After the beheading of journalist James Foley by the terrorist group ISIS, social-media platforms like Twitter and YouTube are cracking down on the sharing of images and video of his death. But should they be the ones who decide what we can see and what we can’t?
http://www.technologyreview.com/view/525076/syrian-web-censorship-techniques-revealed/
The conflict in Syria has led to internet blackouts, but this article reveals the more pernicious censorship that’s ongoing. Most content gets through, but a focus on blocking instant messaging and scouring social networks for certain key words means that citizens are censored in their day-to-day web surfing.
Activists and others involved in the war in Syria say Facebook has been deleting pages created by dissidents and removing content because it violates the social network’s standards, and that important information about the conflict is being lost as a result
From the front room of his flat in a British suburb, an unemployed man with no journalistic training named Eliot Higgins has become the go-to source for information about weapons and military activity in Syria
When SEA took credit for taking down the New York Times and Twitter’s UK site for some people, many may have wondered how they did it. Here’s how.
Instead of filing traditional news reports about Syria to traditional outlets like ABC News and Bloomberg, foreign correspondent Lara Setrakian decided to start her own dedicated news site about the conflict in the war-torn country — part of an ongoing trend towards the unbundling of the media.
Syria, which is engaged in a citizen revolt, has been cut off from the Internet according to several reports. This tactic isn’t all that difficult implement and is becoming more common, making the need for new open source technologies for wireless communications necessary.
Citizen journalism and social-media tools have made it easier to get information out of countries like Egypt and Syria, but in some cases these reports may not be true. Does that mean citizen journalism is unreliable? No. It just means we need to approach it differently.
Western media lost an important ally in their attempts to report from Syria today, as citizen journalist Rami Ahmad Alsayeed was killed by armed forcers only hours after streaming live from the city of Homs. Alsayeed’s footage had been used by the BBC and Al Jazeera.
Syria blocked access to live streaming site Bambuser on Thursday, cutting off one of the last windows into the embattled city of Homs, which has been under attack for days. This follows similar efforts by other regimes to suppress citizen coverage of the Arab Spring.
