Of the war in progress on the battlegrounds in Syria, it has been said and written a lot. Less documented is another kind of conflict,
Streetscape with Bashar al Assad, Damascus, Syria (Photo credit: james_gordon_losangeles)
happening online, on social media, between the supporters of Assad’s regime and the rebels. On one side the government group of hackers, the Syrian Electronic Army – whose last recent “exploit” has been taking control of a Reuters account to spread propagandistic messages – together with the intelligence services involved in the cyber war, weave electronic traps for the activists, so that to snatch their list of the “friends”, when they don’t cut heads torturing them until they reveal the access codes to their Facebook account.
On the other side the rebels, that find on YouTube videos that explain how to clean and to assemble rifles, exchange on Facebook tips on how to disguise their own connection in order not to be intercepted, and spread tapes that should document the atrocities committed by the army. The problem is that it is difficult to be sure that this is indeed the case.
The same video, opportunely framed, can be used to support one side or the other, and it is often not even possible to be certain of when and where the clip has been shot. Aware of the problem, the New York Times has launched an ad hoc project, “Watching Syria’s War“: adding to each video some explanatory notes, and a request to contact the editors if in possess of any other detail that can shed light on the matter.
Another source of news from Syria, one of the few, since journalists have been outcast and some of them, that tried to stay on the field, have been killed without pity, it is of course crowdsourcing. Syria Tracker, a news aggregator based on Ushahidi, picks up accounts and reports of crimes of various kind. Women Under Siege in Syria is documenting the threat of rape hanging over the wives of rebels.
It’s not actually necessary for rape to be consumed: it is enough to confine the victim in a detention center for some time to induce in her husband the suspect of the violence, and make him, in some cases, repudiate her, destroying her life and reputation. There’s no accurate data on the phenomenon, the news is often of second or third hand, but certainly it does exist.
Despite this, the attention reserved to Syrian events from social media users has little to do with the communicative exaltation manifested during the Arabic spring, that is giving in this period her bittersweet fruits, or with the 2009 Teheran protests, when for the first time Twitter seemed to assume an important role in political and social reporting.
For all the passion with which blogger and activists report online, they have little impact, for a number of reasons: first, it’s all already be seen: cynic to say, but from the outside what’s happening, the massacres of Homs and the battles, can seem a remake of what took place in Egypt, in Libya, in Tunisia, also due to the long duration of the conflict, in progress by now since one year and a half. It is the perverse side of media voyeurism: not brought to the level of the African genocides, practically ignored by the Western public; but it is sure that a lot more attention has been paid on social media to the Olympycs in London than to the revolt.
Another reason, perhaps even more important is that the regime in this case, after having assisted to the events of the Maghreb, has arrived prepared to the clash. It has been is supplied of technicians and stuff by firms as the Italian Area Spa. It has learned how to exploit social media to its advantage, for instance inserting harmful viruses in videos shared online. Once downloaded, these programs allow to take the control of a computer, copy its address book and visualize the passwords the user digits online.
Even the 2011 decision, with which the Assad government has allowed Syrian Internet users to access sites that were before blocked, like Facebook and Youtube, has appeared to many a trojan horse to induce the activists to lower their defenses and stop using the softwares that allowed them to skip censorship. Add to all this the low degree of penetration of the Internet in the country (around 20%) and it is clear why the role of social media in Syria has been much less significant than elsewhere.
“Those skeptic about the Internet’s impact – writes however Amiad Baiazy, researcher of the Media Policy.org London’s think tank, in his essay Syria’s Cyber Wars – fail to understand the cyberspace’s influence. Real benefits come from the so called Web 2.0, as the creation of a sphere for public debate and the interaction with the outside world, the access to indipendent news sources and the anonymous creation of pressure groups that organize campaigns on social issues”.
This article was first published in Italian on the website of the daily La Stampa
