The Syrian Uprising witnessed the influential role of online platforms in spreading news in a tightly-censored country. The arrival of the internet brought new state censorship measures. In an interview in 2018, Cybersecurity expert Dlshad Othman said, “Censorship capabilities have been in place since Syria got internet” (Clark). The state owns the internet infrastructure and imposes strict rules on the private providers regarding filtering and blocking content. In the 2011 uprising, Syrian activists utilized Facebook, YouTube, etc. to spread the news and inform the outside world about the regime’s violence. The regime, in contrast, employed similar steps to mainstream its own version of news that targeted its supporters, that it was fighting armed terrorists. While many reports document the regime’s control of the internet, there is little information which articulate that in the larger historical and political contexts. I ask: how does cyber censorship in Syria promote the regime’s narrative about the uprising? How can we situate the implementation of cyber censorship within the larger historical and political contexts? I will discuss how regime exploits the internet as an authoritative, punitive tool not only to control news flow but also to maintain consistent propaganda narratives that target primarily its supporters. I argue that while activists used the internet to inform, the regime used it to control. Both parties targeted different audiences for different purposes. Blocking the flow of information from websites such as al-Jazeera, al-Arabiya, etc. is itself a manifestation of the regime’s intentions to allow little to no room for narratives that might intervene with its supporters’ loyalty. Hannah Arendt notes that, “whenever totalitarianism possesses absolute control, it replaces propaganda with indoctrination and uses violence not so much to frighten people… as to realize constantly its ideological doctrines and its practical lies” (Arendt 333). In 2018, Assad issued Decree no. 9, which orders to establish courts in every governorate to look into telecommunication and online crimes (SANA). My paper will explain the process and connection between cyber authoritarian practices and the creation & dissemination of propaganda narratives. It will offer an insight into the regime’s powerful ability to secure loyalty among its supporters. Arendt, Hannah. The Origins Of Totalitarianism. Harcourt Brace, 1951. Clark, Justin. "Cyber Attacks And Surveillance In Assad’S Syria: ‘They Can Do Whatever They Want, They Own The Infrastructure’". Syria Direct, 2018, shorturl.at/gzOV3. Accessed 6 Feb 2020. Syrian Arab News Agency: https://www.sana.sy/?p=730729.

This paper will draw from and contribute to scholarly discourses on the representation and visibility of gender and sexuality in Muslim majority societies; particularly, it seeks to contribute to the idea of how Islamist patriarchal norms are challenged in globally accessible, virtual civil society via sites for civil discourses in cyberspace. I will explore the semipublic discourse around family planning, gender roles of the nuclear family and human sexuality in a web-series titled ‘Sexual Intelligence’ (kherad-e jensi) for the case of Iran. This series is currently shared via a state sanctioned video-sharing site, aparat.com. Some of my research questions I will explore in through the study of these videos are as follows: in what ways does this discourse challenge traditional-patriarchal gendered roles for women within both the institutions of family and the state? What roles have women played in Iranian state-society relations over the last four decades (since the Islamic Revolution) to allow for this discourse? What are apparent rules for discourse around gender and sexuality on state-sanctioned digital media like aparat.com and in what ways are these discourses being challenged by a generation of intellectuals? Some preliminary hypotheses/findings of these inquiries involve how the leftist-Islamist and intellectual Islamist movement, including some figures who are under house arrest or in exile (i.e. Zahra Rahnavard, Mohammad Khatami, Abdolkarim Soroush, Mohsen Kadivar) have laid the ground for discourses like what is seen in kherad-e jensi to not only be possible, but within the rules of civil discourse under the Islamic Republic. The findings of this paper corroborate Asef Bayat’s theory of post-Islamist civil society emerging in contexts where Islamists have managed to institutionalize and seize control of the state, a theory wherein he also theorizes that the women’s rights movement acts as one of the primary drivers of post-Islamist thought. While little evidence shows that the viewpoints of women’s rights discourse is prominently featured in ‘Sexual Intelligence’ web-series, we expect to see marginal representation for the views of conventional-revolutionary-Khomeinist and leftist-Islamist ideas to be featured, with some intellectual-Islamist discourse-inspired ones marginally seen as well. The results of this paper will allow me to form the grounds for a case comparison to another Muslim majority societies with a somewhat less institutionalized Islamist movement and active civil discourse on a state-sanctioned social media, video sharing and/or vlogging platforms.