Committee to Protect Bloggers

Tarek Baiassi, whom we’ve written about before, has finally been sentenced, by a Syrian “court” to three years in prison. According to the RSF, the legal-like glass for Tarek’s sentence included “publishing false news” and “weakening national sentiment,” whatever that is. The real reason for the sentence was his having posted an article on the […]

Update: MidEast Youth confirmed in an email that Mousa has been released from prison. Confirmation in Arabic.
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We discovered, through MidEast Youth, that journalist and blogger, Osama Edward Mousa, has been arrested by the Syrian authorities.
No one knows where he was taken or where he’s exactly imprisoned within Damascus, and his friends and family fear that […]

Update: Facebook responds. Kind of.
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Update: RSF is trying to find out how Moroccan prosecutors determined Mourtada’s indentity.
Reporters Without Borders wonders how the police identified Mourtada. “Did the police get his computer’s IP address? And if so, how? We have asked the ISP, Maroc Telecom, in which the French company Vivendi is a shareholder, to […]

Update: RSF reports that Baiasi is being tried on March 17. The whimsical “charges” brought against him are “undermining national sentiment” and “publishing false information.” “Undermining national sentiment” is the most Disney of all the fake charges that we’ve seen used by tinhorns the world over. This overtakes even “insulting Turkishness” in the Idiot Grand […]

Forecast Highs, the blog by Jerusalem Post news editor Amir Mizroch, has posted this graphic, by Ricky Ben-David, of a theoretical Facebook page that Syria might have.
If you have graphics of what other countries’ Facebook pages might look like, please send them to us so we can post them or leave the URL in […]

Update: More confirmation, from a Syrian newspaper. (Thanks, Ammar.)
(OK. That turned into gibberish. What’s a guy gotta do to post in Arabic around here?)
Update: Verified, see comments. Thanks Hazem and Kevin.
We received an anonymous tip regarding Facebook in Syria.
i just wanted to tell you that facebook.com has been banned in syria as well a
few […]

YouTube is blocked in Syria. Unlike Iran with Facebook, there is no question that it is an official ban-and-block by the Syrian government. According to Ammar Abdulhamid of Tharwa and Hamsa and a fellow at the Brookings Institution, the nature of the block is clear.
There is a report in Arabic on blocked sites that clearly […]