Israel is looking to hire university students to post pro-Israel messages on social media networks — without needing to identify themselves as government-linked, officials said Wednesday. The Israeli prime minister's office said in a statement that students on Israeli university campuses would receive full or partial scholarships to combat anti-Semitism and calls to boycott Israel online. It said students' messages would parallel statements by government officials.

There's a new jihadist recruiter on the Internet. Based in San Francisco and backed by a multimillion dollar bankroll, the recruiter orchestrates thousands of introductions every day, connecting people at risk of radicalization with extremist clerics and terrorist propagandists -- even facilitating online meetings with hardcore al Qaeda members. The recruiter is Twitter, and it's shaking up the world of online radicalization in ways both large and small.

An Indian Mufti has declared that posting photos on Facebook and other social media sites is “un-Islamic,” according to an interview with the Press Trust of India (PTI) on Sunday. Abul Irfan Naimul Halim Firagni Mahli, who helps to run two telephone helplines advising people Islam related issues, said that Muslims should avoid social media sites and women in particular should refrain from posting pictures of themselves online.

From popes to presidents to pundits, the world's most important conversations increasingly happen 140 characters at a time. Here's FP's annual list of the 100 people you should be following to make sense of global events.

How is social media affecting political participation in Brazil? Fábio Malini, who studies data patterns in Brazilian social media, spoke to AS/COA Online about how Twitter is changing the ways Brazilians interact with the government, as well as the role of social media in Brazil’s June protests. One of the heads of the Research Laboratory on Internet and Cyberculture (Labic) at the Federal University of Espirito Santo, Malini uses big data and data visualization to explore the evolution of social media in Brazil.

The mass demonstrations that convulsed Brazil in June and July 2013 are more than a raw display of people power; they confirm that we are living in a new era of digitally enhanced protest. The storyline is by now well rehearsed. What started out as a modest protest by the little-known Movimento Passe Livre (Free Fare Movement)–a group calling for free public transport over the past decade–went viral.

Internet freedom is a foreign policy priority for the United States, and has been for many years. Our goal is to ensure that any child, born anywhere in the world, has access to the global Internet as an open platform on which to innovate, learn, organize, and express herself free from undue interference or censorship. Indeed, during his time in Congress, Secretary Kerry worked closely with then-Secretary Clinton to make certain that we could effectively promote long-standing values of openness and human rights in a networked world.

Community workshops dubbed "hackerspaces" originated in Germany more than a decade ago. After a slow start, they're now appearing in cities around the world, including United States. In North America, the word "hacker" most commonly refers to someone who illegally breaks into computer networks. But hackerspaces are social clubs for activities that include tinkering, machine tooling, and 3-D printing.