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.
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.
Digital democracy is here. We no longer passively watch our leaders on television and register our opinions on Election Day. Modern politics happens when somebody comments on Twitter or links to a campaign through Facebook. In our hyper-networked world, anyone can say anything, and it can be read by millions.
One of the reasons for the success of social media’s Twitter platform is its ability to summarize a major issue in a few characters, while at the same time providing a link to give more details and credibility to the few words. This week a political activist used some clever research to reveal the hypocrisy and double standards of a politician. Twitter user @bunghan11h juxtaposed two quotes of maverick U.S. Senator John McCain regarding the situation in Egypt.
Social media, and Twitter in particular, enables people to follow news events in real time around the world. On 31 July 2013 and into 1 August, #ZimElections became a worldwide trending topic as the voting in Zimbabwe concluded, and Zimbabweans woke up to a state of limbo. The Zimbabwe Election Commission (ZEC) was not to release the elections results until next Monday – an eternity in today’s connected world – but with a law prohibiting anyone from making pronouncements about the results, surely everyone would hold their tongues till that date?
In Bahrain, all it takes is clicking on the wrong link to end up in jail. A new report prepared by Bahrain Watch, an activist organization critical of the ruling monarchy, details how the Bahraini government creates fake Twitter accounts to reveal the identity of anonymous anti-regime tweeps -- and then prosecutes them on the basis of "secret evidence."
Twitter’s announcement this week that it will create a “report abuse” button will benefit users of the social networking website’s Arabic service, which started last year. In 2012, Wojdan Shaherkani and Sarah Attar became the first Saudi females to compete at the Olympic Games. This led to their abuse on Twitter, with one user constructing the hash tag “prostitutes of the Olympics,” and another tweeting: “You [Shaherkani] do not represent the chaste Muslim women.”
The number of requests for Twitter user data from governments around the world continued to grow in the first half of 2013, the microblogging service said in its semiannual transparency report, released Wednesday. Overall, Twitter said, it received 1,157 requests for data covering 1,697 users, and it turned over at least some data in 55 percent of the cases. The number of requests was up about 15 percent from the last six months of 2012, the company said.