Evidence one: As more than 100,000 protesters descended into the streets on Friday, women uniformly dressed in black flowing robes carried signs saying, “Revolution: The only solution.” Three weeks of pro-democracy protests in this island nation have followed the pattern of those in Egypt and Tunisia, with cellphones and Facebook posts propelling the movement and…
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Don’t let Facebook infect Afghanistan!
So says this clearly scared Muslim leader: Burhanuddin Rabani, a leading Islamic cleric who also leads President Hamid Karzai’s peace council — formed to make peace with the Taliban — have warned Afghanistan’s conservative religious community against increasing influence of Afghanistan’s new generation that he described as “facebook kids”. No doubt if the Ulema (Islamic…
The voice of independent unions in Egypt
A key player in the recent revolution (so not just those on Facebook and Twitter) speaking in solidarity with workers in America: Kamal Abbas is General Coordinator of the CTUWS, an umbrella advocacy organization for independent unions in Egypt. The CTUWS, which was awarded the 1999 French Republic’s Human Rights Prize, suffered repeated harassment and…
Not a Twitter revolution but social tools surely helped
Another fascinating Al-Jazeera feature on Empire about the role of the internet in the Arab uprisings: Carl Bernstein, a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative journalist; Amy Goodman, the host and executive producer of Democracy Now!; Professor Emily Bell, the director of digital journalism at Columbia University; Evgeny Morozov, the author of The Net Delusion: The Dark Side…
Portrait of a key Egyptian dissenter
Hossam el-Hamalawy has been campaigning against the Mubarak regime for years (and appears in my book The Blogging Revolution). In this Associated Press profile he outlines the oft-forgotten in the West supporters of the Egyptian revolution (away from Twitter and Facebook); the workers: “The job is unfinished, we got rid of (Hosni) Mubarak but we…
The importance of visual anonymity in times of crisis
What activists and human rights workers in repressive regimes have the right to demand.
US intelligence is a contradiction in terms
The idea that Facebook and Twitter should be closely monitored by Washington to determine where the next Middle East revolution may occur simply proves the sheer waste of billions on the intelligence services annually. You have to laugh: