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Facebook and the Third Intifada Page: An Update

Further update: This CNN article is essential reading, particularly this quote (emphasis is mine): “The page… began as a call for peaceful protest, even though it used a term that has been associated with violence in the past. In addition, the administrators initially removed comments that promoted violence,” the company statement said. “However, after the [...]

29.03.2011

5 Comments

West Censoring East: Or Why Websense Thinks My Blog is Pornography

Today, the OpenNet Initiative has released a paper, authored by Helmi Noman and myself, enumerating the widespread use of American- and Canadian-built filtering technologies in the Middle East and North Africa.  The paper, entitled “West Censoring East: The Use of Western Technologies by Middle East Censors 2010-2011“, looks closely at Websense, McAfee’s SmartFilter, and Netsweeper [...]

28.03.2011

15 Comments

Israeli Minister Joins Call for Removal of Facebook Page

Last week, I wrote about AllFacebook.com’s Editor, Jackie Cohen, using her platform as a bully pulpit to encourage “friends of Israel” to report a Facebook Page in the hopes of getting it taken down.  Apparently, Cohen has been joined by Israeli Minister of Diplomacy and Diaspora Affairs Yuli Edelstein in appealing to Mark Zuckerberg to [...]

27.03.2011

16 Comments

Microsoft Fixes Bug; Re-enables HTTPS for All Users

Yesterday, I blogged that users in Iran, all Arab countries, Burma, Nigeria, and the Central Asian nations had been blocked from turning on HTTPS encryption within Hotmail.  This was true. According to Microsoft, this was a bug that affected users not only in those countries, but also in the Bahamas, the Cayman Islands, and Fiji. [...]

26.03.2011

6 Comments

Microsoft Hotmail: No HTTPS for Arab, Iranian Users

Update 2: Microsoft has fixed the bug; all users can now enable HTTPS. Update: Further testing by EFF International Activist Eva Galperin found that, in addition to Arab countries and Iran, Myanmar, Nigeria, Kazahstan, Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan, and Kyrgyzstan are also affected. This morning, a Syrian Hotmail user noted that he could not turn on [...]

25.03.2011

10 Comments

The BOBs 2011

Last year, Talk Morocco, the citizen journalism site I co-founded with Hisham Khribchi in 2009, won the Deutsche Welle Best of Blogs (BOBs) Award for Best English Blog in both the jury and user categories.  We were thrilled; our nascent project had received very little recognition up to that point, and the BOBs were a [...]

24.03.2011

1 Comment

Why is the State Department Tweeting in Arabic? A Conversation with Dana Shell Smith

Recently, the US Department of State implemented an Arabic-language account on Twitter, @USABilAraby. My initial reaction was one of pleasure, but after a bit of thinking, I became curious as to why State would think Twitter to be the appropriate platform for such engagement; after all, despite increasingly large numbers of Twitter users across the [...]

21.03.2011

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AllFacebook.com Editor Uses Bully Pulpit in Attempt to Remove Facebook Page

Facebook, like all intermediary hosts of social content, struggles with scalability of its community reporting features. On the platform, users may report content they find to be in violation of the site’s Terms of Service (TOS); they are then presented with five options (in image below): On March 15, AllFacebook.com Editor Jackie Cohen called for, [...]

21.03.2011

1 Comment

Building Human Rights Into Your Social Site

…goes the name of the panel I spoke on yesterday at SXSW Interactive, alongside Danny O’Brien of the Committee to Protect Journalists, Rebecca MacKinnon, and Ebele Okobi-Harris, director of the Business & Human Rights program at Yahoo. Rebecca, Danny and I frequently deal with complaints from activists in respect to account deactivations and other human [...]

15.03.2011

3 Comments

Politician Sues Facebook After Account Deactivation

I’m hardly one to feel sympathy for politicians, but this is a good one.  Majed Moughni, a Republican candidate for Congress last year in Michigan’s 15th district, is suing Facebook for damages after he lost the election, which he claims happened because his Facebook account was deactivated. Moughni stated: This lawsuit was filed to address [...]

07.03.2011

6 Comments

Answering Students’ Questions

Yesterday, I had the good fortune to speak at Professor Lani Guinier‘s Harvard Law School course on Law and Social Movements, along with MIT Professor Dayna Cunningham and my good friend Nasser Weddady of the Hands Across the Middle East Support Alliance. The topic of discussion, of course, was the use of technology in social [...]

04.03.2011

2 Comments

Internet & Mobile Access and Social Movements: Libya, Madagascar, Beyond

Lots of conversations in my life these days are inspired by single tweets. And those tweets, for me at least, are often inspired by my own frustration in the media’s ineptitude on certain issues. One of those issues, of course, is understanding the effects of social media and the Internet more generally in the Arab [...]

01.03.2011

3 Comments