Blogosphere of influence

Ed Lake

The Emirati blogger Ali Gargash, the author of Dubai Nights, says he sees no place "destrcutive criticism" in the blogosphere. Randi Sokoloff / The National

The internet has thrown up a lot of ugly coinages since it emerged 20 years ago, but for sheer gruesomeness, few can rival the colloquial name for online diaries, the “blog”. “Blogosphere”, admittedly, runs it a tight race and its other derivatives – blogger”, “vlog” (a blog on video) and so forth – aren’t much better. Yet the thing itself is a marvel: a literary form and public medium unrivalled in history for flexibility and ease of access. User-friendly writing platforms such as Wordpress and Blogspot have made pundits out of everyone with an internet connection and two thoughts to rub together, a fact that has changed the shape of news media, political discourse, academic research and a good deal else. The rise of the blogger was a watershed moment in the internet age. And yet... “blog”.

Lucky Arabic speakers, then, who get all the medium’s reverberating power and not too much of its naffness. Online diaries are known in Arabic by the rather graceful word moudawanat, and you can expect to hear a lot more about them as the moudawanosphere continues its rapid expansion. A recent study undertaken by the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University identified 35,000 Arabic-language blogs, plus several thousand more in a mixture of Arabic and other languages. Bloggers from across the Arabic-speaking world offer anecdotal evidence for the explosion in blogging’s popularity over the past few years. “When I started five years ago we were like a bunch of 10 or 15 people blogging from Saudi Arabia about Saudi Arabia,” one interviewee told me. “Today we have more than 10,000 Saudi blogs, so it’s quite different now.”

Who are the Arabic bloggers? According to the Berkman report Mapping the Arabic Blogosphere: Politics, Culture and Dissent, they are mainly male, mainly young and mainly Egyptian or Saudi.

Moreover, to judge from the paper, the biggest surprise for the researchers was that the Arabic blogosphere doesn’t really see itself as a Pan-Arabic phenomenon at all. “Those that write about politics tend to focus on issues within their own country,” it claims. “Domestic news is more popular than international news...” It notes, however, that the situation in Gaza is a major topic of interest across the Arab world. And there was one discovery that must have reassured its American readers: to appearances, the bloggers aren’t, for the most part, terrorists. “Across the map,” the authors explain, “Arab bloggers are overwhelmingly critical of violent extremists... We consider this a positive finding”. Alas, the flies in the ointment for potential terror targets include the plausible thought that those with violent inclinations might prefer not to announce themselves on Livejournal, and the old quibble about who qualifies as a terrorist as opposed to a freedom fighter. As the report suggests: “This complex issue merits additional research.”

Source: The National, Blogosphere of influence

Mapping the Arab blogosphere: Harvard Report

This case study is part of a series of studies produced by the Internet & Democracy project. The project’s initial case studies investigated three frequently cited examples of the Internet’s influence on democracy. The first case looked at the user-generated news site OhmyNews and its impact on the 2002 elections in South Korea. The second documented the role of technology in Ukraine’s Orange Revolution. The third analyzed the network composition and content of the Iranian blogosphere. Fall 2008 saw the release of a new series of case studies, which broadened the scope of our research and examined some less well-known parts of the research landscape. In a pair of studies, we reviewed the role of networked technologies in the 2007 civic crises of Burma's Saffron Revolution and Kenya’s post-election turmoil. In April 2009, Urs Gasser's three-part case study examined the role of technology in Switzerland’s semi-direct democracy. This case expands on our study of foreign blogospheres with an analysis of the Arabic language blogosphere.

KEY FINDINGS
We conducted a study of the Arabic language blogosphere using link analysis, term frequency analysis, and human coding of individual blogs. We identified a base network of approximately 35,000 active blogs, created a network map of the 6,000 most connected blogs, and with a team of Arabic speakers hand coded 4,000 blogs. The goal for the study was to produce a baseline assessment of the networked public sphere in the Arab Middle East, and its relationship to a range of emergent issues, including politics, media, religion, culture, and international affairs. A Country-based network (view the full map): The Arabic blogosphere is organized primarily around countries. We found the primary groupings to be: Egyptian (largest, with distinct sub- and associated clusters, e.g., Muslim Brotherhood bloggers, including some women); Saudi Arabian (second largest and focused comparatively more on technology than politics); Kuwaiti (divided into English and Arabic language sub-clusters); Levantine/English Bridge (bloggers in the Levant and Iraq using English and connected to the US and international blogospheres); Syrian; Maghrebi/French Bridge; and Religion-Focused. Demographic results indicate that Arabic bloggers are predominately young and male. The highest proportion of female bloggers is found in the Egyptian youth sub-cluster, while the Syrian and Muslim Brotherhood clusters have the highest concentration of males. Arabic media ecosystem: Bloggers link to Web 2.0 sites like YouTube and Wikipedia (English and Arabic versions) more than other sources of information and news available on the Internet. Al-Jazeera is the top mainstream media source, followed by the BBC and Al-Arabiya. Arabic bloggers tend to prefer more politically oriented YouTube videos over cultural ones. Personal life and local issues are most important: Most bloggers write mainly personal, diary-style observations. But when writing about politics, bloggers tend to focus on issues within their own country, and are more often than not critical of domestic political leaders. Foreign political leaders are discussed less often, but also more in negative than positive terms. Domestic news is more popular than international news among general politics and public life topics. The one political issue that clearly concerns bloggers across the Arab world is Palestine, and in particular the situation in Gaza (Israel’s December 2008/January 2009 military action occurred during the study). Other popular topics include religion (more in personal than political terms) and human rights (more common than criticism of western culture and values). Terrorism and the US are not major topics. When discussing terrorism, Arab bloggers are overwhelmingly critical of terrorists. When the US is discussed, it is nearly always critically.

View full document Mapping the Arab blogosphere: Harvard Report

Middle East web writers 'harassed'

The Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) says five Middle Eastern and North African countries are among the world's "worst online oppressors", intimidating and imprisoning journalists and bloggers.

In its report - The ten worst countries to be a blogger - released a few days ahead of a conference organised by the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Social Organisation (Unesco) in Doha, CPJ said bloggers were at most risk in Egypt, Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia and Tunisia.

Burma topped the list for its severe restrictions on internet use and censorship. China was named as the country with the most comprehensive online censorship policies.

Iran was listed as the Middle East's worst offender for its continued harassment and intimidation of bloggers. Omidreza Mirsayafi, an Iran-based blogger, was cited by the CPJ report as having died in prison "under circumstances that have not been fully explained".

Targeting the web

According to an earlier study by the CPJ, 45 per cent of all imprisoned media workers world wide are bloggers, web-based reporters, or online editors.

Of the 125 journalists currently imprisoned around the world, some 56 are web-based journalists and writers. The organisation says 2009 marks the first time the number of jailed online writers surpasses the number of detained print journalists.

Nora Younis, an Egyptian blogger and journalist, explains the trend by saying that "bloggers are nowadays taken seriously by authorities as well as Arab media", a significant change from a few years ago when she said bloggers used to be ignored.

Bloggers in countries like Egypt, Syria, and Tunisia say they have become instrumental in exposing human rights issues like police brutality, torture, and sexual harassment which has made regional governments undertake increasingly aggressive means to curb cyber-dissidence.

Naila Hamdy, a professor of journalism at the American University in Cairo, says that the political and cultural challenges posed by new media have taken Arab governments by surprise.

"So far, unregulated satellite has brought fuelling of sectarian wars, political dissent and opposing views," she told Al Jazeera in a previous interview.

"With the possibility of thousands more stations and other technologies catching on in a second ... I think that those in government responsible for information regulation have realised that they are a decade behind. They are now trying to address this new era."

The voiceless speak

In 2007, Kareem Amer was given a four-year sentence for 'insulting' Egypt's president
Nevertheless, bloggers in the Middle East are making their voices heard. In Egypt, they took an active part in organising widespread anti-government activities, rallying pro-Hariri protesters in Lebanon, mounting anti-corruption campaigns in Libya and electioneering in Kuwaiti elections.

They have exposed the grim realities of everyday life in war-torn Iraq. In the Gulf, female bloggers are increasingly going online calling for change in a display of growing assertiveness.

More broadly, Arab bloggers continue to break cultural and religious taboos: discussing the social and political malaise afflicting the Arab world, exploring sexual identities and challenging the dominant institutions of religion, state and family.

Ahmed Al Omran, the owner of Saudi Jeans, a Saudi Arabian blog, is one of the most influential in the Gulf region; he hopes to "be a part of the change that is taking place in Saudi Arabia".

Arguing that much of the media in the region does not reflect realities on the ground, he uses his blog as an "agent of change" to push for social justice and greater citizen involvement in the country's affairs.

For him, "human rights, freedom of expression and women's rights are all important issues that our nation will need to tackle on the way to change".

But persecution of cyber-dissidents has became a reality in Saudi Arabia, which has detained bloggers for "violating the kingdom's regulations".

Thirty-two-year-old Fouad al-Farhan was arrested in December 2007 and his computers seized for criticising the pace of reforms in the kingdom.

He was held in solitary confinement at Dahban prison in Jeddah until his release in late April 2008.

Travel bans

But some countries have also in recent years imposed travel bans on bloggers and journalists as a means of applying pressure.

Said Essoulami, the executive director of the Morocco-based Centre for Media Freedom in the Middle East and North Africa, believes the bans are designed to control dissident writers and activists.

"Retaliations such as assassination and imprisonment of writers have been reduced because there are new ways of controlling journalists," he said.

Essoulami said several journalists and bloggers have been barred from participating in international media conferences.

He pointed to the Third Arab Free Press Forum held in Beirut in December 2008 and said many key dissident writers such as Saudi Arabian blogger Fouad Al-Farhan, Mazen Darwish, the director of the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression, and Tunisian journalist Litfi Hidouri had been prevented from participating.

"In fact, every journalist invited from Syria could not come," Essoulami said.

Harassment

Related articles



Perils of blogging in Egypt
Egyptian blogger sentenced to jail
Censorship in Cyberspace
Arab bloggers defy arrest
Bloggers have been detained in many countries -including Bahrain, Egypt, Morocco, Syria, and Saudi Arabia, Tunisia - for the views they expressed on their blogs.

Authorities in these countries are stepping up their efforts to filter such websites. Saudi Arabia blocks thousands of websites and Bahrain is trying to register bloggers, in further signs of a clampdown.

In 2007, Egyptian writer Kareem Amer was imprisoned for "insulting Islam and President Hosni Mubarak" on his blog. He is currently serving a four-year sentence at Borg Al-Arab prison outside Alexandria.

In Syria, blogger Tariq Baissi was sentenced to three years in prison for "weakening the national feeling and the national ethos". Biassi had posted a six word long comment in a web forum in which he criticised the Syrian security services. Numerous other cyber dissidents remain behind bars in Syria.

In Tunis, Nazira Rijba, a Tunisian writer and activist, was in late 2008 charged over an article she wrote in support of the Tunisian news website Kalima which has been subject to censorship by the Tunisian authorities.

She says she is regularly harassed over the Interphone at her house and on the street by the authorities for her work and activism.

"Do not think of us as victims," she said. "We are militants who are being harassed by the government. We are paying the price of freedom, but freedom is the door for change."

Fadi Zaghmout, a Jordanian web developer, uses The Arab Observer blog to write about personal freedoms and tolerance in the Middle East.

His blog sometimes courts controversy because it discusses topics such as sexual freedoms, women's issues, homosexuality and gender equality.

He says he has also been cataloguing underreported cases of sexual harassment of women in the Arab street, honour crimes, and the social pressures on young Arabs - particularly women - to get married.

Increased pressure

Koukha Mansour, a media analyst based in Syria, says journalists and bloggers in the Middle East are likely to continue to face excessive censorship and the fear of being threatened, harassed, or imprisoned in the years to come.

"Middle East media should unify their efforts and establish a liberated journalists union that reinforces the freedom of press and work independently from any governmental or 'lobby' interests," she said.

"Journalists are using bloggers as sources more and more, quoting reports, videos, and photos," Rachid Jankari, a Moroccan journalist, told Al Jazeera.

Many internet activists believe the jailing of web writers will increase in the future, especially as more and more print journalists are said to be migrating to web-based work for various reasons, including censorship circumvention.

"It will increase, I'm sure, as more and more people are tasting the power of the internet and the usage of the web is spreading," said Sami Ben Gharbia, the Tunisia advocacy director of Global Voices, told Al Jazeera.

"We will see more of this detainment of online journalists in the future."

With additional reporting by Julian Madsen and David Stanford.

Tunisia’s bloggers defy state censors

TUNIS // Thirteen years ago, Tunisian authorities barred Zied el Heni from launching an independent radio station. Later, he tried to start a magazine, but they barred him again. Last year, he finally found his platform – blogging.

“I wanted a space where I could express myself without the constraints imposed on my profession,” said el Heni, a journalist and human rights activist in the capital, Tunis. “I’ve tried to transform my sense of injustice and rage into energy.”

Foreign tourists know Tunisia for its sunny beaches, ancient ruins and one of the Arab world’s most liberal societies. But for Tunisians, life is a daily tiptoe through a minefield of political taboos enforced by a vast security apparatus and heavily censored media. Now the country’s drive to embrace the internet is giving Tunisians an unexpected new outlet to challenge authority.

“The government policy is to encourage the use of the internet by all sectors of society, and ensure access,” said Oussama Romdhani, a senior Tunisian official. The president, Zine el Abidine Ben Ali, has vowed to get the country online as part of a drive towards a knowledge-based economy.

The government has poured cash into underwater and fibre-optic cables, and made computer use part of the school curriculum. That has paid off, with official statistics showing that internet use has more than doubled since 2007 to 2.8 million people – nearly one-third of the population.

That gives Tunisians an alternative source of news and commentary to the mainstream press, which largely avoids tough issues and lionises Mr Ben Ali.

They are tapping into an explosion of blogs in North Africa, said Rachid Jankari, a blogger and IT company director in Casablanca, who is working with the Solidarity Center, a US-based workers’ rights organisation, to build an internet-driven network of journalists across the region.

“It’s the emergence of individual expression,” Mr Jankari said. “And we see the diversity of the points of view.”

In Tunisia, that is where trouble can start.

For journalists and activists such as el Heni, the internet is a platform for criticising the state. Government censors have shut down his website eight times since he started blogging last year, he said, forcing him to shift to a new address each time.

Authorities say that only websites threatening public order or promoting hatred are blocked.

“Freedom of the press is guaranteed in Tunisia,” said Mr Romdhani, the senior official. “But freedom of expression comes obviously with a sense of responsibility and accountability.”

But many journalists say that in practice, restrictions often go beyond media that push a violent message. “The law is like an unsigned cheque,” el Heni said. “They promise lots of rights, but the reality is different.”

According to a report last year by Amnesty International, journalists in Tunisia who have criticised the government have had their websites blocked, been subjected to smear campaigns and prosecuted for libel.

A separate investigation last year by the Committee to Protect Journalists, an international media watchdog, found that reporters and rights activists in Tunisia have had their phone lines cut, been placed under police surveillance and been barred from travelling abroad.

A few had been attacked violently or imprisoned in recent years, the investigation said.

Authorities have tried to shut down a few outlets entirely, human rights groups said. A case in point is Radio Kalima, an independent station launched in January, said Mokhtar Trifi, president of the Tunisian League for Human Rights. Police have ordered some reporters for the station to stop working, and a few not to leave their homes, he said.

The station bypassed normal restrictions on transmitting by broadcasting over the internet, and by satellite via Italy. That angered authorities “because it’s something they can’t control”, Mr Trifi said.

That is increasingly true of the internet, too. But thanks to key economic and education policies, Tunisia is wedded to the web.

Tunisia lacks the big oil of neighbouring Algeria and Libya, and is banking instead on serving as a hub for business and industry. Since independence from its coloniser, France, in 1956, the country has followed a modernising ideology that makes learning a priority.

“Our education is oriented towards computer use,” said an internet cafe manager in Tunis. “Every day I have more customers.”

On a weekday lunchtime, peak hours at the internet cafe, students and businessmen who depend increasingly on the web are hunched intently over the banks of computers along the walls.

Computers had become a habit, said the manager. “And that’s happening – I have customers who spend three hours here every day.”

The government has brought the internet to all universities and secondary schools, and to over two thirds of primary schools, according to official statistics.

Trends like that are the reason some bloggers say the future belongs to them, as new technology makes websites more secure. “The more citizens are informed,” el Heni said, “the more they have power.”

Warblogs "Riverbend" – a Voice of Reason

Weblogs are considered as supplementary information sources. Subjective, committed, more direct than the foreign perspectives of normal correspondents, they report from isolated conflict zones. "Warblogs," like "Riverbend", in particular, provide us with information from combat areas and trouble spots. By Amin Farzanefar

| Bild: Book Cover (photo: Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd)
Bild vergr�ssern The young "Riverbend" describes the Iraq conflict and the difficult situation of her family in Baghdad from a personal perspective | During the war in Iraq, the "Baghdad Blogger" achieved a certain fame; under the pseudonym "Salam Pax," a young Iraqi described the events during and after the US invasion. Pax's blogs were characterized by an intelligent, anarchist wit – reason enough for him to choose anonymity for a long time. "Riverbend," whose Internet entries have been published under the title Baghdad Burning, also conceals her identity.

According to the book jacket blurb, she is a young Iraqi who studied computer science and works as a programmer and network specialist – "that is all you have to know," she writes in a brief statement about herself. In almost 400 pages – the English edition was published in two volumes – she provides an incredible wealth of material which is exciting to read and makes the Iraq conflict more vivid than any of the usual news photos and shocking reports.

Everyday life and war

To begin with, there is the intense experience of the war itself – the preparations for the announced liberating blow of "Enduring Freedom," the initially unfamiliar sounds of bombs, tanks, and helicopters, all of which you gradually learn to distinguish according to type.

A day without an explosion is considered a "bad day," meaning the worst is yet to come. Riverbend documents how the occupation changes the everyday life of a middle-class Iraqi family living in a more affluent district of Baghdad, how the traditional festivities – Ramadan, the Eid Fests – have to take place amid increasing obstacles. In addition, the Shiite Ashura processions, which were banned under Saddam Hussein, bring large numbers of strangers to the city, creating new tensions.

| Bild: Pilgrims died on their way to the Ashura festival in Baghdad (photo: AP)
Bild vergr�ssern Sad reality in war-torn Iraq – in January of 2007, seven pilgrims died on their way to the Ashura festival in Baghdad when their bus came under fire | However, the greatest challenge is the desperate attempt to maintain a normal household after years of economic sanctions and violent conflicts. Under the occupation, there is still a shortage of gasoline, gas, water, and electricity, and it is dangerous to leave the house to obtain the necessities of life.

Correcting impressions

What Riverbend's rational, intelligent voice perhaps conveys most clearly is the fact that Baghdad is not per se part of the periphery. During the "Dark Ages" – which people see setting in again today – the city numbered among the greatest metropolises of the world. In the 1950s, world-class architects like Le Corbusier gave it a modernist facade. Only the past decades of dictatorship, the Gulf War, boycott, occupation, and civil war have plunged the country into an – avoidable? – barbarism.

Against this backdrop, the blogger is quite personal, yet she goes far beyond that by continually quoting figures and dates and making comparisons about victims, refugees, occupying forces, incompetent members of the government, and misappropriated funds and contracts.

For example, she comments at length on the outrageous awarding of reconstruction contracts to Dick Cheney's company, Halliburton. Much lower bids by local engineers were ignored. With caustic humor, the blogger exposes the manipulation of her Internet presence by an American who paraphrases her blog in Bush jargon for propaganda purposes.

The young Iraqi also adjusts the black-and-white image of Saddam's rule with details about the educational system, for example, correcting the misconception that only loyal Baathists were admitted to the university. Despite the boycott, educational standards were high, and women enjoyed more equality than those in other countries of the region.

Eclectic range of information

| Bild: Iraqi refugees in front of UN headquarters in Damascus (photo: AP)
Bild vergr�ssern Like many other Iraqis, Riverbend and her family sought refuge from the continuing violence in neighboring Syria – Iraqi refugees in front of UN headquarters in Damascus | Baghdad Burning is subjective but independent. In contrast to the "embedded journalism" of western reporters, the blog allows access to a wide range of sources. Riverbend compares events in the mirror of various international magazines and provides links to official papers and statistics, blogs of Iraqis inside and outside the country, music downloads, and Iraqi recipes.

The day-to-day context and personal involvement create coherence in this moving and entertaining anthology. Riverbend received the Ulysses Award in 2005, a kind of Nobel Prize for literary reportage presented by the cultural journal Lettre International.

The book, with an introduction and comments by the prominent American journalist, James Ridgeway, runs to September 2004, then the entries appear only sporadically. Riverbend's ironically sarcastic remarks are no longer as expansive as earlier. Immediately after Abu Ghraib and the execution of journalist Nick Berg, exhaustion and growing frustration seem to be perceptible in the young author.

If you read Riverbend's blog directly in the Internet, in the last entry, from September 2007, you learn that she and her family now live in Syria – like 1.5 million other Iraqis. "I always had a certain mistaken idea of what refugees are, in transit with a bag and a tent. Now we are refugees ourselves." It can happen to anyone.

Amin Farzanefar

The Blogger Scene in Egypt A Small, Assertive Community

If you want to know where the next demonstration will be held for the Egyptian civil rights movement, you need only log onto one of the many local political blogs. Web diaries in Egypt have become a firmly established part of the civil rights movement along the Nile. Mona Naggar reports

| Bild: Manal and Alaa, Egyptian bloggers (photo: Mona Naggar)
Bild vergr�ssern At the manalaa.net site, Alaa and his wife Manal keep a blog in two languages | At the site journal.gharbeia.net, Amr Gharbeia takes stock of developments in the Egyptian blogosphere over the past twelve months. "A year ago we were commenting on the news, now we ourselves are at the center of the news," writes the young Egyptian.

Since the arrest in early May of some bloggers at a solidarity demonstration for two Egyptian judges who accused the Egyptian government of fraud in the last parliamentary election, the Arabic and international media are now paying more attention to the political web diaries.

Political commentary with a humorous edge

The most well-known blogger in Egypt today is Alaa Saif. With his wife Manal Hassan, he runs the site manalaa.net in both English and Egyptian dialect. You can read a personal account of Alaa's experiences in prison, or a detailed description of various recent demonstrations organized by the Egyptian civil rights movement written from the perspective of participants, or Manal's research on the Muslim-Coptic unrest, or you can just meet Alaa's cat.

Alaa is 24 years old and spent most of his time before his arrest at the computer. The manalaa.net site has been around since March, 2004. The secret behind the popular success of Manal and Alaa’s blog is its humorous style and the couple's courage in sharing their personal life, also their love life, with the public.

At first Alaa's idea was just to experiment with web technology and create a platform for like-minded people: "My wife and I both work for an Egyptian organization that implements free web technology in development aid work. Then we discovered other Egyptian bloggers, started networking, and that motivated us to start writing regularly."

Bloggers support the Egyptian civil rights movement

| Bild: Amr Gharbeia, Egyptian blogger (photo: Mona Naggar)
Bild vergr�ssern "A year ago we were commenting on the news, now we ourselves are at the center of the news," writes blogger Amr Gharbeia | According to the Egyptian Blog Ring, there are currently over 900 web diaries in Egypt, 53 percent of them in Arabic. Together with Lebanon, this country along the Nile is a leader in the Arabic internet world. Although the majority of blogs do not have political content, the boom in the Egyptian blogger scene would be unimaginable without the civil rights movement of the past two years.

Various groups in Egyptian civil society of diverse political leanings were involved in the fight against extending the presidency of Husni Mubarak and for fair parliamentary elections.

Alaa, on the other hand, takes the self-assertive stance that the immense popularity of the Egyptian civil rights movement would be unthinkable without the bloggers. They offer a communication platform for opposition parties and the various groups active in the civil rights movement.

Meetings for election campaigns or other activities are organized via the internet, and volunteers are recruited for election monitoring. Even Arabic satellite channels have used the blogs as sources for information.

Political involvement via the internet

The most recent example is the disturbing story of the activist Muhammad Scharqawi from the civil rights movement Kifaya. His experiences during his arrest on May 25 can be read in several Egyptian blogs. The activist describes in great detail the humiliation and torture inflicted upon him by Egyptian security officers. Many Egyptian media outlets have now also published his blog account.

Shayfeen.com (which translates as "we see you") is another example of political activism on the internet. This site calls upon all Egyptians who have witnessed human rights abuses to send their accounts or photographs to shayfeen.com, where they are published online.

The site also calls on Egyptians to show solidarity with the judges who have accused the government of falsifying the last election results. Their position is that no one should be lead to believe that their vote doesn’t count or that their political engagement is inconsequential.

Blogs dodge government censors

The incredible developments in the Egyptian blogosphere cannot, however, distract from the fact that it is primarily intellectuals and students who use them. Jamal Id from the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information in Cairo is convinced that the number of bloggers would still keep climbing if the instruments used to create blogs were accessible in Arabic.

Another big problem is the high rate of illiteracy. Around 40 percent of Egyptians cannot read or write and are thus excluded from the internet. And most Egyptians remain attached to the most important source of information in the country: satellite television.

The situation in Egypt and other Arabic countries can be compared with Iran, where blogs have long escaped state control despite limited freedom of the press and harsh governments reprisals. Young Egyptian bloggers all agree that Iranian society is more active, the youth more involved, and the political system under the Mullahs more democratic than in their own country.

Mona Naggar

Turkish bloggers censure the censors

Turkish bloggers are closing their websites to protest against courts banning dozens of mainstream sites for carrying content deemed "immoral" or insulting to Turkey's founding father.

A grassroots "censuring the censors" movement has formed over the past week, with about 450 websites voluntarily replacing their content with a message mocking the official court order barring access to a website.

A law passed in 2007 gave judges the power to ban websites for inciting suicide, drug use, paedophilia, immorality, illegal prostitution or insulting Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, the architect of modern Turkey.

Judges have used the power to its fullest, temporarily closing popular websites including Wordpress, the blogging platform, Alibaba.com, a trading site, Slide.com, the photo sharing site, and Geocites, the webhosting service.

YouTube, the Google-owned online video-sharing site, has fallen foul of the censors several times and has been off-limits to users in Turkey since May. It has been alarmed at authorities' attempts to make contentious content inaccessible not only to viewers in Turkey but around the world.

Last year YouTube provided the forum for an intense "cyber war" between Turkish and Greek nationalists posting abusive videos. One video claiming Ataturk was homosexual was enough for a Turkish judge to close the entire YouTube site.

Firat Yildiz, a blogger who was the first to "self-censor", said he "simply had enough" when a court banned Dailymotion.com, a French video clips site. Visitors to Mr Yildiz's blog were confronted with a message saying "access to this site has been blocked by order of the website itself", a play on the typical court closure order.

Admirers of Mr Yildiz's gesture wrote a code to allow others to follow his lead. Encouraged by the level of support his action received, Mr Yildiz and Deniz Tan, his creative partner at an Istanbul ad agency, set up a campaign page; 450 websites have signed up.

"Finding a 'back door' to keep on using banned websites is no solution," the manifesto says. "We must oppose all forms of censorship because it impinges on your freedom to information, chews up your rights, and takes your power to judge right from wrong and gives it to another person."

The campaign has the backing of several popular websites such as sinema.com and Zargan, an English to Turkish dictionary.

Google has watched developments in Turkey with concern, but would not comment on talks with authorities, beyond reiterating that YouTube would remove offending content when told of a legitimate concern.

Mr Yildiz and Ms Tan denied receiving assistance from big US or European companies and said the campaign was spontaneous.

Turkey's young society - more than three-quarters of the 72m population is under 30 - has embraced the internet, flooding social networking and file-sharing sites and making Turkish one of the leading languages online. Turks make up the fourth biggest national community.

But online operators have yet to realise the full commercial potential of the Turkish market, according to Baris Karadogan, a Turkish venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. He argues this will limit the commercial impact of the rise in censorship. "Closing sites like YouTube is ridiculous. But when you have a hammer everything looks like a nail. The Turkish government will learn that closing down sites will solve nothing."

BLOGGERS OF THE WORLD, LET'S SHOP!

The young online tribe is more interested in discussing sex, drugs and rock'n'roll than political revolution, writes Antony Loewenstein

EARLY last month, some Iranian members of parliament voted to debate a draft bill that aimed to ``toughen punishment for disturbing mental security in society'' by adding to the list of offences punishable by execution crimes such as ``establishing websites and weblogs promoting corruption, prostitution and apostasy''.

Nikahang, a Canadian-based Iranian online cartoonist and blogger, was defiant: ``Only people who disturb people's mental security could support such a thing.''

During a visit to the Islamic Republic in 2007 to research the blogging community, I found this attitude was common. With a population of 70 million, most of them under 30, Iran is home to one of the Middle East's largest online communities, which is thriving despite onerous censorship and risk of imprisonment.

The more than 100,000 active Iranian bloggers, writing mainly in Farsi, include hardline Islamists battling with reformists over religious dress, anti-Semitism, the war in Iraq and dating rituals.

The rise of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, it seems, has only emboldened activists of all political persuasions.

I spent a day with the country's former vice-president Mohammad Ali Abtahi, a regular blogger. This chubby man, a frequent giggler, chastised me when I asked why it was impossible to criticise Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei publicly, just as Westerners routinely slam elected politicians. ``One of the misunderstandings is that you try and compare the institutions of countries, which are not similar to each other,'' he instructed.

I quickly discovered that in a country such as Iran, the divide between conservative and moderate is far narrower than generally presumed. Iranian reformers are Islamists in less fundamentalist garb and most citizens appear to want an Islamic nation with a modern face.

Across the world, young generations are challenging tired state media by writing online about politics, sex, drugs, relationships, religion, popular culture and especially Angelina Jolie. From Egyptian activists opposed to female circumcision to outspoken, pro-Western women in Cuba, people are being empowered by new technology to create spaces away from the prying eyes of meddling authorities.

The rise of the online community means the relationship between the state and its people is shifting radically. Individuality is emerging in societies that routinely shun such behaviour and repressive regimes are not pleased.

A recent University of Washington report reveals that 64 people have been arrested for blogging since 2003. Iran, China and Egypt are the main offenders.

In the West, blogging has become an essential part of the media, with millions of internet users cataloguing their daily lives. The US-based Co-operative Congressional Election Study has found that although political blogging is popular, only a minority of web users regularly engage with political bloggers. The study's report confirms that readers ``tend to visit blogs that share their viewpoint''.

The need for alternative sources of information, voices not processed through a Western journalist's filter, became pronounced after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC. I shared the frustration of many with the mainstream media's lack of insight into nations deemed Western enemies or allies.

Blogs offered a window into mainly middle-class segments of societies rarely examined in the West. What does a Saudi Arabian male think about his country's adherence to Wahhabism? How does the average China web user cope with multinational-assisted filtering? What is Cuba's likely future after Fidel Castro?

These are just a few of the issues that blogs have helped to elucidate.

My on-the-ground investigation of the blogging revolution and its influence on the relationship between the West and the rest took me to Iran, Egypt, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Cuba and China. In these countries I met writers, bloggers, dissidents, politicians and journalists.

The subjects we discussed included the role of companies such as Google, Yahoo, Cisco and Microsoft in helping repressive regimes censor the internet.

The results were surprising. As one blogger told me in Tehran: ``Most of the people (I knoware) in favour of reform, not revolution, because people are too tired to experience another revolution.'' I found the same message echoed throughout the countries I visited: the desire to experience incremental change without foreign involvement.

Vocal activism was the exception, not the norm. Take China. A recent study by the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that the vast majority of China's web users -- who number more than 250 million, the largest online community in the world -- expressed support for Beijing managing or controlling the internet. A book editor in Shanghai explained to me that online filtering didn't bother many Chinese, given that 99 per cent of blogs discussed food and daily life. He thought that most citizens questioned the sincerity of leaders who talked about ``democracy with Chinese characteristics''. ``Is China ready for free elections?'' he asked sceptically.

Despite these realities, during the past decade there has been a steady increase in awareness about political rights, principally because of satellite television and the internet.

China's leading video-sharing site, Tudou (which means couch potato), is reportedly bigger than YouTube, with more than one petabyte of daily data transfers. Tudou founder Gary Wang explains that officials phone in several times a week to demand the removal from the site of films they consider suspect. Wang is philosophical. Change is coming but it will take time. Political reform isn't a priority for most citizens. Even though he spent years living in France and the US, Wang resents questions about ``oppressive censorship'' from Western reporters. ``They seem to pity us,'' he says.

Earlier this year, most Chinese bloggers reacted with outrage at what they perceived to be anti-Beijing coverage in the Western media of the pro-Tibet protests in Lhasa and the troubled Olympic torch relay. ``For a long time now,'' one of them wrote, ``certain Western media, best represented by CNN and BBC, in the name of press freedom, have been unscrupulously slandering and defaming developing nations.''

I heard repeatedly during my visit to China, usually after a tirade against foreign journalists who rarely travel beyond Beijing, that satisfaction with the Communist Party regime is strong and growing. This doesn't mean the Chinese endorse authoritarian methods. Rather, it means incremental change and battles against corruption are considered preferable to Western-style capitalism.

A separate global Pew Research Centre study conducted this year found 86 per cent of Chinese were happy with their country's direction, double the 2002 figure. In comparison, only 23 per cent of Americans surveyed thought their nation was heading the right way.

Blogger Mica Yushu told me in Shanghai that most of her middle-class friends didn't crave political change. ``We use the internet mostly for entertainment, sharing information, earning money or other fun,'' she said. The sight of darkened internet cafes across the country was something to behold, with thousands of users gaming, watching downloaded films and soft-core pornography, blogging and instant messaging. Politics seemed the furthest thing from these monitored minds.

China's economic boom has mostly silenced the internal critics and agitators who do speak up pay a high price for challenging Beijing's unelected clique.

Online culture is thriving in almost every country I visited. The exception is Cuba, although the elevation of Raul Castro to the presidency is slowly leading to economic and social perestroika, despite some politically tinged websites being blocked.

Most bloggers prefer to protest privately, anonymously or not at all. The fight against repression takes many forms, from drinking contraband vodka in Tehran to appropriating American hip-hop culture in Havana. The price of protesting in Egypt, one of the highest annual recipients of US aid, is likely to be imprisonment and torture.

Despite their relatively small numbers and the penalties they attract, dissenting bloggers are playing havoc with the established order. According to Human Rights Watch researcher Elijah Zarwan, ``bloggers have succeeded in doing something that years of standing on the street corner and shouting `No to torture' or `No to the interior ministry' has never managed to accomplish'': putting these issues on the public agenda.

The small size of online communities in Syria and Saudi Arabia has not stopped bloggers from challenging authoritarian rule.

Neither country employs harsh online filtering, but users learn quickly there are lines that cannot be crossed.

Saudi Arabian actor Mohammad al-Qass explains that in a fundamentalist nation such as his, internal reform -- for women's rights and broader legal and social rights -- needs space to develop. ``Fifty years ago, Saudi Bedouins were riding around on camels. Now they're using mobile phones and the best technology,'' Qass says. ``It will take time for society to catch up with this technology.''

Meanwhile, for the first time a more nuanced view of the West is being offered via the web, and it allows a woman in Damascus the freedom to admire Brad Pitt as well as pray five times a day at the local mosque. Cross-cultural pollination is occurring, no matter what the religiously pious may think about it.

The issue of online representation is central to this debate. I recently presented a paper in Budapest at the Harvard University and Google sponsored Global Voices Citizen Media Summit. While we heard countless tales of bloggers across the world using online tools to highlight police torture and corruption, many participants wondered about the voices we weren't hearing online: such as those of minorities, the poor and Luddites uncomfortable with technology.

US writer Clay Shirky explains in his book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organising Without Organisations that ``communications tools (such as YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and blogging) don't get socially interesting until they get technologically boring''. In other words, it's only now becoming possible to come across online the words of indigenous communities in Bolivia, dispossessed voters in Kenya or sex workers in India.

Letting people speak and write for themselves without a Western lens is one of the triumphs of blogging. The culture of blogging is unlike that of any previous social movement. Disjointed and disorganised, its aims are deliberately vague. While many want the right to be critical in the media, others simply crave the ability to date and listen to subversive music. That in itself is revolutionary for much of the world.

The Blogging Revolution by Antony Loewenstein (Melbourne University Press) is published next week.

Loewenstein will appear at the Melbourne Writers Festival, as well as at next month's Brisbane Writers Festival.

Text of report by Paris-based media freedom organization Reporters Sans Frontieres (RSF) on 18 August

Reporters Without Borders reiterates its condemnation of the government's behaviour towards certain opposition websites after lawyer and website editor Abdallah Souleiman Ali was detained for 12 days for "persisting in publishing legal and political articles criticizing the role of the government". It was the second time he has been targeted since March.

"His arrest was an unacceptable but unfortunately common intimidatory method," the press freedom organization said. "The owners of opposition websites are constantly harassed by the Syrian authorities and are often held incommunicado although the constitution guarantees free expression. We urge the government to put a stop to its harassment of Souleiman."

Arrested on 30 July, Souleiman was held for 12 days at the state security department in Damascus because of articles that criticized Prime Minister Muhammad Naji al-Itri and claimed that he headed a "strategic operations" government.

Souleiman's website is called Al Nazaha (http://www.alnazaha.org), which means "Integrity". Created on 8 August 2005, it focuses mainly on legal and political issues and defends the independence of the judicial system. The company that hosts the site rendered it inaccessible in November 2006 after getting a visit from the Damascus state security department. A hacker attack erased all of the site's content on 23 June 2007.

Access to the site was blocked in October 2007 as a result of a Damascus court decision. Souleiman sued the telecommunications ministry the following month to get the decision rescinded. The complaint was eventually withdrawn.

Since March of this year, the Al Nazaha site has been accessible at a new address: http://www.alnazahanews.com. But Souleiman has been repeatedly interrogated and threatened in an attempt to force him to close his site.

The Syrian Mirror (http://www.syrian-mirror.com) and Syria Life (http://www.syria-life.com) websites were recently the target of similar threats. An independent news website, Syrian Mirror was blocked on 18 April 2006 after operating for just over three years. Syria Life was blocked on 13 February 2008.

Syria is on the Reporters Without Borders list of "Internet Enemies". At least five cyber-dissidents are currently in jail in Syria for expressing their views online, which makes it the Middle East's most repressive country as regards internet users.

Article 38 of the constitution nonetheless says: "Each citizen has the right to express their views freely to everyone, in writing or by any other means of communication (...) The state guarantees freedom of expression, printing and publication in accordance with the republic's laws."

Source: Reporters Sans Frontieres press release, Paris, in English 18 Aug 08

The Hunger

Egypt's bloggers want to be journalists

Sandmonkey was determined to quit his blog. Sniping away at life and politics in Egypt had become too risky, he said, even under the cover of his anonymous online moniker. Too much of a chance the government thugs would hurt him or someone close to him, or smash his computer equipment. He wasn't alone in his worry. The dozen or so bloggers who had gathered in the offices of a fledgling Cairo newspaper were freaked out by the four-year prison term given to a twenty-two-year-old former law school student for criticizing President Hosni Mubarak and for "religious incitement." The blogger had called Mubarak "the symbol of tyranny" and said Muslims who attacked a Coptic Christian church had "revealed their true ugly face." He had blasted Al-Azhar University, a revered center of Islamic learning, as "the other face of the coin of al Qaeda." Some of the bloggers in the room disagreed with what he had written, but they didn't expect a prison term. The muscular guy in a black T-shirt sitting beside me said that the authorities had already done all they can do to him, so he wasn't worried. He said he would keep blogging, writing what he wants, showing up at dissident rallies. I was tempted to ask for specifics about what he had endured, but decided it was best that I didn't.

I was in Cairo on a Knight fellowship from the International Center for Journalists, on leave from the Chicago Tribune, where I cover labor after years of roaming back and forth to the Middle East. I earned my first Middle Eastern credentials covering the Lebanon war in 1982, and my Arabic is still pretty good. The Washington-based center sends people like me around the world to help independent-minded journalists make a difference in their countries. But shortly after I arrived in Cairo in late February 2007, the two main projects that I had planned to work with were swept aside in a swirl of dead-handed bureaucracy and delayed decisions. No surprise; it's the Middle East. But with just over four months remaining in my fellowship, I needed to find another way to contribute. It felt like I was back forty years in the Peace Corps in Turkey-things don't work out, so you move on.

I began calling newspaper friends who suggested people and organizations I might be able to assist, and right away an Egyptian reporter who was struggling to establish an independent news network connected me with the bloggers. I found them at an existential moment. They are testing the limits of their freedom in a time of great intellectual, economic, and political ferment in Egypt. Some Egyptian journalists told me with absolute certainty that change is coming for their news media, and that it can't be stopped. It is true that small newspapers are bubbling up to challenge the state-run media; satellite TV from the wider Arab world has forced Egyptian TV to get real and copy Al Jazeera's model; Egyptian journalists are talking to other Arab journalists about what binds them and about strategies for the future; government newspapers, in the face of declining circulation, finally seem to realize that they must compete; and the Internet-as it has in repressive societies everywhere-has opened the world to Egyptians and given them the power to speak out.

Until only a few years ago, the major players in Egypt's print media were the government press, which mostly behaves like the regime's loudspeaker, and the opposition press, for which facts are often considered fungible. Then in 2004, Al Masry al Youm entered the arena with investigative articles and rigorous, fact-driven reporting. Egypt had never seen anything like this aggressive, privately funded newspaper, and it took off financially and critically, particularly among young, middle-income Egyptians who welcomed its strong voice and appreciated the relevant information it delivers. The success of Al Masry al Youm emboldened others to launch independent media projects. In response, not surprisingly, the government and its supporters cracked down, hassling print, broadcast, and digital media operations with legal challenges and mindless secrecy, fostering the self-crippling fear that you will get slapped by the government-or even your boss-if you cross any red lines.

As I listened to these young bloggers, I tried to figure out what drives them to take such risks. They have been arrested, beaten up, tortured, even sodomized. Among them was Wael Abbas, who often writes on sensitive topics like corruption or police brutality, and often with strong, firsthand reporting (he has since gone on to win a Human Rights Watch award for his commitment to free speech in the face of repression). Wael is shy, soft-spoken, intense. He leaned forward and said to me, "I want to learn how to be credible. I want people to believe me. I want to know how you journalists work. I want to report news. Facts. No ideology."

His words caught me. For one thing, they were in stark contrast to the scorn for mainstream journalism and its ways that I hear coming from the U.S. blogosphere. But more important, while there are many places like Egypt where bloggers are eager to broadcast views that challenge their rulers, at this point there are only a few where they are doing the difficult work of actually building a second line of journalism-one that is not for sale and on guard against manipulation, devoted to ferreting out the best obtainable version of the truth.

MY INQUIRIES LED me to the Middle East News Agency (MENA), Egypt's state-owned news service and the Arab world's largest. Competitors among the Gulf Arab news services are coming on strong, and MENA'S bosses are eager to catch up with what they should have been doing years ago. Their online presentation is bare-bones. Tradition has stifled innovation and evolution. The editors asked me to work with the news-feature department. They want short, timely features to go with breaking news. One problem is that the department exists on a different planet. Stories are written by hand, and then entered into a computer by typists. Articles take weeks to complete and are often about movie stars, dead or alive; and, as several veteran feature writers emphasized to me, they write nothing that might stain Egypt's image.

In early March 2007, I began meeting twice a week with thirteen MENA reporters. Most were veterans, and I quickly sensed their coolness. Later, they would tell me they were not eager to work with an American. But that's only one problem. After I laid out the kind of approach their editors wanted, several flatly said that the narrative style used by most Western wire services is impossible, that they preferred a more formal style that often segues into a question-andanswer format. Maybe there's a middle ground, I suggested, and quickly stressed that I was not their teacher, exactly, but their colleague; I was there because I think we share a common bond-our profession. I explained that I hoped to learn from them, and that after years of reporting I, too, felt the need to reflect and grow.

Slowly, after a few sessions, I ceased to be an outsider; the security guards no longer eyed me warily when I entered MENA'S offices in a teeming part of downtown Cairo, which, like many of Egypt's government buildings, has a regal façade that belies the fact that, but for a handful of exquisite offices for top editors, great swaths of the interior are crumbling from neglect. The rooms where the feature reporters work are dumps. Repairs were under way, but slowly. Life is not easy for Egyptian journalists. Pay is low. Independence is rare. Troublemakers are discouraged. Unpopular reporting can bring libel suits that can land a reporter in jail.

Several weeks into our class, an older feature writer volunteered that she liked the story structure I was teachingfeature leads that wind back to a signature ending-and had begun using it. Others agreed, among them Khaled Mohammed Mustafa, a middle-aged reporter who wore fashionable ascots and modestly noted that he had dated movie stars. But writing about famous people was not his passion. His heart is in the occult, and he hosts a show about it for a Gulf television station that often begins with him stepping out of a coffin in a creepy graveyard. One day, he showed up to class with a balding, elfin man. Khaled introduced him as a medium who had come to commune with any spirits who may reside in our offices. As the medium explained his exceptional powers, the class came alive. Some grumbled that he was spewing blasphemy, but most were fascinated, and they grilled him. Everything that I had been teaching about interviewing came together-the questions were aggressive, but still polite. When the medium left, we discussed the interview and how to put the story into a larger context-in this case, the role of mystical beliefs in Egyptians' daily lives-while keeping the format short and readable. It was one of our best sessions, and I thanked the spirits on the way home.

By June, our sessions were finished, but I agreed to work further with two interns in their late twenties, Mohammad and Shaimaa, on a long feature article. The editors wanted us to tackle a topic that would appeal to Gulf clients, and we decided to explore ways to spend a $10 billion fund that had been set up recently by Sheik Mohammed bin al Maktoum, the prime minister of the United Arab Emirates and the ruler of Dubai. The sheik had said that he wanted the fund to support "knowledge development" in the Arab world, and that he particularly deplored the state of education for Arab women. Mohammad and Shaimaa decided to focus on female literacy, and the subject required quite a leap in reporting for them. Neither had ever conducted an interview that wasn't arranged ahead of time, nor done any street reporting. They found women at a literacy program in a distant and poor neighborhood of Cairo, a place they told me they rarely visit. They talked with public-policy experts who say money from the fund should not be disseminated by government agencies because it would surely be siphoned off for other things. They interviewed critics of Arab governments' lack of support for women in general. The story had details, quotes, and a literary arc that Mohammad and Shaimaa had never attempted before. Three weeks after we began the reporting, we sat down to edit the first draft, and Mohammad told me that this experience had convinced him that he can make a career of journalism. Though shy, Shaimaa made the same point. They worked overtime to finish so we could tackle another story, but my time was running out. I was not around when the piece went out on the newswire, but their editor told me she was pleased that they took on such an important and sensitive topic.

ISLAM ONLINE CALLED. The editors there had heard about my work and the work of my colleague in Cairo, Craig Duff, a contributing videographer to The New York Times, who was teaching videography to students and working journalists via the International Center for Journalists. They asked if we would help train their people. Islam Online, which publishes in Arabic and in English, is one of a slew of Islam-oriented online news operations, but also one of the largest online news sources in the Middle East. It has a large footprint outside the Arab world, too, and its English-language report brings some 40 percent of its traffic. I learned that its funding comes from wealthy Gulf Arabs and that the Egyptian-born Sheik Yusuf Qardawi is its spiritual leader. Among Islamoriented Web operations, it is considered moderate-but I was wary. I read some of thefatwas that Islam Online had published on its prayer service and decided that they would curl a parakeet's feathers. I told the editors I won't help anyone who promotes extremism and violence. They insisted that they believe in moderation and that they intended to weed out the hard-line fatwas, which, in fairness, had been written several years ago. I was still doubtful.

But Craig and I agreed to do it, figuring we could at least nurture the more moderate tendencies in their newsroom. Over the next few weeks, I met separately with the English- and Arabic-language staffs. I tackled the issue of the site's news values indirectly, stressing that in order for Islam Online to grow, its product had to be professional. That meant intellectual honesty, a sense of fairness, details, and solid sourcing. This would help readers to trust them, I said. Nobody disagreed. Soon, I began to notice that much of the time they agreed when I said certain articles needed more background, more sources, and to be more even-handed.

Still, their stories had an Arab-world slant and conservative Islamic spin. Stories about anti-Muslim prejudice in the West got prominent play. So, too, did any news about Saudi Arabia. The peg was often the Arab world on the defensive. That's their right, of course, but it doesn't always produce the honest journalism that the Arab world needs. Islam Online's editors will have to decide what they want, ultimately. I hope the tug of competition will gradually convince them that good journalism-not journalism in service of a cause-is their best bet, both commercially and in terms of helping their society.

ON THE TOP FLOOR of a soot-covered Art Deco era building in downtown Cairo, where the elevators only sometimes work, ElBadeel (The Alternative) was being born. Like other newspapers, it needed a license; the government had stalled that for months, and the delay was draining away the money raised for this new newspaper. But the editors were not giving up. With less financial support than Al Masry al Youm, El Badeel wanted to do the same kind of work but from a leftof-center perspective. The plan was for analysis, people-oriented features, and consumer and investigative reporting.

Mohammed Sayed Said, a longtime source and friend, accepted my offer to work with his staff, and I came to El Badeel in March, four months before its first issue was published. After years of writing for Al Ahram, the government's principal newspaper, Mohammed had taken the job of El Badeel's editor only a few months earlier-no small risk in a country where career mistakes can be terminal. Soft-spoken, middle-aged, and professorial, Mohammed is a particular kind of Egyptian intellectual. When he speaks in classical Arabic, the language sparkles. Egyptians like him are democratic reformers, believers in the need, and the ability, to reinvigorate their politically moribund society. They don't carry the baggage of the Nasserites or other outdated Arab nationalist ideologies. They float on their own, borrowing what they like from East and West.

Most of El Badeel's reporters were young and inexperienced. I had to explain to the business reporters what a stock market is. I reminded the feature writers that not all stories should be heartbreaking tales of oppression. Life has its joys, too, I suggested. But the investigative reporters stunned me. For every reporting scenario I offered, they had strategies for getting the necessary information. Basic facts are as guarded there as Egypt's ancient treasures, yet that didn't dissuade them. I wondered where this drive came from. A few had attended investigative workshops put on by Western journalists, some have read about investigative reporting online, and some, I decided, were just eager to learn.

OTHER OPPORTUNITIES TO teach cropped up and I was busy, but the bloggers remained my obsession. Their potential to open up the streams of news is great, not just in Egypt, but across the Arab world. I attended their meetings at various locations around Cairo, where they train one another on the latest technology but mostly fret about the government's growing dislike of them. I had not forgotten Wael Abbas's comment that first day about wanting to "know how journalists work," and, after my time training all these journalists around Cairo, it was clear what I could do for Wael and the other bloggers: write a guide, with their help, that began to set some standards and best practices for online journalism in the Arab world.

It was April 2007 when I began searching for people in Cairo who were interested in advancing online journalism and found Gamal Eid, an overworked lawyer who heads the Arabic Network for Human Rights Information, the only human-rights group in the Arab world dedicated to freedom of expression. His office, which he shares with a handful of co-workers, is a string of modest rooms in a Cairo suburb. Eid's resources are few, but his ambition is great, and he liked my idea of creating a bloggers' guide. We made a deal. Once I'd cooked up the guide, he would provide a translator for the final draft and help disseminate it.

It took me several weeks to put it together. I interviewed bloggers, the human-rights groups that defend them, and others with ideas about how to grow the Internet in the Arab world. I learned that the bloggers wanted to know how to build a story out of facts, and make sure they are as accurate as possible. I skipped the objectivity issue, knowing that today's reporters here and elsewhere want their own voice. But I urged them to be fair and professional and open to ideas that contradict and challenge their own. They were especially interested in knowing the basics of sedition and other laws that can snare them. Because so many bloggers work in solitude, they wanted advice on how to create a community for support and protection. They also wanted help thinking through the pros and cons of Hogging anonymously. And with all the problems they are likely to face, I reminded them that when we speak up, there is no longer silence, and we are not alone.

With Eid's help, the guide was copied on discs that we gave to those who don't dare work in an Internet café for fear of being arrested or otherwise hassled by government authorities. He also printed copies for workshops run by his organization and posted the guide on the network's Web site, immediately reaching over 140 Arab human-rights groups.

The first day it went up, I received e-mails from across the Arab world, congratulating me and asking for further advice. The International Freedom of Expression Exchange, which links human-rights groups across the globe, asked to post the guide on its Web site. Other human-rights and journalism groups followed. My host, The International Center for Journalists, put it online in Farsi, Spanish, and Portuguese, as well as in English and Arabic. Not bad.

SINCE RETURNING TO Chicago last July, I've remained impressed by the hunger I witnessed in these young Egyptian bloggers and reporters to learn the hard work of journalism. They, and their counterparts around the Arab world, are not perfect. Their passions and sense of injustice may be so strong that they cannot stop themselves from sometimes crossing the line from witness to advocate. But their fervent belief in truth-telling and fact-based reporting is encouraging, and it propels them, sometimes like moths to a flame. As I follow developments in Egypt, I am heartened-but more than a little worried-by the work my friends and colleagues there are producing.

Wael's Internet fame (and infamy) grew, for instance, after he posted videos of people being tortured by police. One, showing a bus driver being sodomized by officers, led to a three-year prison term for the officers. Yet, while other bloggers have been beaten or jailed, Wael thus far has faced only nasty rumors meant to discredit him.

Elsewhere, the bloggers and other independent media outlets have covered the on-again, off-again wave of labor strikes that have wracked Egypt since 2006 with a fearlessness and tenacity that put the establishment media's thin and cautious coverage to shame. The unrest, which is now the longest and largest social upheaval in Egypt since World War II, and has pulled in everyone from factory workers to government employees, is driven by widespread layoffs, shrinking wages, and rising inflation-especially in the cost of food-at a time when wealthy Egyptians seem to be flourishing. The government crackdown on the weak political opposition and labor-union activists only fueled the strikes. Police reportedly seized a number of bloggers in April during demonstrations, and the government newspapers have been drumming up anger toward the bloggers, blaming the unrest on them.

From its first issue in July 2007, El Badeel's investigations into the labor unrest have established it as a serious player in the Egyptian media market. It broke the story of how police - had chained injured citizens arrested at a riot to their hospital beds. One day, its first three pages were given over to pictures of ordinary Egyptians caught up in the disputes, a visual landmark for Egyptian newspapers.

In May, a reporter in Cairo e-mailed me, asking for guidance on how to cover the strikes. And, after a short intermission, Sandmonkey is blogging again.

Wael's Internet fame grew after he posted videos of people being tortured by police.

The dozen or so bloggers who had gathered in the offices of a fledgling Cairo newspaper were freaked out by the four-year prison term given to a twenty-two-year-old former law school student for criticizing President Hosni Mubarak and for "religious incitement." It is true that small newspapers are bubbling up to challenge the state-run media; satellite TV from the wider Arab world has forced Egyptian TV to get real and copy Al Jazeera's model; Egyptian journalists are talking to other Arab journalists about what binds them and about strategies for the future; government newspapers, in the face of declining circulation, finally seem to realize that they must compete; and the Internet-as it has in repressive societies everywhere-has opened the world to Egyptians and given them the power to speak out. The unrest, which is now the longest and largest social upheaval in Egypt since World War II, and has pulled in everyone from factory workers to government employees, is driven by widespread layoffs, shrinking wages, and rising inflation-especially in the cost of food-at a time when wealthy Egyptians seem to be flourishing.

Copyright Columbia University, Graduate School of Journalism Jul/Aug 2008 | STEPHEN FRANKLIN covers labor for the Chicago Tribune, where he has also been a foreign and national correspondent.

Politics on the web: Blog standard

WHAT do Barbra Streisand and the Tunisian president, Zine El Abidine Ben Ali, have in common? They both tried to block material they dislike from appearing on the internet. And they were both spectacularly unsuccessful. In 2003 Ms Streisand objected to aerial photographs of her home in Malibu appearing in a collection of publicly available coastline pictures. She sued (unsuccessfully) for $50m--and in doing so ensured that the pictures gained far wider publicity.

That self-defeating behaviour coined the phrase "Streisand effect", illustrated by an axiom from John Gilmore, one of the pioneers of the internet, that: "The Net interprets censorship as damage and routes around it." But the big test of the rule is not whether it frustrates publicity-shy celebrities. It is whether it can overcome governments’ desire for secrecy.

In November 2007 Tunisia blocked access to the popular video-sharing sites YouTube and DailyMotion, which both carried material about Tunisian political prisoners. It was not for the first time, and many other countries have blocked access to such sites, either to protect public morals, or to spare politicians’ blushes. What was unusual this time was the response. Tunisian activists and their allies organised a "digital sit-in", linking dozens of videos about civil liberties to the image of the presidential palace in Google Earth. That turned a low-key human-rights story into a fashionable global campaign.

It was the same story in Armenia in March, where the president, Robert Kocharian, ended his term in office with a media blackout that, supposedly, extended to blogs (self-published websites which typically contain the author’s personal observations and opinions). Like all other outlets, the authorities said, blogs could publish government news only. The result was a soaring number of blogs hosted on servers outside Armenia--all sharply critical of the authorities.

Some countries still think that the benefits of censorship are worth the opprobrium. China unabashedly blocks foreign news sites, with state-financed digital censors playing an elaborate game of cat and mouse with those trying to elude them. Saudi Arabia makes a positive virtue of the practice, warning those trying to access prohibited websites of the dangers of pornography: sources cited include the Koran and Cass Sunstein, an American scholar who argues that porn does not automatically deserve First Amendment protection.

Such authoritarian countries are increasingly co-operating: Chinese software for finding keywords and spotting dangerous sites is among the best in the world. But international co-operation cuts both ways. If Egypt, for example, buys Chinese web-censorship technology, the Egyptian bloggers may learn ways to bypass it from their Chinese colleagues before the technology arrives.

That may keep information flowing fairly freely. But it does not keep bloggers out of prison. Security officials who once scoffed at blogs, or ignored them completely in favour of bigger and more conspicuous targets, are now bringing their legal and other arsenals to bear. A common move is to expand media, information and electoral laws to include blogs. Last year, for example, Uzbekistan changed its media law to count all websites as "mass media"--a category subject to Draconian restriction. Belarus now requires owners of internet cafés to keep a log of all websites that their customers visit: in a country where internet access at home is still rare and costly, that is a big hurdle for the active netizen. Earlier this year Indonesia passed a law that made it much riskier to publish controversial opinions online. A Brazilian court has ruled that bloggers, like other media, must abide by restrictions imposed by the law on elections.

The chilling effect of such moves is intensified when governments back them up with imprisonment. From Egypt to Malaysia to Saudi Arabia to Singapore, bloggers have in recent months found themselves behind bars for posting materials that those in power dislike. The most recent Worldwide Press Freedom Index, published by Reporters Without Borders, a lobby group, estimates their number at a minimum of 64.

International human-rights organisations have taken up their cause. But the best and quickest way of defending those in prison may be with the help of other internet activists. Sami ben Gharbia, a Tunisian digital activist who now lives in exile in the Netherlands, says that this beats traditional human-rights outfits when it comes to informing the world about the arrest of fellow bloggers. He co-ordinates the campaigning efforts of Global Voices Online, a web-based outfit that began as a collator of offbeat blog content and has now branched out into lobbying for free speech.

Such issues were expected to be in sharp focus at Global Voices’ annual summit in Budapest this week, where hundreds of bloggers, academics, do-gooders and journalists from places like China, Belarus, Venezuela and Kenya were due to swap tips on how to outwit officialdom. The aim, says Ethan Zuckerman, a Harvard academic who cofounded Global Voices, is to build networks of trust and co-operation between people who would not instinctively look to the other side of the world for solutions to their problems.

That is a worthy if ambitious goal. Doubtless, authoritarian governments are in close touch too, sharing the best ways of dealing with the pestilential gadflies and troublemakers of the internet. But they will not be posting their conclusions online, for all to see. Which way works better? History will decide.

SOURCE: The Economist

Blogging in Egypt

With the increasing importance of citizen journalism on the Internet, which has burgeoned since blogging started to gain popularity in 2003, the new media are not only impacting mainstream journalism but the political process itself.
Last year the World Bank reported that Egypt, with more than 4 million Internet users, had the highest rate of Internet access among non-oil Arab states. But having expanded access, Mubarak is now trying to reassert state authority over cyberspace by expanding the state security service into the virtual public arena. The more promising hope of the Internet for citizens in their quest for political reform lies in the potential for blogs to galvanize, inspire and organize.Until recently, journalism in the Arab world suffered under the heavy hand of authoritarian rulers who sought to control the symbolic power of the media, the major arbiter of public opinion. With the increasing importance of citizen journalism on the Internet, which has burgeoned since blogging started to gain popularity in 2003, the new media are not only impacting mainstream journalism but the political process itself. With the force of the blogosphere coming on the heals of the explosion of Arabic satellite news media over the past decade, the public has more diverse, credible, and culturally relevant information source to choose from than ever before.
Online citizen journalism in the form of web logs (blogs) video blogs (vlogs) is emerging as a powerful force in the Arab world, where it is challenging the ability of the state to control the information environment and forcing mainstream journalists to compete with online citizen journalists. Blogging in Egypt is taking off, although it is still relatively unknown and certainly not popular among the general public. However, among journalists and the professional, globalized class, it is an emergent phenomeneon.
The Egyptian blog ring claims more than 1500 blogs, with slightly less than half of those published in English (http://www.egybloggers.com/). The Egyptian Blog Review’s motto “from citizens to watchdogs” proclaims the potential for new forms of citizen media to bypass state control and self-censorship, evidence of the impact changes in global communications systems are having. These changes favor narrowcasting and transnational, sub-state media that provide a more realistic view of the world than the traditional state-run media. Rania Al Malky, a former journalist for the English-language Egypt Today, describes on her site how new media is both subversive to the state and empowering to the public: “In a country like Egypt where state control of the media has reached such epidemic proportions that self-censorship has become a worse threat than direct censorship, the empowering effect of a blog is undeniable. It was only natural that political activists would pick it up to spread their pro-reform message and coordinate demonstrations and other forms of civil action which have been slowly gaining momentum in the past two years. And they now have the tools to tell the real story of how their peaceful protests are ‘controlled’”.These real stories have been an important source of information for citizens in the Arab world as well as for foreign journalists, governments and citizens. Such un-edited, un-hierarchical, un-censored information is likely to become more popular as Internet connectivity expands. Although the Internet remains a rare commodity in countries like Egypt, connectivity is rising and information communication technologies (ICTs) are at the heart of socioeconomic development. Last year the World Bank reported that Egypt, with more than 4 million Internet users, had the highest rate of Internet access among non-oil Arab states. President Hosni Mubarak created a new Ministry for ICT in 2005 and has built hundreds of internet access points in schools and communities across the country. Internet cafes abound and several restaurants and cafes offer free wireless connections for the more affluent of the younger generation. But having expanded access, Mubarak is now trying to reassert state authority over cyberspace by expanding the state security service into the virtual public arena. Last summer Internet café owners were told to start collecting the identity cards of all patrons. In March the government began prosecuting bloggers for the content of their blogs, perhaps realizing their influence beyond national borders. Blogs in Egypt have become important sources of alternative information for domestic and foreign journalists, especially regarding abuses. For example, according to blog postings, the Egyptian media initially ignored the assaults on women that occurred during October’s Eid al Fitr festivities. So the blogs took it upon themselves to report and provide evidence of what happened through eye-witness accounts, posting video on YouTube and translating important accounts (see for example Global Voices, Manal and Alaa, Forsoothsayer, and Mechanical Crowds). The extensive online coverage eventually compelled the independent local press and foreign press to report the story. New and old media alike credited coverage of the story to blogs, reflecting a growing awareness of blogs not only as news outlets for unpopular stories but as sources and competitors for the mainstream media.Many of the most popular journalistic blogs are in English, perhaps reflecting the fact that many of their official contributors have worked for Western media organizations, the ability to get away with more in English than Arabic, and the desire to communicate with an English-speaking audience that includes mainstream Western journalists. Western journalists in Egypt use Egyptian journalistic blogs to find out what’s happening in opposition movements and get ideas for stories, while Western journalists more broadly use blogs as a way of measuring the pulse of Egyptian politics and society. One foreign correspondent based in Cairo said she uses blogs to keep abreast of the opposition and to find out where protests will be held. But as blogs play an increasingly important agenda-setting role for the Western media they face growing repression in their own countries.The growing attention being paid to bloggers and their blogs by journalists and human rights organizations has enhanced their popularity and influence. Unfortunately however, such attention is a double-edged sword, as growing interest brings more intimidation. One of the most well-known Egyptian bloggers who calls himself (?) SandMonkey (Rantings of a SandMonkey) recently stopped blogging because he feared his anonymity had been compromised and that he was being monitored. He explained that increasing intimidation by the security apparatus along with the failure of the Egyptian blogosphere to “focus” and use the media attention and admiration they have garnered to do something substantial to improve the political situation forced him to quit. While many observers build their hopes for political reform and transformation on the power of the blogosphere, they fail to notice that there are few mechanisms to translate online discontent into real political change. The circuitous route by which information is reported on blogs, then picked up by the Western press, and subsequently read by policymakers who may choose to exert pressure on the offending government is unreliable and still depends on foreigners to pressure the government to reform. For example, in March a student blogger was arrested for the content of his blog postings, the first blogger prosecuted for his writing as opposed to his role in protests or political activism. The case was reported on heavily in the blogosphere and the United States released a statement expressing its disappointment with his conviction, calling it “a setback for human rights in Egypt.” Such statements, however, are rarely followed up by real sanctions and thus even pressure from important allies seems to have little real political impact other than simply drawing attention to the problem. Arrests and attacks on bloggers most often occur because of their participation in political activities like protests. During the debate over a new press law last year, for example, blogger-journalists used their blogs to organize protests as well as report on them. Thus the protests held at the Press Syndicate throughout the summer of 2006 were organized through the professional, personal, and cyber networks of journalists and activists, and resulting abuses and repression were then reported on in the mainstream media as well as on blog postings in both English and Arabic. These resulted in arrests and abuses of journalists and bloggers by the government, which were covered domestically and globally, even making major world papers like The Washington Post and The Independent. Perhaps, then, the more promising hope of the Internet for citizens in their quest for political reform lies in the potential for blogs to galvanize, inspire and organize. The organizational capacity and information dissemination made possible by such technology has undermined the ability of the state to control the public sphere. Demonstrations over the proposed press law and the Lebanon war showed the potential of blogging to organize political action and raise funds for victims and causes online. Blogs rallied to the causes of imprisoned bloggers, victims of the war in Lebanon, and those of the Dahab bombings by raising money through online donations. Bloggers have also been instrumental in creating media events that compel broadcasting media to cover them; and it is through this coverage by the mainstream media that the blogosphere has really gained its power. In their book about media events, Dayan and Katz showed how media events confer status on the participants and issues involved by giving voice to civil society actors who are not part of the hegemonic state apparatus, and how they can in turn mobilize public opinion in support of them and perhaps even serve as catalyst for social mobilization against the status quo. It is this organizational potential coupled with the powers of journalism that make blogging such an important phenomenon.

Courtney C. Radsch is a scholar and freelance journalist whose work focuses on the Arab media and politics.