Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Bassem Youssef was Egypt’s most famous comedian in the 2000s and until 2014. His weekly half-hour satire, “The Program,” skewered the government of president-for-life Hosni Mubarak in the run-up to the 2011 youth revolt. Mubarak was thin-skinned but did allow some comedians and pundits to blow off steam. He did, […]
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social media
How TikTok Videos are exposing Israeli repression of Palestinian Dissent
By Shahira Tarrash and Craig Brown | – ( Waging Nonviolence) – On the weekend of May 8, TikTok was awash with videos from East Jerusalem, Sheikh Jarrah and the Al-Aqsa compound, where Palestinian worshippers were attacked by Israeli security forces. This was before Hamas’ rockets attracted the focus of European and North American media […]
Is the flood of War Atrocity Video Coarsening our Souls?
( Tomdispatch.com ) – Recently, I wanted to show my wife a picture, so I opened the photos app on my phone and promptly panicked when I saw what was there. It’s not what you think. A lot of people are worried about what’s lurking on their smartphones. Compromising photos. Illicit text messages. Embarrassing contacts. […]
Suit seeks to limit anti-Muslim speech on Facebook but roots of Islamophobia run far deeper
By Caleb Elfenbein | – A civil rights group is suing Facebook and its top executives in federal court over the company’s failure to crack down on hate speech against Muslims. Muslim Advocates, a Washington, D.C.-based organization focused on discrimination against American Muslims, alleges in the suit that Facebook has violated a series of local […]
Social Media and the Spread of Global Hate
( Foreign Policy in Focus ) – Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter helped right-wing populists take power. Can they now help rein them in? By John Feffer | April 14, 2021 One insidious way to torture the detainees at Guantanamo was to blast music at them at all hours. The mixtape, which included […]
Facebook’s news blockade in Australia shows how tech giants are swallowing the web
By Jennifer Grygiel | – When Facebook disabled Australians’ access to news articles on its platform, and blocked sharing of articles from Australian news organizations, the company moved a step closer to killing the World Wide Web – the hyperlink-based system of freely connecting online sites created in 1989 by Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Though the […]
Hating on Muslims in Western Media is based on the Big Lie
By Stuart Chambers | – Although anti-Muslim sentiments certainly existed long before 2001, the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks and the response to them intensified anti-Muslim tropes, namely the presumption that Islam is inherently violent or that Muslims have a propensity for terrorism. Since 9/11, specific individuals have turned Islamophobia into an industry, scapegoating Muslims to […]
Why is False News about Iran All Right? No, Khamenei didn’t Threaten Trump on Golf Course, and no, his Twitter account wasn’t Banned
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – No, Ayatollah Ali Khameni’s twitter account did not carry an image of Donald Trump being droned on a golf course, and no, his twitter account was not canceled. A small twitter account run by unknown persons with only 8,000 followers posted the image of someone (it wasn’t a picture of […]
Vanilla ISIL: Social Media is forced to Treat Trump and Trumpists Like Terrorists
Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – Not everyone who mobbed the Capitol on 1/6 was a terrorist, but there were many terrorists among them. Some people came armed, or with ties for taking congressional representatives and senators hostage. Some were desperately looking for Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi in order to assassinate them for, in their […]