Tuesday
May012012
The Real Net Effect: The Saudi Regime Tries to Control Social Media (Mutter)
Tuesday, May 1, 2012 at 10:05 | Scott Lucas in EA Middle East and Turkey, Journalism and Media, Middle East and Iran
Media monitoring, as practiced by governments in Libya, Bahrain, Egypt, Syria and Iran (to name a few), is not so much enforced by datacenters, wiretaps and informants but by searches of TV stations by police, days in a holding cell and the warrant officer's truncheon. The technology, of course, plays an increasingly vital role, not least because it makes it so much easier to prepare a mound of "evidence" to the prosecution's satisfaction. As Sultan Al Qassemi notes, governments and their supporters are becoming more social media savvy too.