Cyber activism played a vital role in creating spaces of contention under repressive Arab regimes when traditional media was acting as regime mouthpieces protecting the status quo. After the Arab uprisings, the banalisation of the use of social media by various actors, including repressive regimes, and the subtle interplay between social and traditional media in reporting the aftermath of political change, are changing the nature of the use of cyber space and its political significance. They are both expanding and limiting its potential for empowering political dissent. In this paper, I will examine the subtle interplay between social media and traditional national media, exploring the significance of these interactions in empowering political dissent as well as its impact on traditional journalists’ practices and on their political engagement. The paper will take as a case study the use of online news and Facebook during the 20 February pro-democracy movement in Morocco and in its aftermath, analysing its impact both on countering national media discourse and on creating alternative political engagement for journalists. I argue that experiences of collaboration between professional journalists and activists were successful in countering hegemonic media discourse and in challenging mainstream politics but they were not able to create sustainable forms of political engagement and new media practices. The extensive use of Facebook by professional journalists is allowing them to challenge entrenched taboos but without seriously impacting their professional practices. The paper is empirically grounded in the findings of a field research conducted in Morocco in 2015 with a sample of professional journalists and media stakeholders, as part of a research project looking at the interplay between national media and democratization in the aftermath of the Arab uprisings based at the Middle East Centre of the London School of Economics.

This study examines how Orientalism in postcolonial Egypt serves Western hegemonic power through news texts in the period following the January 25, 2011 revolution by employing the theory of internalized orientalism, in which the press represents its own society through a lens crafted by Western perception regarding Arabs. Rather than the Western media applying Orientalism discourse to Arab society, Arab media applies Orientalism discourse to its own constituents, dividing the ruling state class from the rest of the people in society. To deconstruct the textual representations of power relations between the ruling class and the rest of society in post-revolution Egypt, this study considers empirical examples from three Egyptian newspapers (Al-Ahram, Almasry Alyoum, and Al Shorouk) published in the 28 months immediately following the 2011 Egyptian revolution. Through contextual analysis of 734 news stories in the press I argue that the Egyptian media projected an image of the ruling class as “the self” while constructing the rest of society as “the other” by using the discourse of internalized orientalism in newspapers. Once Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak was out of office following the 2011 revolution, news on the front pages of newspapers reflected the people’s power, legitimacy, and voices for the first time in Egypt’s post-colonial history. These changes were short-lived, however. By looking at the language and textual construction of the three newspapers used to describe people and revolutionaries in Tahrir Square, in a short period of time, Egypt went from an elite power structure to a people-centered structure with self-determined power, but it soon reverted to an elite power structure. I argue that the transition to elite power happened, in part, because the power structure of internalized orientalism in postcolonial Egyptian news media played a role in the Egyptian people’s inability to shift people’s perspectives toward a permanent people-centered form of government. The institutionalization of the deep state as ruling class in Egypt was reflected through news representation that employed internalized orientalism discourse to represent power relations between revolutionaries and the deep state. The analysis of news texts fits Mitchell’s (1988) conception of colonizing Egypt, in which colonial power constructed Egyptian society by dividing modernist Egyptian autocratic elites from the rest of the people, thereby emphasizing Said’s (1978) Orientalism of Western hegemonic domination over Arabs’ discourse regarding the self and the other.

A constitutional referendum was held on September 12, 2010 in Turkey. The majority supported the constitutional amendments, hoping that they would democratize the country. Although the work on these amendments has been interrupted a few times since then, the political discourse revolving around the promises of the new constitution is continuous. Some months after re-election, the Armenian president announced plans in September, 2013 to implement major constitutional changes. A committee was formed, which produced a draft concept paper in April, 2014, with a final draft for a new constitution published in August, 2015. The referendum held on December 6, 2015, was controversial, adhering to the general trend in Armenia of fraudulent elections. But the document was adopted as the new constitution of the Republic of Armenia. This presentation attempts to explore the discourse present in major Turkish and Armenian media outlets regarding proposed changes to the respective country's constitution. Data taken from a representative sample of publications between the periods 2011 to 2015 are analyzed for keywords pertaining to the general narrative of democratization in both states. Particular attention is paid to the shift in Turkey from a parliamentary to a presidential model and in Armenia from a semi-presidential to a parliamentary model. In addition, in-depth interviews with media workers at the editorial level supplement the data in order to gain insights into the process of the creation of that discourse. Our data show that different media outlets that represent diverse stances use a variety of frames on the new constitution. In the Turkish context, regardless of these conflicting media frames, the rhetoric by the politicians in power shapes the dominant public discourse on the new constitution. One major realm of public discourse on democratization and the constitution has been the pros and cons of the presidential system. In the Armenian context, a largely pro-government and self-censored media is peppered with opposition or radical viewpoints, mainly online and through social media, with a few politicians in or out of parliament regularly voicing concerns. Those voices tend to make little impact on the party in power, which remains securely entrenched in its position. We argue that the political cultures of Turkey and Armenia are similar enough to echo each other’s discourse, but that their traditions and scales of media production and distribution are disparate enough that a comparative analysis would reveal worthwhile insights into the generation and dissemination of public discourse.

This paper presents an empirical study on Islamic social network sites providing normative content for Muslim minorities living in a non-Muslim context, particularly in Western Europe. It analyses the Facebook audiences of these sites and explores their similarities, differences, and affinities via social network analysis. The paper introduces a new quantitative method, Normalized Social Distance, that calculates the distances between various social groups, based on the intentional stances as expressed by these groups members’ activities on social networks. The emergence of social media have introduced substantial innovation in both production and consumption of Islamic knowledge, where established traditional Muslim authorities compete for audiences with charismatic satellite preachers and Internet-based muftis. This is particularly relevant to European Muslim communities, where experiences of cultural displacement and negotiations on hybridity and authenticity are at the heart of contemporary life. At the same time, the rise of social media along with the progress in computational tools that can process massive amounts of data makes possible a fundamentally new approach for the study of human beings and society. This paper explores 80 Facebook sites providing specific ‘Islamic’ content to European Muslim minorities. By doing so, it analyzes publicly available data about more than 3,5 millions users of these sites via Normalized Social Distance (NSD). In a nutshell, NSD is a formally defined method calculating the distance between social groups, based on the intentional stances as expressed by these groups members activities on social network sites. The resulting number expresses how ‘far’ or ‘close’ are the audiences of various sites to each other. The method provides an opportunity for a distant reading of social media, enabling us to formally represent and analyze the structural aspects of ‘big social data’. The empirical evidence indicates that there exist several tightly connected clusters of Islamic sites on Facebook, whose audiences are significantly ‘close’ to each other and share similar intentional stances. The users located in these clusters share similar media content and rarely reach out to different clusters. Furthermore, the findings indicate that a specific content, particularly related to the coexistence between Islamic law and European legal systems, gains a significant prominence on social networks by the actions of relatively small, yet coherent and active, audiences of predominantly Salafi sites. This elevation then subsequently influences the ways mainstream media and politicians prepare and promote their content on social network sites, shaping the public debate on Islam in Europe.

Muslim media resounds with a plethora of voices interpreting scripture to “revitalize” Islam and facilitate its engagement with diverse groups. These media and the well-known figures who employ them incorporate discursive threads that at times emphasize constructions of “science”, debunking or accepting science that is often also constructed as “Western” or “Qurʾānic”, or even both. Muslim televangelists such as Zakir Naik present these discourses, utilizing them to augment traditional scriptures in order to gain additional fame. This renown then is constructed as providing them with an authority to speak for and to Muslims globally. For some, this process is part of the democratization of Qurʾānic interpretation, often connected to Salafi belief systems, although it is not only found among them. Although terms like “televangelism” suggest satellite television, these media are increasingly found in online videos, on YouTube and other platforms, where they are consumed on cell phones and computers alike, expanding access well beyond home-based television. The spreadability of these materials, through re-editing and spoofing as well as copying to new platforms or channels or embedding them in other social media, suggests that both the media and the discourses enclosed in them do offer extensions to traditional sources of authority. This paper examines the scientific discourses used by Zakir Naik in online videos that were collected as a part of our research into videos on science and Islam. Zakir Naik was presented in more videos in our catalogue—three times as many as the next closest figure—making his use of this discourse an important element in Muslim cultures worldwide. Several prior scholars have noted use of Zakir Naik’s materials in Ethiopia, Bangladesh, and Norway. The recurring use of his “Qurʾān and Modern Science: Compatible or Incompatible?” in venues around the world demonstrates interest in the topic. This includes leading with science-related ideas in a Oxford Union appearance (UK) in 2011, demonstrating at least Naik’s belief in its continuing relevance culturally. Naik’s presentation of the same material in Dubai during Ramadan of 2013/1434 also demonstrates his popularity in the central Islamic lands as well. We argue that his material both incorporates and rejects “Western” ideas in order to both build his own brand and develop ways for Muslims in non-majority geographic regions to understand Islam as scientifically proven.