The Real Net Effect: The Paid Bloggers and Trolls for Russia's Putin (Elder)

The existence of on-line fronts, of fictional individuals or of people paid to post, has long been suggested but seldom proved. Howver, as more and more corporations, governments, and organisations keen to shape public perceptions, further evidence of such online manipulation may be left behind. Writing for The Guardian, Miriam Elder looks at a campaign in Russia to inflate the status of Vladimir Putin, seeking the mirage that he is very, very popular amongst Russian citizens.

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Polishing Putin: Hacked E-mails Suggest Dirty Tricks by Russian Youth Group
Miriam Elder

A pro-Kremlin group runs a network of internet trolls, seeks to buy flattering coverage of Vladimir Putin and hatches plans to discredit opposition activists and media, according to private emails allegedly hacked by a group calling itself the Russian arm of Anonymous.

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The Real Net Effect: Andy Carvin & the Power of Twitter

Many readers who follow EAWorldview (@EANewsFeed) on Twitter are likely to know the name Andy Carvin (@acarvin). Carvin, the senior social media strategist at NPR and an established foreign policy journalist, has spent the last year Tweeting the revolutions and uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa.

And few would dispute Andy's prowess on the social media platform. In 2011, The Daily Dot said that no one had done more to transform Twitter than Carvin and the hacking group Anonymous. The Columbia Journalism Review even asked, "Is This the World’s Best Twitter Account?" Carvin has been called a "living, breathing real-time verification system," and has often spoke about the power, and sometimes the pitfalls, of using social media to spread the news.

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Social Media Revolution (Qualman)

Erik Qualman and the folks over at Socialnomics created this piece with a simple, yet bold, question: Is Social media a fad, or is it the biggest shift since the Industrial Revolution?

The question is loaded, and I don't believe that it is designed to make a "Technology is responsible for all good change in the world" type of argument. What it firmly establishes, through a series of simple facts, is a rapidly changing world, a world in which youth + technology = a change in the power structure, for good and for bad, that has existed for generations, or in some cases millenia.

Plus, with a soundtrack by Fatboy Slim, how can one go wrong? So turn it up, and learn some facts.

The Real Net Effect: Arab Revolutions and Social Media (Harb)

Is this, then, the age of new media? Could the Internet be a free space for Arab citizens to express their opinion and fulfil their democratic aspirations in bringing about freedom of speech and political freedom generally? Is it able to form the new Arab public sphere?

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Iran Feature: As Strong as Our Signal --- Social Media and Activism (Mostatabi)

How can we, as an ever expanding internet network of activists, reach beyond the limitations of traditional activism, and the almost too limitless and too cluttered world of online activism, to find an effective way to take online action in a way that will affect real life change? How can we mitigate the tug of war for our attention, the broadcasts shoved into our faces, the murky, polluted stream of information, and realize that for all our good intentions, fascinating stories, and revs to action, we – our stories, our aspirations, our movements – remain only as strong as our signal?

The Real Net Effect: Social Media 1st-Hand from Tunisia to Egypt to.... (Beaumont)

>"Social media was absolutely crucial [in Tunisia]. Three months before Mohammed Bouazizi burned himself in Sidi Bouzid we had a similar case in Monastir. But no one knew about it because it was not filmed. What made a difference this time is that the images of Bouazizi were put on Facebook and everybody saw it."

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Egypt Special: A Lesson Learned About Twitter From Al Jazeera

Twitter is just another communication tool, there to be leveraged by anyone with the will and the ambition. Yet just as Al Jazeera’s coverage of Egypt would sound ridiculous if described as "Television Revolution", so do straw=man notions of a "Twitter Revolution" in Iran, or indeed anywhere else. The Twitter of 2011 looks like it will become a mature, integrated part of the media landscape: if protesters in Tahrir Square did not have access, it still had a role to play in bringing the story to the outside world.

The jury’s still out on what Al Jazeera’s rise in prominence meant for the people of Egypt. As with Iran in 2009, we may never know just how many people inside the country were getting their information from these sources. But the jury is definitely in on how the channel has benefited greatly from positioning itself as the source of information from Egypt among mainstream news outlets, and it can thank social media for a pivotal influence in this rise.

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Tunisia and the Real Net Effect: A First-Hand Account of Why Social Media Matters (Kosina and "S")

"Without the Internet there would be no flow of information, neither within the country nor to the outside world. Without the Internet it would have been possible for the massacre to happen in silence for us and for the outside world. President Ben Ali had censored all the media and especially the Internet (everything except for Al-Jazeera TV)."

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