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Mirna Shaban

New study quantifies use of social media in Arab Spring | UW Today - 0 views

www.washington.edu/...of-social-media-in-arab-spring

revolution socialmedia

shared by Mirna Shaban on 26 Jun 14 - No Cached
    • Mirna Shaban
      Mirna Shaban on 26 Jun 14
       
      Yellow highlighting= Information about role of social media in the Arab Spring. Pink highlighting= Statistical information Blue highlighting= Possibility of link to more information. 
  • the team located data about technology use and political opinion from before the revolutions. 
  • “Our evidence suggests that social media carried a cascade of messages about freedom and democracy across North Africa and the Middle East, and helped raise expectations for the success of political uprising,” said Philip Howard, the project lead and an associate professor in communication at the University of Washington.  “People who shared interest in democracy built extensive social networks and organized political action. Social media became a critical part of the toolkit for greater freedom.”
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  • During the week before Egyptian president Hosni Mubaraks resignation, for example, the total rate of tweets from Egypt — and around the world — about political change in that country ballooned from 2,300 a day to 230,000 a day. 
  • Data for the UW project came directly from immense digital archives the team built over the course of several months.
  • After analyzing more than 3 million tweets, gigabytes of YouTube content and thousands of blog posts, a new study finds that social media played a central role in shaping political debates in the Arab Spring.
  • The Project on Information Technology and Political Islam assembled data about blogging in Tunisia one month prior to the crisis in that country, and had special data on the link structure of Egyptian political parties one month prior to the crisis there.
  • Political discussion in blogs presaged the turn of popular opinion in both Tunisia and Egypt.  In Tunisia, conversations about liberty, democracy and revolution on blogs and on Twitter often immediately preceded mass protests. 
  • Twenty percent of blogs were evaluating Ben Alis leadership the day he resigned from office (Jan. 14), up from just 5 percent the month before.  Subsequently, the primary topic for Tunisian blogs was “revolution” until a public rally of at least 100,000 people eventually forced the old regimes remaining leaders to relinquish power.
  • In the two weeks after Mubaraks resignation, there was an average of 2,400 tweets a day from people in neighboring countries about the political situation in Egypt. In Tunisia after Ben Alis resignation, there were about 2,200 tweets a day.
  • Ironically, government efforts to crack down on social media may have incited more public activism, especially in Egypt. People who were isolated by efforts to shut down the Internet, mostly middle-class Egyptians, may have gone to the streets when they could no longer follow the unrest through social media, Howard said.
Mirna Shaban

World Development book case study: the role of social networking in the Arab Spring -- ... - 0 views

newint.org/...-networking-in-the-arab-spring

government socialmedia ideology

shared by Mirna Shaban on 26 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • The start of the unrest was in Tunisia and the spark was the self-immolation of a market stallholder, Mohammed Bouaziz, on 10 December 2010.
  • he first reported use of social networking websites by dissident groups taking part in a civil revolt was in Moldova, a small country between Romania and Ukraine, in April 2009.
  • The internet is useful for information dissemination and news gathering, social media for connecting and co-ordinating groups and individuals, mobile phones for taking photographs of what is happening and making it available to a wide global audience and satellite television for instant global reporting of events.
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  • For dissident groups, all of these digital tools allow them to bring together remote and often disparate groups and give them channels to bypass the conventional media, which is usually state controlled and unwilling to broadcast any news of civil unrest and opposition to the government.
  • Rapid internet interaction through Twitter and Facebook gave information to the protesters about how to counteract the security forces as they tried to disperse the protesters, maps showing locations for protest meetings and practical advice about such things as what to do when teargas is used against groups of protesters.
  • The governments in Tunisia and Egypt were very unhappy about the often brutal images of repression of the protests by government security forces and both governments tried to block the social-networking sites. In Tunisia, the effect was to increase the size of protest demonstrations and the Tunisian president, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, was forced to change his strategy. He apologized for blocking the sites and reopened them. He offered to open talks with the dissident groups but by that time it was too late to save his government. He resigned on 16 January and an interim coalition government was set up.
  • The Egyptian government’s decision to cut all communication systems, including the internet and mobile phones, on the night of 27 January was widely perceived to be a watershed moment in the overthrow of the Mubarak government.
  • Egyptian protest sympathizers were unable to watch events on their computers and televisions and joined the demonstrators in Tahrir Square instead.
  • The Mubarak government stepped down on 12 February and was replaced by a military council purporting to support democratic change.
  • China has taken much firmer control of its internet as a result of events in Arab countries, fearing a contagion effect. After an internet call for popular revolt in February, over 100 activists are reported to have ‘disappeared’.
  • There is an argument to be made that the role of technology in these events has been overstated. The frequent cry is that it was not laptops that marched on Tahrir Square but people with a common cause that they had already identified. As far as they are concerned, revolution is nothing new and the impact of the new technology in the Arab Spring has mostly been reported by people who are using the technology themselves. Its importance, they say, has been exaggerated.
  • In the Western world, Twitter is a device that is most frequently used to comment on relatively minor media or personal events, such as the behaviour of a particular celebrity. In Egypt and Tunisia its use proved to be much more political and effective – not social networking, just networking.
  • The difficulties are immense: regional poverty, tensions over the use of resources such as oil and water, religious divisions within countries, rapid population growth and, more threatening than any of those, relationships between Israel and its Arab neighbours.
jamieparkerson

All of Iraq is in the Deep Web - 0 views

www.news.com.au/...story-fnjwmwrh-1226960562497

Deep Web Tor The Onion Router freedom censorship surveillance anonymity Hacktivists free speech political unrest

shared by jamieparkerson on 25 Jun 14 - No Cached
  • jamieparkerson on 25 Jun 14
     
    AS THE Iraqi government censors large swathes of the internet following devastating attacks and victories by the militant group Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS), thousands of people are turning to the deep, anonymous web. Locals are adopting the browser Tor, the most popular anonymising tool online, to get around government obstruction, the Daily Dot reported.
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