Egypt Claims to Counter Disinformation, but Whose Disinformation is Sisi Fighting?

By Dounia Mahlouly|March 29, 2023|Arab uprisings, Digital cultures, Social media, The Middle East, Uncategorized|0 comments

Misinformation – whether deliberately harmful or unintentionally misleading – is nothing new. Political actors have always competed for attention and legitimacy by strategically framing their narrative, occasionally distorting the facts or counteracting alternative versions of the truth. The term ‘disinformation’ however became somewhat of a buzzword in recent years (Bennett and Livingston, 2018). In today’s media environment, the debate surrounding this issue specifically pertains to unverified or misappropriated claims as

Read More

Nine Years After the Toppling of Hosny Mubarak

By Dounia Mahlouly|March 15, 2020|Arab uprisings, Digital cultures, Social media, The Middle East|0 comments

By Hossam Fazalla and Dounia Mahlouly Nine years after the toppling of Hosny Mubarak, the 91-year-old ousted Egyptian president passed away. The news was met with emotional confusion and mixed feelings by Egyptians. It is the death of the man whose face was in every Egyptian classroom, who was considered a war hero, and yet, it is also the death of the dictator who ruled for 30 years, and whose hands

Read More

Dr. Zahera Harb discusses fake news and the Lebanese protests

By Dina Matar|November 11, 2019|Arab uprisings, Latest news, Social media, The Middle East|0 comments

Lebanon Protests and ‘fake news’ By Zahera Harb On October 17 a wave of protests erupted in Lebanon against corruption. Almost half of the Lebanese population took to the streets demanding an end to corruption, transparent economic policies, social justice and protection of the environment. Slogans, such as ‘down with the sectarian confessional regime,’ mingled with calls for the resignation of all state officials whose practices were regarded as corrupt

Read More

Where next for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood after death of Mohamed Morsi

By Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad|July 4, 2019|Arab uprisings, Latest news, The Middle East|0 comments

Mohamed Taha, SOAS PhD candidate, discusses future prospects of Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt after Morsi. “The death of Egypt’s former president, Mohamed Morsi, in a Cairo court on June 17, on the same day he was elected six years previously, closed a chapter in Egyptian history. Morsi was the first president of Egypt to be elected in popular, representative and multiparty elections. But his burial in a graveyard alongside previous

Read More

Gabriel Huland on US media and the Syrian conflict

By Dina Matar|June 15, 2019|Arab uprisings, Media and Syrian conflict|0 comments

The Syrian Conflict in the New York Times   Gabriel Huland, Centre for Global Media and Communications   The Syrian conflict is probably the most reported upon in history. As some of the videos recorded during the protests had extreme content, YouTube changed its rules to allow them to be uploaded online. When the protests erupted in 2011, only a few international media organisations had correspondents in the country. This

Read More

What is new, or not, about media and the 2019 ‘uprisings’ in the Arab world?

By Dina Matar|May 13, 2019|Arab uprisings, Latest news|0 comments

2019 may be as significant a moment as 2011 for media and communication scholarship focusing on the Arab World. As in the uprisings that disrupted the political order in Tunisia, Egypt, Libya and Syria in 2011, the highly mediated and visible protests in Sudan and Algeria, two of the least covered countries in the region, have, too, managed to challenge long-standing power structures, catching media analysts and scholars somewhat by

Read More