The nervous nellie in me is starting to wonder if there aren't factions deep within the loonier pockets of Tea Party World™ who aren't watching these uprisings and overthrows and thinking to themselves "We can totally do this, too!"In the immediate aftermath of Mubarak stepping down, a guy I knew a long time ago posted something like the following to his Facebook wall:
I wonder if we all took to the streets if Obama would resign too or just throw us in jailEven ignoring the fact that these people have made a big show of taking to the streets, which didn't result in them being jailed, it struck me as so incredibly divorced from reality, as if a duly elected leader under a longstanding democracy, who they would get a chance to vote out in less than two years, and who in no case would be in office for more than six more years, was the same thing as an autocrat who was held unelected or pseudo-elected power for thirty years, and showed no signs of giving it up, not to mention the immense difference in basic freedoms available to the typical person in the two countries.
no two democracies have ever warred against each other.This is often said, but it's simply not true.
Well, here we go again... the mainstream media yesterday jumped on rumors that Algeria had shut down the Internet, with seemingly no effort to check facts with people on the ground. This wouldn't be the first time that an unsubstantiated rumor of this sort was spread by so-called professionals; last week, a similar statement about the Syrian Internet was made, despite protest on Twitter from Syrian users, who were accessing the site just fine.posted by ericb at 11:52 AM on February 13, 2011 [3 favorites]
This time around, journalists didn't check Twitter either; if they had, they would have seen that Algerians were tweeting throughout the supposed blackout.
As of the evening, neither the Telegraph nor Mashable -- the two outlets primarily responsible for the rumor--had bothered to issue retractions, despite hard evidence. This morning, Mashable corrected their post to state that there was no countrywide blackout.
The Telegraph's report -- which Mashable and the Associated Press based their own reports on -- was simply obscene. Not only did the Telegraph claim the Algerian Internet had been shut down, but their subheader also stated that, "Internet providers were shut down and Facebook accounts deleted across Algeria." Really? Facebook accounts were deleted? The article doesn't mention anything to back that up, so I have no idea what the intent was. Did users delete their accounts out of fear? Were they phished by the government and then deleted? Did Facebook delete the accounts of users utilizing pseudonyms? Did they really mean that Facebook was blocked?
Turns out, none of the above. In fact, the Internet didn't go down countrywide at all, but that didn't stop Mashable from parroting the Telegraph report. Algerian commenters quickly jumped in, however, to point out that the story had not been verified and that the Telegraph was Mashable's only source.
... Now, there were indeed reports from some Algerians on Twitter that the Internet was intermittently unavailable, which I see no reason to doubt. @EyesOnAlgeria, precise location unknown, reported earlier today that his (her?) Internet was unreliable. It is also possible that the Algerian government slowed Internet traffic, similar to what happened in Iran in the summer of 2009.
Other Algerians say that Internet outages are relatively common and frequent in their country.
As for the Facebook "deletions," well...no evidence of any kind has surfaced as of yet.
Update: Though there are reports of access to the Internet allegedly being cut off, sources from within the country are reporting they have access with slight disruptions in some areas and Renesys reports services are running “normally.”posted by ericb at 11:56 AM on February 13, 2011
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Hey wait, it actually kinda does!
posted by bicyclefish at 2:41 AM on February 13, 2011 [45 favorites]