The #1in5Muslims Internet Meme: Once Again, the Best Response to Ignorance is Ridicule

Amid all the deeply depressing news: a ray of humor;

The Sun, Rupert Murdoch's British tabloid that until fairly recently was best known for its "Page 3 Girls," bare-breasted models who must have been a major support of Britain's silicon industry based on their improbably ample attributes, is not generally known for its news quality, which at times makes The Daily Mail look reliable. (Page 3 girls have apparently put tops on after years of feminist protest.) In the present Islamophobic hysteria gripping all US Republican candidates and some Europeans, it featured this front page splash:

While still managing to keep its audience by getting female breasts on the front page (though covered with a bikini), it also sensationalized and apparently misstated a poll result.

Longtime readers may recall that back in 2012, Newsweek ran a cover story on "Muslim Rage" that provoked a hilarious response on Twitter as I duly reported then.

Well the hashtag #1in5Muslims is replicating that with posters posting made-up "factoids" thst are often funny. (Warning: there are hostile posts under the hashtag, too.) A selection:

Nor were the Page 3 Girls forgotten:

And finally at least for now:

That's Murdoch of course. I  think he should go back to Page 3 Girls. Bare boobs may be sexist but don't provoke hate crimes and racism.

Marc Lynch Looks at Arab Twitter Trends on Gaza, Iraq, Syria

Marc Lynch, in "Arabs Do Care About Gaza," looks at Arabic Twitter trends to assess recent events in Syria, Iraq, and Gaza:

What did Palestine’s relatively declining place in Arab discourse really mean, though? For many analysts, especially in the West and Israel, it signaled a nail in the coffin of theories of linkage and the relevance of the Palestinian issue. For others, it was just a matter of the news cycle, since Palestine hadn’t had the mass demonstrations on the Tahrir Square model or the mass slaughter of Syria’s model . . .

Syria (in blue), which in 2012 and early 2013 consistently generated millions of tweets per month in Arabic, shows a relatively low level flat line. The shocking developments in Iraq (in green) galvanized attention in mid-June, and Iraq continues to attract more attention now than does Syria. But Gaza, after being virtually ignored for a long time, surges to dominate everything else once the conflict begins. Score one for the “latent relevance” hypothesis.

UPDATE: it's been pointed out that the table doesn't use the more frequent Arabic spelling of Syria as  سوريا, though a search with that spelling doesn't dramatically change the conclusion.

Amnesty: Egypt Planning for Mass Surveillance of Social Media

Amnesty International has issued a statement saying that the Egyptian Ministry of the Interior has issued a tender for a system that would allow mass surveillance of social media:

Under the proposed plans, disclosed in a leaked tender by the Ministry of Interior this week, Facebook, Twitter and YouTube and possibly mobile phone applications such as WhatsApp, Viber and Instagram would be systematically monitored.

“The plans by the Egyptian authorities to indiscriminately monitor social media a few months after the adoption of a new constitution guaranteeing the right to privacy shows the little regard they have for human rights or the rule of law. The plans also spark serious fears that systematic monitoring of social media networks will be used by the authorities to further clamp down on the slightest sign of dissent,” said Hassiba Hadj Sahraoui, Middle East and North Africa Deputy Director for Amnesty International.

First They Came for Twitter . . .

Then they came for YouTube. Turkey has blocked YouTube in the wake of the leaking of another embarrassing audiotape, this one a security meeting about a possible war with Syria.

Banning Twitter BOOSTS Twitter Use in Turkey?

Now, I'm fully aware that Hurriyet Daily News are hardly friendly with Turkish Prime Minister Erdoğan and his AKP Party, but they are reporting that after yesterday's ban on Twitter,that
"Twitter usage SOARS in Turkey, let alone succumbing to 'the ban'."

The number of active Twitter users, as well as tweeted messages, has soared since the Turkish government blocked access to the popular social media platform, new statistics have shown.

The access to Twitter was blocked in the first hour of March 21. According to figures published by social media rating agency Somera, over 6 million Turks tweeted from March 20, 23:00, to March 21, 12:00. Only 4.5 million tweets were sent the previous day in the same time slot when there was no blocking. The difference correspondents to a 33 percent rise.

The number of tweeting Turkish users have also risen by 17 percent, from 1.49 million to 1.75 million comparing the same periods. The Turkish activity on Twitter was 16 percent lower than the previous day one hour before midnight. Just after the access was blocked, it quickly rose, hitting 95 percent more than the previous day and remained in record highs even at 03:00 am as seen in the graph:

In last night's post I already talked about one workaround. There are others. The Prime Minister promise that "Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic" seems to have a somewhat hollow echo by now. For one thing the Turkish President, Erdoğan's former colleague and AKP ally, Abdullah Gül, denounced it. How? On Twitter of course:

I don't read Turkish but I understand he's saying that blocking Twitter posts against which there was a court order would have been sufficient and that blocking Twitter altogether violated both privacy and freedom of expression.

So now, Erdoğan's own party is unhappy. Now there are reports that Twitter is negotiating a restoration. Did we see "the power of the Turkish Republic" here, or the power of social media?

Turkey Bans Twitter; Turks Tweet About It Anyway

Turkey banned Twitter today, after Prime Minister Erdoğan threatened to do so at a campaign rally in Bursa. He blames Twitter for spreading links to leaked tapes implicating him and his government to a corruption schedule, and he told the rally, “We now have a court order. We’ll eradicate Twitter. I don’t care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic.” He also threatened Facebook and other social media.

The power of the Turkish Republic notwithstanding, there was some lag time between the threat and the deed, and before ISPs in Turkey had blocked access to Twitter, Twitter sent this:

So once Twitter went dark online, Turks started messaging their comments, including the cartoons below and lots of denunciation, vociferously tweeting, via SMS, about the shutdown of Twitter. This may not have demonstrated the power of the Turkish Republic quite as effectively as Erdoğan intended. SMS has its limitations of course, but it gave Turks a means to express themselves, at least, to the outside world if not within Turkey.

When the Turkish Parliament passed a new, tough Internet law last month, I noted that "Critics claim that the bill is in response to revelations published on social media pointing to government corruption, and that the intention is to block further revelations." It looks as if those critics might have a point.

Study Says Egypt "Second Most Addicted" to Facebook

According to this report, Egypt, though it has fewer Facebook users than other countries, ranks second in the world in number of posts per Facebook user, after only Brazil:

With Facebook crossing the one billion user-line, Socialbakers has released the results of statistics showing the most Facebook-addicted countries on Facebook. Egypt came in second on the list.

 

While the US is one of the most populous countries with a high percentage of its people connected to the internet and having the greatest number of registered Facebook pages, other countries like Brazil and Egypt topped the list of the highest activity on the social networking website.

 

According to the Sociabakers, their findings were based on the number of posts published in each country. Brazil which topped the list publishes a total of almost 86 thousand posts per month, with an average of 103 posts for every registered Facebook page every month.

 

While Egypt has six times fewer pages registered on Facebook than Brazil and eight times fewer than the US (which came third on the list), pages in Egypt publish an average of 380 posts per month for every registered page.

The US ranked third. The only other Middle Eastern country to make the top ten is Turkey.

Glitch or New Policy? Iranians Have Access to Facebook and Twitter, Today at Least

Iran shut down access to both Facebook and Twitter during the 2009 post-election troubles and both have remained inaccessible, even though President Rouhani has a Twitter account.

Until today, when Iranians discovered they could access both sites. There has been no announcement so it's unclear whether this is just a glitch of some sort or a quiet bit of liberalization. It isn't clear if it's working throughout the whole country or even on all ISPs. Or, of course, if it will still be there tomorrow.

Social Media's Role from Tahrir to Taksim

Certainly the most dramatic developments in the region over the weekend involved the deepening and spreading protests in Turkey. I will have some extended comments of my own some time later today, but until that's ready I wanted to refer you to a thoughtful piece elsewhere.

Prime Minister Erdoğan, who during the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions praised the role of social media in resisting unpopular governments, has made clear that he thinks his electoral majority should exempt him from social media attacks; over the weekend he attacked Twitter.

At Zeynep Tufekci's Technosociology blog, devoted to social media among other issues, the Turkish-American Tufekci discusses at some length this question: "Is there a Social-Media Fueled Protest Style? An Analysis From #jan25 to #geziparki": that is, in Twitter hashtag terms, from Cairo's Tahrir to Istanbul's Taksim. The situations are not identical (Turkey is more evenly divided and the issues are quite different); but her analysis of the role of social media is worth your time. More on this from me later today.

"Istanbul Gas Festival"

Iran Restores Gmail; Can its "Intranet" Work?

Jillian C. York at Al Jazeera asks "Is Iran's Halal Internet Possible"? We've talked previously about Iran's efforts to create a national "Intranet" firewalled off from the global Internet, but its recent move in shutting down Google and Gmail (reputedly in retaliation for YouTube not taking down the video attacking the Prophet) had to be rescinded in the case of Gmail, when not only was there a popular backlash but even members of Parliament complained.

The Great Firewall of Iran: Blocking Google and Gmail

Though not as well known as the Great Wall of China, Sassanian Iran (in the centuries before the coming of Islam) was once protected by the Great Wall of Gorgan, protecting northeastern Iran from steppe peoples of Central Asia. With other fortifications to the west of the Caspian, Iran was protected by a network of defensive walls  rivaled in length only by their more famous Chinese counterpart. The eastern and western walls protecting the "Caspian gates" came to be associated with the mythological tales surrounding Alexander the Great and the so-called Wall of Gog and Magog.

Iran is now talking about erecting a wall of another sort, a firewall against the world, apparently as part of its declared intention of creating a national Intranet independent of the global Internet. It's latest step: 
Iran has cut off access to Google and Gmail,  Officially, the moves against Google were in retaliation for YouTube's not taking down the controversial film attacking the Prophet. YouTube is owned by Google.

Most access to Facebook, Twitter and other social media has been blocked for some time.

Iran claims its attempt to create a self-contained national Intranet is not primarily aimed at isolating its people from information, but at blocking the sort of cyber-attacks on its computer and scientific infrastructure, including its nuclear program, that it has experienced in recent years.

Newsweek, "Muslim Rage," and the Best Response: Muslim Humor

Newsweek, which was once something you younger folk may have heard about, a weekly newsmagazine, has changed hands recently and is trying to figure out what role a weekly magazine may have in reporting news in a round the clock online world, and now has provoked controversy over a seemingly provocative if not incendiary cover called "Muslim Rage." It has also provoked something else, which is both reassuring and encouraging: widespread ridicule (of the funny, not the angry, kind),  in the Muslim world. Newsweek actually tweeted asking for responses to its cover, so it deserves everything it's gotten:

Gawker put up 13 images of "Muslim rage" showing Egyptians having fun, Iranians building snowmen, and other such, though I can't reproduce their photos here. But Twitter, which can create a massive humor wave instantly, produced a wave of commentary. Some was serious, like veteran journalist Larry Pintak:

And there was sharp criticism as well, including some requiring a crude language warning, but still worth noting:

But most was tongue in cheek, with Muslims describing various day-to-day annoyances as #MuslimRage. There are news accounts here and here, but it may make more sense just to let the contributors speak:

The Short-Lived Internet Death and Subsequent Resurrection of Abdelaziz Bouteflika

In case you missed it, Algerian President Abdelaziz Bouteflika died for a while over the weekend, but like Husni Mubarak and others who have died on the Internet, Bouteflika's death was greatly exaggerated and limited to social media rumors. He has, in fact, died frequently in the rumor mills since 2005. French blogger Alain Jules, whose original post said Swiss sources indicated he had been declared clinically dead in a Swiss hospital, but whose original post has since been replaced by a "Mea Culpa au President Bouteflika et a ses Compatriotes," was apparently the sole origin of the story, after which various Algerian opposition sites and Twitter took it and ran with it.

Unlike Husni Mubarak, whose last of many Internet deaths was last June and was actually reported by the official state news agency, there was never any major media report of Bouteflika's alleged demise. The Algerians took a little while to deny it, which may have fueled the speculation.

[Update: Saudi Foreign Minister Prince Saud al-Faisal is not dead either, despite media reports.]

Bouteflika yesterday: Apparently he's feeling MUCH better now:

"E-Militias of the Muslim Brotherhood"

Here's another post that's mostly just a link: Linda Herrera and Mark Lotfy at Jadaliyya on "E-Militias of the Muslim Brotherhood: How to Upload Ideology on Facebook." It provides a fairly detailed look at how the Muslim Brotherhood uses websites and social media, including both the official sites but also those that appear to have no link to the MB but do.

Overdue Guide: Jillian C. York on Middle Eastern Internet Memes

This blog has occasionally excerpted some of the funnier Internet humor on Middle Eastern politics and society, but somebody needed to do this post, and Jillian C. York at The Guardian has done it: "Middle East Memes: A Guide."

One example from the #SalafistMovies hashtag:

YouTube, Satire, and the Kingdom

 Saudi Arabia may not have cinemas, but it does have YouTube. Here's an interesting piece from the Chicago Tribune on how satirical YouTube videos and other online media are raising some issues in the Kingdom.

Hazemania: Candidate Abu Isma‘il's Poster Overkill Invites Parodies

Hazem Salah Abu Isma‘il is a popular Salafi preacher who is running for President of Egypt. To the surprise and alarm of many, his rallies are drawing large crowds and he is showing considerable charismatic skill in public speaking, despite taking rather extreme positions on hijab and other social issues. (See Khalil al-Anani's "The Advent of Informal Islamists.") Although his popularity may be overshadowed if the Muslim Brotherhood does field a candidate, he is enjoying his moment of fame. And now, he os enjoying his moment of being the butt of Internet jokes. He's become a meme in his own right.

Although the official campaigning period is still a few weeks away, Abu Isma‘il's supporters put up campaign posters this week. No, I mean they really put up campaign posters this week. Everywhere:


Before I start stealing the great creations of a lot of clever people, I should note that the phenomenon has been written up in the last couple of days by Global Voices and by The Egypt Independent, both of which have many illustrations, and there's a Facebook  page (in Arabic) for mock Abu Isma‘il posters. Of course there's a Twitter hashtag, #AbuIsmail (and perhaps others). There's also a Tumblr of "Abo Ismail Doing Stuff," which is slightly different but in a similar vein. Many of these that follow appear in several of those sites, so I credit them collectively.

Though this has swept the Egyptian social media in a little over 48 hours, there are dissenters: someon Twitter are alarmed that the Abu Isma‘il mania is giving the man free publicity and may even help his campaign. Needless to say, the creators of these parodies are not likely to vote for the man,

The sometimes ingenious, sometimes hilarious (and often neither, which I'm not including here) include the fairly predictable:

 ... Obama's complaining someone put a poster on his car, and of course the George Washington painting on the oval office wall has changed a bit ..

Then there are historical references:  the cornerstone of the Qasr al-Nil bridge ...

and cultural ones ...

Then there's the new design for the Egyptian one pound note:

Some of the jokes are a bit meta, in that they invoke other Internet themes. Some readers may remember a bit over a year ago, just before and after the fall of Husni Mubarak, all the talk about "the guy behind ‘Omar Suleiman." "The guy" was a military officer who stood behind the then Vice President in his last few appearances, including the announcement of Mubarak's departure. Not identified at the time, it wasn't clear if he was Suleiman's bodyguard, or his minder, to make sure he said what he was told to say. He seems to have been SCAF's man.

Well, yes, you guessed it. The Guy Behind ‘Omar Suleiman is back:

Nor has Field Marshal Tantawi been forgotten:

If you browse through the sites linked above, you may be mystified by a large number of them involving Pepsi Cola: Pepsi bottles, Pepsi cans, versions of the Pepsi logo, etc. These all refer to one of Abu Isma‘il's more dubious achievements: a TV talk in which he asserted that "Pepsi" was an acronym for "Pay Every Penny Saving Israel." No, I am not making that up. I don't like quoting MEMRI since they tend to cherry-pick the Arab broadcasts they translate in order to show the most offensive, most lunatic, and most anti-Israeli, but since this talk is all three of those things and let you hear Abu Isma‘il's discussion in the original and with subtitles, I'll make an exception:

That should help explain this:

And one of my own favorites, this:

Actually, if you watch the video, he doesn't approve of Coke either, but it's funny.

So will this ridicule help puncture Abu Isma‘il's rising political balloon, or is all publicity good publicity?

Internet Arabic: "The Mixed Language of the Third Millennium"?

 I've noted many times (check my Arabic language tag for a collection of posts) the frequent laments of Arabic linguistics and literature professors about the imminent demise (if it's not dead already) of the Arabic language. Usually this falls onto one of two categories: (classical, literary) Arabic is moribund because of the influence of colloquial dialects (which have been around from earliest days, of course), or because of the influence of foreign language vocabularies entering pure Arabic. These days the complaint is usually about English (mostly) and French (especially in North Africa and Lebanon). A few hundred years ago (Arabic has been dying for a long time, it seems), it was Persian and Ottoman Turkish.

Well, here's a piece, more about how the language is changing than a lament of its demise, about the influence of the Internet on Arabic. Obviously anyone who reads Arabic posts on Facebook or Twitter knows that a mix of languages, jargon, and sometimes alphabets is routine. The article — which is in French, unfortunately for those who don't read it — contains an introduction and a translation of an Arabic article in Hayat by one Abu Wazen on the "mixed Arabic of the Internet, the language of the third millennium." The article does not see the changes wrought by the Internet as a necessarily bad thing.

http://cpa.hypotheses.org/3368

Not Revolution 2.0: Social Media as Lynch Mob in the Kashgari Case

I haven't commented up to now on the case of Hamza Kashgari, the Saudi journalist who had to flee the Kingdom due to his Twitter tweets about the Prophet Muhammad, and who was then seized in Malaysia and extradited back to Saudi Arabia for possible trial, which could even entail the death penalty. The basic issues of freedom of expression seem clear enough, and the case is even more dismaying because of Malaysia's role in delivering him back to KSA after he had made his escape. Certainly Kashgari's tweets were ill-advised for someone living in Saudi Arabia (what parts of "Commission for the P:romotion of Virtue and the Prevention of Vice" and "Religious Police" did he not understand?), but the potentially draconian punishment is provoking justifiable outrage. Background stories here and here if you haven't been following it.

But there's another side to the whole Kashgari issue that is worth noting amid all the talk over the past year of the Arab uprisings as "social media revolutions," "Revolution 2.0," and so on. In the Kashgari case, it is the social media that have been baying for his scalp.

As this piece in Canada's MacLeans notes,  the Internet has been playing the role of lynch mob in the Kashgari case. YouTube videos call for his death; chat rooms demand it.

Then there is the battle of the Facebook groups. As of this writing, the "The Saudi People Demand Retribution from Hamza Kashgari (Arabic)" Facebook page has 26,711 members.  "Free Hamza Kashgari," on the other hand, has 6,700. Of course there are other pages and other forums, but it seems clear that supporters of the Saudi religious establishment are using social media to demand punishment. Though the page itself does not immediately call for his death, many of the posters do. (In contrast, the Grand Mufti of Egypt has noted, "We don't kill our sons; we talk to them.")

Yes, social media can be a major organizing tool for revolutionary change. It can also be the modern equivalent of the lynch mob.

The Evanescence of a Social Media Revolution: A Year Later, 10% of Data, Images are Missing

 As someone whose discipline is history, I have naturally wondered about how the history of the past year will be written. At first glance the vast library of YouTube videos, live tweets as events transpired, cell-phone photos of events from hundred of sources, etc. would seem to mean the revolutions would have been well documented.

But endurance of these media may be an issue. Here's an important article I think: "Losing My Revolution: A year after the Egyptian Revolution, 10% of the social media documentation is gone." Using several aggregation sites, Storify, etc., a test study showed that up to 10% of the content, especially photos and videos, is no longer available. And that's after only a year.

This raises some interesting questions for digital archivists. I commended it to historians, techie geeks of various stripes, and anyone with an interest in social media.