Apart from serving as an additional means of personal communication, Twitter is used in the Arab-Islamic Middle East by a whole range of groups and individuals, covering the entire gamut of society. ‘Tweets' are employed by political and social movements, religious websites and Islamic cultural centers, as well as for the promotion of films, fashion and commerce. News organizations, such as CNN, the BBC (especially its Persian language service), Al-Jazeera and the Voice of America all have popular Twitter feeds. Twitter speeds up the capacity to deliver the news because of its short and restricted structure, so much so that it is often chosen over newspapers as a person’s primary news source.

As a parallel information universe, Twitter enables the dissemination of information, mobilization of public opinion, and evasion of governmental censors.  In Syria, for example, Twitter enabled a wave of protests against the decision by the website, ‘LinkedIn' – a social networking geared towards those interested in business – to block its services in Syria, and the decision was ultimately reversed. Earlier this year in Iran, Twitter was employed by ‘the March 18^th movement' in remembrance of the Iranian blogger, Omid Razah, who died in prison on this date, and to pressure the authorities to release seven Bahai leaders that were arrested during the month of May.

A particularly powerful demonstration of Twitter’s potential came following the arrest of an American journalism student in Egypt while filming a demonstration. He immediately sent a message via his cell phone announcing his arrest to 48 “followers” on Twitter, and the message quickly spread around the world. As a result of the ensuing attention and entreaties, he was quickly released. Similarly, the well-known Egyptian blogger, Wa'el Abbas, was quick to publicize his arrest and subsequent experiences with the police this past April, causing embarrassment to Egyptian officialdom.

The usages of Twitter by women in the Arab world are especially varied, not surprisingly, given the relative anonymity it provides to the user. Twitter allows women to search for spouses, describe their lives, discuss issues pertaining to the status of Muslim women in their societies, and communicate and show solidarity with like-minded individuals, for example, lesbians. Women from Saudi Arabia tend to hide their personal ‘Tweets' so that only those who have received their permission in advance can read their announcements. Women from most other Arab societies, which are socially more open and less hierarchical than Saudi Arabia, are more likely to enable their ‘Tweets' to be read by all.

Women’s advocacy groups make good use of Twitter: for example, the Egyptian group ‘All of Us are Laila' has fought against the inequality in women’s daily lives, in Egypt and the Arab world in general, for the last three years. So does Queen Rania of Jordan, who writes about diverse subjects on an almost daily basis, to a readership of about 125,000.

To be sure, there are those who belittle Twitter’s reliability as a source of information, pointing to its maximum limit of 140 characters per item, and the instant worldwide dissemination of Twitter items without any cross-checking information to confirm their truthfulness. But these limitations are also the basis of its strength. Twitter serves as a speedy and direct platform able to bypass official state media oversight and the limitations on free speech by authoritarian governments. In the Middle East, in particular, it is nearly the only path for different social groups to get their messages across without government interference.

The power of Twitter in transmitting onsite and immediate reporting was highlighted in the months leading up to the Iranian presidential elections and in the subsequent demonstrations against the falsification of the results. Along with other on-line social networks, Twitter served as an almost exclusive source for the unfolding events in the streets of Tehran.

However, Middle Eastern governments have not remained passive in the face of the rapid expansion of the new media, and particularly of on-line social networks which increase the possibilities for individual action and challenges to governments.  The authorities around the region have invested considerable efforts in regulating and restricting these new means of communication. For example, the Dubai government partially blocked the use of the highly popular social networking Facebook website and the internet voice and video Skype program, claiming that their action was justified by “content that was not concurrent with the religious, cultural, political, and moral values of the United Arab Emirates.” Iran has cracked down heavily on Twitter and other social networking sites.  Not only has it blocked access to particular internet sites, it has also installed content filters and monitored traffic on them. This was done by means of Nokia Siemens Networks (NSN) features installed as a condition for the company’s access to the Iranian market. The ability to monitor internet and Nokia cellular phone traffic resulted in the arrests of a number of persons transmitting reports about the unfolding events in Iran, resulting in a consumer boycott in Iran of Nokia phones as an act of protest.

Time will tell regarding the impact of Twitter on the relations between Middle Eastern authoritarian governments and their citizens. In the meantime, Twitter has demonstrated a capacity to serve as a means for continuous and rapid dissemination of information among wide sectors of the population.  To be sure, this alone cannot bring about far-reaching social change or a fundamental expansion of political and social freedom, but it certainly carries much potential, and even inspires hope among long-disenfranchised and cynical Middle Eastern publics.

This research has been published on July 26th, 2009: Tel Aviv Notes, Dayan Center, Tel Aviv University (PDF).

According to Press reports, YouTube is ranked among the top 10 most popular sites in the UAE and news about its possible censorship has sparked debate in the blogosphere.

Fake Plastic Souks sounds the alarm, and writes:

Blocking YouTube will further deny Emirati, and other, youth here of the opportunity to embrace a range of technologies and changes in social behaviour that are revolutionising the world around us.

That we are even contemplating blocking sites that contain content we don't like is a deep concern - the trick is engaging in a conversation, taking part in the interplay of ideas and opinion that is driving the Internet - and the flow of public
opinion around the world today.

the grapeshisha blog wonders:

We heard these rumors in the past, but more and more people seem to be confirming that these aren’t just false alarms anymore and that YouTube will actually be banned officially in the UAE. We can’t be totally sure yet until the site is totally inaccessible for our friends and members there, and according to them no action has been taken yet (despite thousands of other sites being blocked) however many are expecting it. Will the ban fail like it did with Facebook? Is the UAE testing the waters with how much internet censorship it can get away with?

Local newspaper Khaleej Times reports that the UAE's Telecommunication Regulatory Authority has said that YouTube will not be completely banned in the country as its content is already regulated by the authority.

Dubai Jazz agrees that some of YouTube's content should be moderated. He notes:

There comes the inevitable question, is youtube totally ‘safe’? Of course not, and I wholeheartedly support censorship on some of its content. Especially the kind of hate inciting content. You might choose to believe otherwise, but WE DO NOT have democracy and total freedom of expression in the Arab World. We have a vicious Sunni-Shia sectarian strife. We have an intimidating rate of illiteracy. We have an intimidating rate of credulity. The stable and relatively prosperous Arab societies are stable because there are measures that ENSURE everything stays stable. Even when stability sometimes borders on stagnation….. in short, I am not worried about moral disintegration of societies, I am worried about strives and rifts. So for the time being, some of the content, in my opinion, may have to be censored.

Meanwhile, MMM reports that Flickr is now totally blocked in the UAE, after it was blocked by one Internet provider.

Today, Du followed the lead of Etisalat and went ahead and blocked the photo sharing service Flickr, meaning that Flickr is now no longer accessible from the UAE through any of the ISPs.
I’m guessing it’s because of all the x-rated material that is available on Flickr. But, it’s not like blocking Flickr is going to stop people who look for that kind of material from finding it.
This totally sucks! All my photos are hosted on Flickr where I have a pro account, and now I’m unable to access my photos or upload any new ones because of this.

MMM also posts a photograph of the ban order:

A photograph of the Du censorship message

According to Emirates Business 24/7, DU informed its customers of plans to filter the internet on Sunday 13 April, 2008 via SMS text message: “We wish to inform you that from April 14, 2008, we will be blocking sites with content that do not conform to the moral, social and cultural values of the UAE.” DU also issued a public statement as follows:

It is our constant endeavour to maintain the perfect balance between ensuring that all our customers' requirements are met, and that we comply with all the guidelines of the TRA, including those on internet content filtering.

The World Wide Web offers us great opportunities to get and share information and to communicate. However, it is imperative that when making use of this technology for its enormous benefits, we respect the moral, social and cultural values of the United Arab Emirates.

DU will be blocking all content that is not in line with these values, effective from 14 April 2008. Due to the nature of the content filtering process, some harmless sites may also inadvertently be blocked. We request our customers' assistance in informing us when a site that they consider harmless has been blocked, by writing to safesurf@du.ae so we can look into the matter.

This move means that the uncensored internet enjoyed until recently in UAE free zones is over and that the ISP DU will bring its internet content filtering in line with the strict guidelines of the Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) that have already been implemented for years by the government-owned Internet provider Etisalat. “These are not new regulations we are implementing, this is an initiative we have chosen to take to filter some content after receiving complaints from concerned customers,” Osman Sultan, chief executive of Dubai's ISP DU told ArabianBusiness.com.

As a result, Secret Dubai Diary has been reported blocked along with the U.S.-based Arab Times (both websites are already banned by Etisalat), a Wikipedia article on fitna, the film by the Dutch MP Geert Wilders, playboy.com (and its IP: http://216.163.137.3).

Users trying to access blocked websites have been re-directed to a page displaying the error message: “Surf Safely. The website is not available in the UAE”.

And in the meantime, some United Arab Emirates bloggers are reporting that Etisalat, the major telecommunications company that services much of the country, is blocking part of Facebook, preventing style sheets (CSS), javascripts and applications from loading properly.

According to Download Squad, access to the popular social networking website Facebook has been blocked in the United Arab Emirates. Some UAE internet users are confirming that the ban was ordered by the government-owned Etisalat. The Administrator of itihad.net (UAE) called up his ISP’s call center and they stated that they are blocking Facebook.

Other Internet users, however, are reporting (here [Ar], here [En] and here [En]) they can access the website and that there is no blocking at their end.

On September 05 2007, The UAE Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) told Time Out Dubai that “At the present time we can say that we have no intention of stopping access to Facebook (…) We have heard that people think this is going to happen but that is not the case. However, we do take any complaints seriously and the situation would be reviewed should that happen.”

Apparently, it seems that Facebook is blocked to some people, but not to all. Nevertheless, UAE Facebook community has setup a petition to keep facebook from being permanently blocked. The petition has already more than 690 signatures. According to Time Out Dubai, “Facebook has over 55,000 users in the UAE with numbers rising daily.”

Almost the same thing happened last month in Iran when HAMSA’s “C.R.I.M.E” reported that Facebook was being blocked, relying on Information provided by the “Against internet censorship and filtering in Iran” Facebook group. Hamid Tehrani, Global Voices' Persian Language Editor, was following the case through his contacts in Iran, received contradictory reports and screenshots from trusted bloggers proving that the ban was most likely on the ISP level and not an official ban.

Some of the inaccurate reporting on the Iran issue illustrated the difficulties of reporting on anti-censorship issues. As Global Voices co-founder Ethan Zuckerman has said, “one of the major challenges of documenting and decrying Internet censorship is that it can be very confusing to figure out precisely why you can’t access a particular website. Is the problem specific to your internet service provider? Is the server down? Or is a block of some sort taking place?” Zuckerman cited the reaction to the ban on Blogspot.com in India in July 2006, during which Indian bloggers were documenting and carefully updating the situation, as a good example of anti-censorship reporting.

One of the censorship nightmares experienced by web-connected citizens living in countries engaging in Internet filtering is to find out that they can no longer access their favorite sites. Unfortunately, this is what is happening to the Flickr.com community in Iran and in the United Arab Emirates, where, a few weeks ago — and for the third time — the Internet service provider, Etisalat, decided to ban access to Flickr after the UAE Flickr community fought so hard to get it back.

However, and while repressive regimes are particularly effective in building substantial Internet filtering systems and at creating an atmosphere of fear in which people censor themselves, there are amazing individuals who are making a difference. In the asymmetrical battle — individual vs. State — taking place between two parties with vastly different resources, a few freedom-loving people have been taking on the sophisticated state censorship machine, armed with nothing but their passion and creativity. One of these people is the young Iranian Hamed Saber, Flickr fan and very talented photographer. One month ago he launched a Firefox extension called Access Flickr!, that enabled his fellow citizens to circumvent the flickr.com filter. I recently discovered this fascinating extension on flickr.com, where Hamed Saber presented it and invited the UAE Flickr community to try it for their country.

I'm aware that the existence of this extension does not mean very much to the large majority of average internet users who don't know that the Web is not that big blue e on the desktop screen. But what I certainly know is that this tool does matter to those who want to take back the web and get back the magic of Flickr. So, I couldn’t wait to talk with Hamed by e-mail about his initiative and the hole that such technique might open in the firewall of digital censorship:

Sami Ben Gharbia: Why did you set up the Firefox extension Access Flickr!?

Hamed Saber: As I said in the extension home page, in my country (Iran), unfortunately, flickr.com is banned. I'm a fan of that photo-archive website, so I wrote this extension just to help my dear friends who can not access flickr.com from Iran.

SBG: What purpose does Access Flickr! serve?

HS: I think all human beings have the right to choose what is good and what is bad for themselves. The “Big Brother” theory is not logical and ethical to me. Yes! Of course. I don't want to say that parental control should not be happening just because of freedom and information access rights! No! I mean NO ONE has the right to censor ANY THING for me and for others without our permission! We can decide what is good and what is bad for us, better than those!

SBG: Do you think that it is helping people (Iranian and others) getting access to flickr.com?

HS: Yes. It helps all Flickr members (and viewers) who want to access this great website in Iran, UAE, China and other regions in which this site is blocked there. Of course if they try to block this extension, they can do it, but then I'll develop another bypassing way.

SBG: Are you aware of any other initiatives like yours using Firefox extension as tool to bypass censorship?

HS: No, I didn't hear or read anything about (if any).

SBG: Can you provide us with some technical details about how this extension works? Is it a sort of proxy like TOR?

HS: It is so simple! Not sophisticated and powerful like TOR! This extension just substitutes some parameters in HTTP request header before sending it, and after receiving the response, again it substitutes some other parameters in the HTTP response header. The source code is not encoded, and the extension is open source, anyone can read the simple source code!

SBG: When did you release the first version of Access Flickr!?

HS: The first releases (versions 1.0 and 1.1) were not published, and I just sent them to my friends for testing, but the first published version was 1.2 which was released on Jan 12, 2007.

SBG: Does Access Flickr! use a built-in proxy IP or does it bypass the local DNS server query by resolving directly flickr’s DNS?

HS: No, not at all! It just substitutes the HTTP headers with some constant parameters which are not blocked yet! I mean everywhere I found that flickr was blocked, the firewall blocks *.flickr.com, or in UAE just www.flickr.com!

Some friends in UAE are using other URLs such as www3.flickr.com with tweaking the Yahoo! login page redirector URL, but this trick is not working in Iran, because they banned *.flickr.com, so even if the user uses an IP address for connecting, he/she can neither see the images nor CSS or JS files. But this extension substitutes all those host parameters with alternatives, plus substituting the passed cookies with proper ones.

SBG: You said that the extension is open source and that anyone can read the simple source code. Is it possible then to tweak the code for other censored websites in other repressive countries? If yes, where can we find the code?

HS: No, it is not always possible for tweaking and reusing it. It depends on the site. For example orkut.com is blocked in Iran too. But this trick won't work for it because Google web servers are obligated to response to true host requests, and if you ask them for some other host parameter, they respond you with a direct HTTP header. The source is included inside the extension file. You can check the development zone of Mozilla.org for learning how to check and use it.

SBG: Proxies are usually slowing down the internet connectivity, is this also the case with this extension, I mean does the requested webpage needs more time to be displayed?

HS: No, not at all! The speed is like the time you are not filtered!

Thus, thanks to such bypass techniques, the decision taken in October 2006 by the Iranian government to ban high-speed internet turned ridiculous since it won’t slow down the connection to flickr.com. As one commentator -among numerous of others who had welcomed the extension- has said “Now, it's the time for just sitting at the front of your PC/Notebook with a cup of coffee and browse Flickr as easy as drinking the Coffee!”.The amazing thing about this technique is that it does not require any advanced technical knowledge of proxy server configurations. Users are able to use it without having to go through a complicated installation process. “Just install the extension and restart your browser.” (see the animation below).

SBG: So thank you Hamed for your gift to the passionate Flickr community and may this genius idea inspire other developers to make more breaches in the dam of the Internet filtering.