime is back with full force. Not only to consolidate its power in the present, but also to control the past. Yet, since the outbreak of the January 25 Revolution, besides the Islamists, two distinct communities were – and still are – in conflict, among other things, over the revolution’s nature and principles: the regime and the revolutionary activists. What follows is an exploration of these communities’ strategies to permeate the people’s collective consciousness and to enforce their own narratives of the revolution and its memory, across three different domains: Egypt’s public space; Egypt’s online sphere; and outside Egypt.
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in the revolution’s early years, Egypt’s public space was representative of the young activists’ creativity and rebellion
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Through graffiti on walls, images, texts and structures, the activists created from the country’s streets and squares memorials to keep the memory of the brave martyrs as well as the revolution’s ideals alive. Walls of Freedom, a 2014 book by Hamdy and Stone, offers thorough insights into the revolution and its artistic works. Young Egyptians’ independent cultural activities, including concerts and exhibitions, played a role in enhancing the historical narrative of the pro-revolution community.
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In November 2013, a few hours after Prime Minister Beblawi inaugurated it, protesters vandalised a memorial that the government built for ‘the martyrs of the revolution’. In his inaugurating speech, Beblawi referred to January 25 and June 30 ‘revolutions’ as well as the martyrs of the police and the army. That was interpreted by the protesters as another attempt to conflate the meanings and disrupt the image and the perceptions of the January 25 Revolution in the Egyptians’ collective consciousness
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the military, Egypt’s central power, endeavoured to restrict the public space and erase the memory of the January 25 revolution. For this power knows that while memories are linked to the past, they determine how many Egyptians will perceive the future. The military pursued 1984’s Orwellian prophecy: ‘he who controls the past controls the future’.
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the walls of revolutionary graffiti were repainted, CCTV cameras were installed in central spaces, and governmental offices were relocated away from the heart of Cairo
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in dismantling the revolutionary symbols, the regime intended to construct a collective memory that excludes rival interpretations of events to its own. That is reminiscent to the Bahraini government’s destruction of Pearl Roundabout, the rallying point of the 2011 mass anti-government protests.
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the activists’ 2012 campaign: Askar Kazeebon (Lying Military) whose modus operandi was to broadcast videos and documentaries to pedestrians that falsify the military’s accounts of various events and expose the soldiers’ crimes and human rights violations that official and regime-friendly media ignored
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The unprecedented crackdown on dissent and the draconian laws that reportedly imprisoned tens of thousands of activists had prompted many to surrender the public space. Some are silent out of fear or disappointment. Others tried to put the memory of the revolution aside, so that they can go on with their own personal lives
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Since the 2013 military coup, state and private media outlets – mostly controlled by the regime’s clientele – have kept glorifying the military’s role in recent years as well as defaming the revolution and activists as tools of the west to destroy Egypt
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tech-savvy young activists already utilised memorialisation to foment the democratic uprising. We Are All Khalid Said, a Facebook page created to commemorate the 28-year old Khalid Said who was brutally tortured and killed by police, in 2010, became the January 25 protests’ virtual rallying point and main coordinator.
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there are many initiatives to resist forgetting the revolution and silencing its voices. The most recent of which is Mosireen Collective’s 858 archive of resistance. In the Collective’s own words, the archive includes raw photographs, videos and documents that ‘present thousands of histories of revolt told from hundreds of perspectives. While the regime is using every resource to clamp down on public space and public memory the time has come to excavate and remember and re-present our histories.’
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Wiki-Thawra whose slogan is ‘so we don’t forget’; UCLA’s Tahrir Documents; AUC’s University on the Square; and MIT’s 18 Days in Egypt.
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After the 2013 military takeover, thousands involuntarily left the country to live in exile abroad. A minority among the exiled are still engaged in telling stories of the revolution and protesting al-Sisi government’s human rights violations and destruction of Egypt’s democratic hopes. Using art and satire, they continue to disturb the regime’s hegemonic revolution-defaming narratives.
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it is still uncertain whether the regime has successfully dominated the Egyptian collective memory of the January 25 Revolution. That is because collective memory is not a static realm but rather a fluid construct that shapes – and is shaped by – current conditions and future aspirations.
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Here's Why You Probably Won't Read This Article About Syria - 0 views
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analysis by BuzzFeed News shows the number of shares on Facebook, Twitter, and other social media sites of the most-read stories about Syria in the past two months were a 10th of what they were just over a year ago
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“I work so hard to try and post videos, but no one cares. I don’t know what to say. They just see the article or report, and just say: ‘Oh, that’s really sad.’ And after that they turn the internet off and go and live their lives.”
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Once the footage is online people like Ethar El-Katatney, executive producer of AJ+, pick it up, and try to work out how they can tell the next story from Syria.“All of the footage I am looking at today looks the same as the footage I saw a year ago and it’s the same dust, and blood, and screaming, and hospital rooms and hospital floors,” El-Katatney told BuzzFeed News. “It has become normalized.”
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“People are feeling helpless, they are feeling [that] it is not that we don’t care — it’s that we just can’t do anything.”
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“We have hit a ceiling in shocking people,” El-Katatney said. “From [a] pool of blood, or a dying child, and now people have come across severed limbs, decapitation. I don’t think there is anything that I can show that will shock anyone, no matter what it is.
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In the final two months of 2016, as the four-year siege of the rebel-held city of Aleppo ended in brutal fashion, the four more-shared stories were all shared more than 300,000 times. The best performing story (about how people could help civilians trapped in Aleppo) was shared more than half a million times, almost entirely on Facebook.However, in January and February this year, as the Syrian regime and Russian forces bombarded the enclave of Eastern Ghouta, the most viral piece across all publishers (a BBC News article about children struggling to survive) was shared just 42,000 times.
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human brains are incapable of coping with prolonged catastrophes, a phenomenon called “psychic numbing.”
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the more death and destruction you see, on social media for example, the more your feelings of empathy actually decreases. “One plus one is less than two,” in this situation, he said.“We do numb to repeated photographs, just like we numb to increasing numbers of individuals,”
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almost half a million people have been killed, 5 million more have fled the country, and 6 million have been displaced internally
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Decisions made by US President Donald Trump’s administration have contributed to keeping the conflict from the international community’s attention. Despite bombing Syria, Trump’s only focus in the country has been ISIS, leaving a vacuum that has been occupied fully by Vladimir Putin’s Russian forces, who have worked together with the regime of Bashar al-Assad to bombard the remaining rebels, like those in besieged Eastern Ghouta.
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"I think the world is frustrated by the actions of the major powers," said Salwa Aksoy, vice president of the National Coalition of Syrian Revolution and Opposition Forces. "The struggle has lasted so long, and the scale of the war crimes has reached a level where there is just too much pain for the international community to look at it,”
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“All of our calls to protect children inside Syria have gone unheeded,” she said.“People are genuinely upset, if not angry or outraged, about what is happening now in Syria. For that I have no doubt about,’ she said. “There is, however, a certain element of fatigue among people about the suffering and the continuous horror stories. I think a lot of people feel helpless over what is happening and not being able to stop the bloodshed in Syria.”
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“What kind of ways can we cover Syria that we haven’t done a thousand times before, whether it is with footage or with the scripting? And sometimes we fail. Sometimes there just really is nothing.”For Adam, messaging from a rooftop elsewhere in Ghouta, he could see the people not retweeting his stories, but he could also hear the shelling continue. “Today, like always bombing, airstrikes, and people killed. Like every day,” he said.“But no one cares.”
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Memes: A gamechanger in Egyptian politics - Focus - Weekly - Ahram Online - 0 views
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How has the political culture changed in Egypt due to the emergence of political memes and the influencers behind them?
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President Abdel-Fattah Al-Sisi also recently laughed when he was shown some of the memes referencing the most recent spike in petrol prices, telling the first session of the seventh National Youth Conference held in the New Administrative Capital last month that when the government tackles vital issues it takes into consideration the reaction of people on social media. He said that the government routinely gauges the possible reaction of the people before taking difficult decisions. This demonstrates how the country’s political culture has evolved in the digital age, since physical banners, such as those that were once used in demonstrations, have now often been replaced by digital memes, with the government closely monitoring the Internet in order to gauge the state of public opinion.
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Khaled Al-Baramawi, a media commentator, said that Egyptians had always been known for their wit and satire, particularly on political issues. “With the rise of social media, Egyptians have become top producers of digital content,” he said. “When you combine Egyptian humour and online activity, you can understand why digital satire is so popular among Egyptians, including on Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and other platforms. Politics is a conversation staple, and memes are often produced based on statements by officials.”
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“Nationalist Memes” is a Facebook page with 11,000 followers and one administrator who advocates for Egyptian nationalism and promotes this idea to the public, for example. The aim is to instill patriotism into a generation that may be sceptical of it and to respond to rumours on social media.
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“opposition political parties are very weak in Egypt and have no impact on the streets. People do not care to hear about them or know what they are doing. Memes, however, are followed by many Egyptians, especially young people who may sign up to several meme pages and interact with them all the time. Their impact is so great that many of the ideas doing the rounds of young people in Egypt have their origin in a meme on the Internet.”
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shared by Ed Webb on 07 Sep 19
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Due to technical problems on our... - Mada Masr English | Facebook - 0 views
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Egypt media television TV Sisi military EGIS intelligence fascism
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the main reason for Kamal’s dismissal was that he made a seemingly minor programming change in his last episode on August 2, going against instructions handed down by a group of young graduates of the Presidential Leadership Program (PLP) who have been put in charge of editorial content for all channels owned by the General Intelligence Service (GIS), including DMC
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GIS owns the Egyptian Media Group, the biggest media conglomerate in Egypt and the parent company of several media organizations, including ONtv and the Youm7 news organization. The GIS also owns D Media, which owns the DMC network, Radio 9090 and mobtada.com. The GIS also has majority stakes in channels like al-Hayat TV, al-Nahar TV and CBC TV
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Presidential Leadership Program was launched in 2015 under an initiative announced by President Abdel Fattah al-Sisi. Run in partnership with the Ministry of Defense and the Cabinet of Ministers, the PLP “targets young future leaders and enables them to acquire the skills they need to learn about governance, administrative and political fields,” according to their website. The eight-month program is open to university graduates between 20 and 30 years old with the goal of “increasing the awareness of young people on political and national development knowledge.” At the National Youth Conference in April 2017, Sisi said the PLP prepares young adults to fill crucial roles in the presidency, ministries and governorates
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the full confidence of the security apparatus in the graduates to oversee the media based on how they were selected and trained, including training on national security
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As punishment for not following orders, the channel fired not only Kamal, but his entire production team was as well, the source said, despite mediation efforts by several senior staffers at the channel to keep some members of the team on board. The hasty dismissals appear to be a clear message to people working at other channels to not deviate in the slightest from the programming instructions handed down to them.
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the ideas and policies of young people who have no media experience, which is reflected in their choices of topics and guests
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PLP graduates’ role is not only restricted to managing the editorial content filling Egypt’s airwaves. During the last youth conference, the graduates had final say over all aspects of the event, including the list of presenters and guests. They also arranged all the themes and prepared all the questions and warned presenters not to deviate from the script
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OTF | The Rise of Digital Authoritarianism in Egypt: Digital Expression Arrests from 20... - 0 views
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Since 2013, Egypt has seen the worst human rights crackdown in the country’s history. The current regime has imprisoned thousands of political activists, criminalized demonstrations, and seized control over the media landscape in a successful effort to limit genuine political discourse. Today it is nearly impossible for any alternative narrative to penetrate conventional modalities of expression. As the state continues to close physical spaces and exert control over traditional media, alternative political voices have been forced to rely on digital platforms as a means to express themselves. In response, the state has turned its attention to these platforms.
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Online censorship increased in 2017 when the websites of 21 independent media and political organizations were blocked inside the country in a single day. The number of blocked websites in Egypt has since surpassed 500. Large-scale phishing attacks are also frequently launched against Egyptian civil society, with attacks documented in 2017 and 2019. In 2018, several new laws were passed in Egyptian parliament limiting digital expression and inhibiting the right to privacy.
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After compiling a dataset of 333 digital expression violations (including arrests, acquittals, prison sentences, investigations, fines, lawsuits, and pretrial detentions) in Egypt from 2011 until mid-2019, this report found the number of Egyptian citizens targeted by the state for digital expression has been steadily rising. Analysis of this data reveals a yearly increase in the number of digital expression violations, with a surge in the occurrence of these violations beginning in 2016 and continuing until mid-2019, when the data collection for this report ended.
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Egyptian security authorities routinely surveil and target social media posts—particularly Facebook content—as a basis for the arrest and detention of Egyptian citizens. The state relies on provisions such as “spreading false news,” “joining a banned group” and “misuse of social media” to detain citizens for digital expression. These charges are found in the Penal Code, the Counterterrorism Law, and the Telecommunications Law, rather than new and highly publicized laws such as the Cybercrime Law and the Media Regulation Law.
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Detainees held for digital expression violations by the SSP spend long periods in pretrial detention due to the unique procedural rules governing this body; many of these cases are never even brought to court
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a dramatic increase in the use of a special prosecutorial body, the State Security Prosecution, to investigate digital expression cases.
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The SSP is a special prosecutorial body which investigates and prosecutes cases related to national security and terrorism; it is notoriously subject to extraordinary procedural rules.
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Egypt’s Prosecutor General issued a decree in 2018 directing prosecutors to focus on cases concerning the spread of false news. A “rumour collection network” was established for citizens to send in reports of false news and rumours to a WhatsApp number—effectively crowdsourcing surveillance to the civilian population.
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Egyptian security authorities surveil online expression through technically unsophisticated strategies such as device seizures, observation of social media platforms, and informant networks. Demonstration events on Facebook, particularly during periods of heightened political tension, are routinely targeted by security authorities. Videos are also frequently targeted, as they are easily shared and accessed. Analysis of the dataset found three main types of arrests: mass arrests during periods of increased political tension; high profile figures targeted for their cumulative body of work; and individual posts that cause a citizen to be targeted.
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Coronavirus: Pandemic unites Maghreb leaders in crackdown on dissent | Middle East Eye - 0 views
www.middleeasteye.net/...avirus-algeria-morocco-tunisia
Algeria Morocco Tunisia expression freedom repression pandemics press media
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Before the pandemic spread, a number of countries in the Middle East and North Africa had been experiencing a wave of public protests for more democratic and accountable rule akin to the so-called Arab Spring of 2011. "The crackdown started several months before the pandemic, but has been exacerbated by the emergency laws and extrajudicial tools regimes are employing under the guise of the pandemic," Sarah Yerkes, a senior fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for Peace Middle East Program.
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"Regimes across North Africa are exploiting the pandemic to crackdown on activists, journalists, and anyone critical of the regime, particularly those using social media."
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In Algeria, with the popular anti-government protest movement known as the Hirak put on hold for safety reasons since March, the repressive climate, arguably the worst in North Africa, has worsened with the continued arrests of journalists and activists, which has been a maintained pattern since President Abdelmadjid Tebboune took office in December.
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The increased repression, coupled with persistent concerns over the government's incapacity to handle the pandemic, and plummeting oil prices that spell disaster for Algeria's economy, are all contributing factors to a tension threatening to boil over onto the streets, pandemic or not.
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"We work in fear," an Algerian filmmaker who spoke to MEE on condition of anonymity said. "People aren't only afraid for their safety, but also for their families' safety, as you never know how things can escalate with this Kafkaesque judicial system.
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"Algeria is the country where, more than any other in the Middle East, authorities have exploited the pandemic to neutralise active opposition to its rule," Eric Goldstein, the deputy director of Human Rights Watch's Middle East and North Africa division, told MEE.
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"President Tebboune took office saying he had heard the Hirak's calls for reform and promised a new constitution. "Instead, he exploited the Covid-19 lockdown to try to put the Hirak genie back in the bottle, while proposing a draft constitution that does little to advance political and civil rights."
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Reporters without Borders has ranked Algeria 146 out of 180 countries and territories in its 2020 World Press Freedom Index - five places lower than in 2019.
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Many journalists and activists face campaigns of disparate accusations and slander, and anyone using the internet to voice dissent against the monarchy and ruling elite faces possible prison time.
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Some 16 Moroccans have been arrested on similar charges as Radi since October, including famous rapper Gnawi, YouTubers, as well as several high school students.
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Since Morocco's Hirak protest movement erupted in 2016, the Moroccan Association for Human Rights has documented more than 1,000 cases of political detention.
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Moroccans continue to advocate under the #FreeKoulchi ("Free everything") campaign for the release of all those imprisoned.
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Despite adopting some reforms since 2011, citizens are offered little political power under King Mohammed VI, who this year has entered his third decade heading the kingdom. Like much of North Africa as a whole, unemployment levels are high, political corruption and abuses of police power are widespread, and social services are lacking.
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According to the Arab Barometer, a central resource for quantitative research on the Middle East, 70 percent of Moroccans aged 18-29 have thought about emigrating, a strongly held sentiment shared by both Algerians and Tunisians, whose migration to Europe has increased significantly this year.
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Last month, a Tunisian woman was sentenced to six months in jail after sharing a Facebook post about the coronavirus written as a Quranic verse. The post mimicked the style of the Quran in reference to Covid-19, encouraging people to wash their hands and observe social distancing.
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he consolidation of the prime minister's power in Tunisia, high levels of corruption, security and economic challenges along with political stagnation, are all factors that have helped to scupper Tunisia's democratic consolidation.
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Though the best performing out of the Maghreb countries, Tunisia still has much room for improvement when it comes to freedom of expression. Despite the steps taken, journalists still face pressure and intimidation from government officials, and reporters covering the operations of security forces often face harassment or arrest.
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In terms of the pandemic, unlike in Morocco and neighbouring Algeria in particular, the majority of Tunisians have expressed trust in their government - with 71.2 percent trusting the government to control the virus, and 84.5 percent trusting it to communicate effectively with the public, according to the Sigma Conseil.
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The social, economic, and security effects of the pandemic are likely to divert attention away from needed long-term reforms, the political agency of civil society, and risk the permanence of authoritarianism that mirrors Egypt under President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, after the worst of the pandemic has gone.
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Signal asks users to set up TLS proxy servers to help Iranians 'bypass' censorship | Mi... - 0 views
www.middleeasteye.net/...roxy-servers-bypass-censorship
Iran socialmedia censorship politics election
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Signal has asked users to set up TLS proxy servers to help Iranians bypass censorship of the app, after Iran blocked the encrypted messaging platform.
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Signal said it was "working around Iran's censorship" after becoming the most downloaded app on Iranian app stores.
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Thousands of Iranians flocked to Signal after Facebook-owned WhatsApp announced plans to overhaul its privacy policy.
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An Iranian filtering committee blocked Signal after it alleged the app hosted "criminal content". However, neither the government nor the judiciary, which both sit on the committee, are taking responsibility for the move. An Iranian judiciary spokesperson distanced himself from blocking Signal, saying it had not "blocked any media, news outlet or messaging service" since 2019. The "Identifying the Criminal Content Working Group" consists of six government ministers and seven officials from other authorities.
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Signal was previously blocked between 2016 and 2017. It joins Telegram, Twitter, Facebook and YouTube, which Iranian authorities have also blocked.
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An analyst close to the government told Middle East Eye the judiciary and hardliners were determined to make Iranians pessimistic about reformist candidates ahead of June's presidential elections. "As Rouhani is close to the end of his tenure, the judiciary and hardliners are determined to make sure Rouhani has no encouraging legacy to make people totally pessimistic about reformists and moderates," said the analyst. Rouhani has two legacies, according to the analyst: "One is the 2015 nuclear deal, which is somehow in intensive care, and the other is his striving to keep social networks open and unblocked."
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Right-Wing Media Outlets Duped by a Middle East Propaganda Campaign - 0 views
www.thedailybeast.com/iddle-east-propaganda-campaign
media politics socialmedia disinformation propaganda UAE Qatar GCC Iran
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Badani is part of a network of at least 19 fake personas that has spent the past year placing more than 90 opinion pieces in 46 different publications. The articles heaped praise on the United Arab Emirates and advocated for a tougher approach to Qatar, Turkey, Iran and its proxy groups in Iraq and Lebanon.
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“This vast influence operation highlights the ease with which malicious actors can exploit the identity of real people, dupe international news outlets, and have propaganda of unknown provenance legitimized through reputable media,” Marc Owen Jones, an assistant professor at Hamad Bin Khalifa University in Qatar who first noticed suspicious posts by members of the network, told The Daily Beast. “It’s not just fake news we need to be wary of, but fake journalists.”
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placed articles critical of Qatar and supportive of tougher sanctions on Iran in conservative North American outlets like Human Events and conservative writer Andy Ngo’s The Post Millennial, as well as Israeli and Middle Eastern newspapers like The Jerusalem Post and Al Arabiya, and Asian newspapers like the South China Morning Post.
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a series of shared behavioral patterns. The personas identified by The Daily Beast were generally contributors to two linked sites, The Arab Eye and Persia Now; had Twitter accounts created in March or April 2020; presented themselves as political consultants and freelance journalists mostly based in European capitals; lied about their academic or professional credentials in phony LinkedIn accounts; used fake or stolen avatars manipulated to defeat reverse image searches; and linked to or amplified each others’ work.
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In February, two websites, The Arab Eye and Persia Now, were registered on the same day and began to acquire a host of contributors.
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both sites share the same Google Analytics account, are hosted at the same IP address, and are linked through a series of shared encryption certificates
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Persia Now lists a non-existent London mailing address and an unanswered phone number on its contact form. The apparent editors of the outlets, Sharif O'Neill and Taimur Hall, have virtually no online footprints or records in journalism.
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They’re critical of Qatar and, in particular, its state-funded news outlet Al Jazeera. They’re no big fans of Turkey’s role backing one of the factions in Libya’s civil war
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constant editorial lines like arguing for more sanctions on Iran or using international leverage to weaken Iran’s proxy groups in Lebanon and Iraq. The personas are also big fans of the United Arab Emirates and have heaped praise on the Gulf nation for its “exemplary resilience” to the COVID-19 pandemic, its “strong diplomatic ties” to the European Union, and supposedly supporting gender equality through the Expo 2020 in Dubai.
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criticizing Facebook for its decision to appoint Tawakkol Karman, a 2011 Nobel Peace Prize laureate, to its oversight board. Media outlets in Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and the United Arab Emirates have criicized the appointment of Karman, a former member of the Muslim Brotherhood affiliated Islah Party in Yemen, for her association with the group.
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None of the Twitter accounts associated with the network ever passed more than a few dozen followers, but a few still managed to garner high profile endorsements for their work. An article by “Joyce Toledano” in Human Events about how Qatar is “destabilizing the Middle East” got a shout-out from Students for Trump co-founder Ryan Fournier’s nearly million-follower Twitter account and French senator Nathalie Goulet high-fived Lin Nguyen’s broadside about Facebook and Tawakkol Karman.
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All of the stolen avatars were mirror image reversed and cropped from their originals, making them difficult to find through common Google reverse image searches
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On her LinkedIn page, “Salma Mohamed” claimed to be a former reporter for the AP based in London, though no public record of an AP journalist matching Salma Mohamed’s description is available.
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Another persona, Amani Shahan, described herself in bios for Global Villages and Persia Now as being a contributor to and “ghostwriting articles” for The Daily Beast. No one by that name has ever written for The Daily Beast and The Daily Beast does not employ ghostwriters. (Shahan also referred to herself with both male and female pronouns in different author bios.)
Trump's Favorite Dictator Fueling New Pro-Hitler Movement - 0 views
www.thedailybeast.com/ement-on-facebook-and-telegram
fascism Sisi telegram socialmedia Egypt nazis NaziGermany youtube facebook Tunisia military
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Facebook deletes Ethiopia PM's post that urged citizens to 'bury' rebels - BBC News - 0 views
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An Uncertain Future for Jordanian Youth - POMED - 2 views
pomed.org/ain-future-for-jordanian-youth
Jordan youth activism unemployment economy censorship expression organization socialmedia media repression
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Jordan’s strategic relationships and regional importance continue to win it unmatched financial support from the international community. And as a result, the government has felt little urgency or pressure to undertake real reform or respond to the legitimate demands of its youth. With trust between the youth and the regime low and the perception of corruption high, however, remaining complacent carries grave risks for the country’s stability.
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“Economic optimism is scant, particularly among the youth,” the Arab Barometer found, adding that the economic crisis was “leading many to consider migration despite global travel restrictions.”
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the rate of suicide in Jordan has also increased over the past few years amid the dire economic conditions. In 2020, the rate was the highest in 10 years and 45 percent higher than the year before, with one suicide on average every other day. After university graduates threatened earlier this year to commit mass suicide over widespread unemployment, Jordan’s parliament passed legislation criminalizing suicide and attempts to commit suicide in a public place, doubling the fine if it is a mass suicide attempt.
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There are more than 6.5 million internet and social media users in Jordan, the majority of whom are youth, out of a population of roughly 11 million. Jordanians are avid social media users, and over the years have used Facebook, WhatsApp, and other platforms to share news not broadcast on state-controlled channels, jokes targeting the regime, and rumors about the myriad political and corruption scandals circulating across the country on a regular basis
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Cybercrimes Law No. 27/2015 is a popular regime tool used to control expression online. Article 11 regulates expression on online platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and blogs. In April 2019, parliament introduced amendments to the law to criminalize the act of spreading “rumors” and “hate speech,” extending to the use of private messaging apps such as WhatsApp. The latest amendments define hate speech as “every writing and every speech or action intended to provoke sectarian or racial sedition, advocate for violence, or foster conflict between followers of different religions and various components of the nation.” And under the cybercrime law, Jordanians will face a criminal penalty if they are convicted of “sending or resending or disseminating information through the Internet or website or any information system that includes defamation, slander or libel against any person.” Between 2019 and 2020, the cases brought under the cybercrime law exceeded two thousand, more than double the number from the year before. In 2022, there have been more arrests under charges of “spreading false news,” including the detentions of several high-profile journalists.
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Even the Jordanian National Center for Human Rights, a semi-governmental organization, wrote in its own recent annual report that “the detention of individuals for what they express is continuing.” Alarmingly, a recent Citizen Lab and Front Line Defenders joint report confirmed that two operators, “likely agencies of the Jordanian government,” used the NSO Group’s Pegasus spyware to hack the phones of at least four Jordanians, including a human rights defender, a lawyer, and a journalist.
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Loosely formed groups of youth activists, often described with the term hirak (“movement”), organize in various neighborhoods and towns across Jordan around shared issues. In 2019, a workshop looking at youth activism across the Middle East and North Africa found that youth activism does not adhere to formalized structures of organizing, such as political parties, professional associations, and civil society organizations.
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we have seen youth movements in the past decade break the generations-old divisions of urban versus rural and West Bank versus East Bank
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organizing around their shared frustrations over unchecked levels of corruption, perpetual over-education combined with underemployment, and restrictions on what they can write on social media or when they can gather.
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the many initiatives launched over the years have not ever been driven by local youth demands, but rather have been top-down, buzzword-filled projects, centralized within the newly created Ministry of Youth, with little to no popular support or participation
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RTL Today - Turkey introduces jail terms for 'fake news' - 0 views
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Turkey's parliament on Thursday approved a tough pre-election law that could see reporters and social media users jailed for up to three years for spreading "fake news".
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cement the government's already-firm grip on the media eight months before a general election that President Recep Tayyip Erdogan enters trailing in the polls.
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The Council of Europe said the measure's vague definition of "disinformation" and accompanying threat of jail could have a "chilling effect and increased self-censorship, not least in view of the upcoming elections in June 2023".
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One lawmaker from the secular CHP party smashed his mobile phone with a hammer in parliament to demonstrate how freedom of expression was being destroyed -- particularly for the young."I would like to address my brothers who are 15, 16, 17 years old and who will be deciding the fate of Turkey in 2023," CHP lawmaker Burak Erbay said before taking out his hammer."You have only one freedom left -- the phone in your pocket. There's Instagram, YouTube, Facebook. You communicate there," he said ahead of the vote."If the law here passes in parliament, you can break your phone like this," he said.
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Most Turkish newspapers and television channels fell under the control of government officials and their business allies during a sweeping crackdown that followed a failed coup in 2016.
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Turkey used the threat of heavy penalties to force giants such as Facebook and Twitter to appoint local representatives who can quickly comply with local court orders to take down contentious posts
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The new legislation imposes a criminal penalty for those found guilty of spreading false or misleading information.It requires social networks and internet sites to hand over personal details of users suspected of "propagating misleading information".
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Turkey was ranked 149th out of 180 countries in the annual media freedom index published by Reporters Without Borders (RSF) earlier this year."Authoritarianism is gaining ground in Turkey, challenging media pluralism," RSF said. "All possible means are used to undermine critics."