Syria’s Cyberwars: Using Social Media Against Dissent
For years, average Syrians were blocked from Facebook, YouTube and other social media by Bashar al-Assad’s repressive police-state government. Early last year, however, as the Arab Spring swept through the region, something odd happened: the social media sites that were pivotal to uprisings in other Arab nations were suddenly switched back on.
Now we know why: It’s easier to track people -and find out who is against you - if you can monitor computer traffic to such sites, or trick visitors into clicking on tainted links that download spyware onto their computers, rights activists and cyber experts say.
To a far greater degree than Libya, Egypt or perhaps any other nation in the Arab world, Syria’s government has succeeded in flipping activists’ use of digital tools and social media to the government’s own advantage, cyber experts with an eye on Syria say.
A “Syrian Revolution” page showed up on Facebook in March 2011, winning 41,000 fans in just a few days, and 138,000 a few weeks later, a recent report found. By last month, it had 438,000 fans. But frequenting such pages may be potentially hazardous, as well as educational or motivational.