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

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Is Clubhouse the latest new media technology for change in the Middle East?

By Dina Matar|April 15, 2021|Digital cultures, Uncategorized|0 comments

Dina Matar, Chair, Centre for Global Media and Communication The story of the popularity of the audio chatroom app. Clubhouse, in the Middle East seems to follow a well-trodden route – the platform is launched in the region and elsewhere; the app is quickly taken up by users eager to talk about anything- from what to wear in Zoom calls to discussions of taboo topics, such as honour killings in

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The Netflix Effect?

By Dina Matar|December 10, 2020|Digital cultures|0 comments

Big Tech are now the most powerful publishers of our time, and Netflix should be viewed with the same skepticism as Facebook and Google. By Nadine Sayegh, MA Media and the Middle East (2015-16), Centre for Global Media and Communication With the giant firm Netflix making an informal call for content in the Arab world and wider region, it is an opportune moment to address the social, cultural and political

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Campaign against the execution of three protesters in Iran in July 2020

By Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad|October 1, 2020|Digital cultures, Latest news, Research, Social media, Students, The Middle East|0 comments

On 10 July 2020, the Iranian Judiciary announced that three men, namely Amirhossein Moradi, Saeed Tamjidi and Mohamad Rajabi, who were arrested in anti-regime protests in November 2019, were to be imminently executed as they had been denied appeal. Within three days of the announcement, the Persian hashtag #اعدام_نکنید (“Don’t_Execute”) started appearing on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. By 14 July, the hashtag was trending globally on Twitter with many inside

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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

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What does it mean to “muck in?”

By Matti Pohjonen|March 9, 2020|AI, Digital cultures, Research|0 comments

Environmental philosopher Timothy Morton criticises what he calls a “beautiful soul syndrome” sometimes still prevalent in Academia. By this he refers to a kind of critical attitude that tries to look at the world from the safety of detachment, without getting one’s hands dirty, without compromising one’s own ideological purity. He writes that a truly theoretical approach is not allowed to sit smugly outside the area it is examining. It must mix thoroughly

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Politics of seeing

By Matti Pohjonen|February 12, 2020|AI, Digital cultures, India, Research, Social media|

“Knowledge is a practical assemblage, a ‘mechanism’ of statements and visibilities.”  — Deleuze People often ask why I bother learning the algorithms and technologies that drive today’s AI innovations – I am a digital anthropologist after all and not a hard-baked computer scientist.  Should I just not focus on the bread-and-butter of qualitative research – thick description, deep contextual knowledge of cultures, in-depth understanding of the nuances of language –

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Birthright, Birthwrong: Representations of Jewish Diaspora in Online Media

By Saeed Zeydabadi-Nejad|September 6, 2019|Digital cultures, The Middle East|0 comments

Emma Jacobs explores competing discourses of identity on two Jewish websites. Emma did a module on Transnational Communities and Diasporic media in 2018/19 academic year. Image credit: “Birthright Israel: Bus 423” by HRYMX is licensed under CC BY 2.0  As a genre of travel, Birthright Israel—a free ten-day trip to Israel for Jewish young adults, funded by the Israeli government, Zionist organizations, and private donors—sits at a strange point of

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Global Digital Cultures and Extreme Speech

By Matti Pohjonen|July 15, 2019|Digital cultures, Extreme speech, Research|0 comments

I am glad to announce the publication of a Special Issue on Global Digital Cultures and Extreme Speech published in the International Journal of Communication.  This is the outcome of a five-year collaboration with colleagues across the world committed to advancing a more comparative perspective to ongoing debates on online hate speech and violent online political extremism — and most notably collaboration with Professor Sahana Udupa at the Digital Dignity Project, at LMU

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Should robots control what we read?

By Matti Pohjonen|July 4, 2019|AI, Digital cultures, Extreme speech, India, Research, Social media|0 comments

For somebody who has been following digital politics globally for more than a decade now, it is sometimes uncanny how hateful, violent and misleading communication – or at least the public and political controversies and moral panics around them – now dominates the global political landscape. Digital media, it seems, is imagined in mostly terms of the dangers it poses: violent extremist propaganda run amok; democratic processes corrupted by disinformation

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