Have we been imprisoned by social media?

Have we been imprisoned by social media?
The advent of Twitter, Facebook promised freedom of information and expression. But now the same services are being turned on their users.
4 min read
23 November, 2014
What has happened to our freedom on the internet? [Getty]
Social media was once a tool of revolution, playing a pivotal role in in Egypt as the regime of Hosni Mubarak imposed a media blackout during the protests of 2011. Its use has caused political earthquakes across the Arab world.

But in recent years, services that once allowed individuals to demand their freedoms have instead been used to violate their privacy.

Governments are not the only intruders, however. Friends, family and even bosses have used what individuals post on Twitter, Facebook and other services against them. Here are a few examples of social media gone wrong:
     Governments do not just request user data ...they also monitor and arrest people who post things deemed dangerous.



A family feud writ large

Sofia, from Lebanon, left home after arguing with her family about personal space and freedom. She graduated, got a job, and got on with her life. However, her estranged family began monitoring her Facebook and Twitter accounts.

"My father contacted a Lebanese political party as a threat and extortion because of my posts”, Sofia, whose name has been changed, told al-Araby al-Jadeed. "He also tarnished my reputation by claiming I was a whore only because I have male friends."

Eventually her father sent Sofia's employer and colleagues photos and comments of her, and demanded she be sacked, and her position became impossible.

The nightmare boss

Twitter is a great forum for posting political views. Adel used the service to express his support for the Egyptian revolution of 2011.

"No matter how long we suffer from oppression, the revolution will be victorious… the revolution continues", Adel once posted.

Unfortunately, his manager was a supporter of Hosni Mubarak, and Adel says he was fired after six months of victimisation.

Controlling partners

Yara had been in a relationship with Omar for three years. At the beginning, it was full of love and passion. But it turned sour after she started a new job.

Omar began to monitor her social media accounts. "You cannot post your pictures any more, other men could see them," Omar would tell her. Omar later demanded she stop speaking to any of her male friends, and forced her to remove them from her friends list on Facebook.

"I could not stand the social isolation. I could not go out with my friends or even talk to them online," Yara told al-Araby al-Jadeed. "I broke up with Omar even though I loved him, but he kept watching everything I did on those platforms".

But it did not stop there.

"The fear and intimidation he made me feel did not go away despite the end of the relationship, so I ended up deactivating all my accounts."

Big Brother is watching

In Iran, Facebook, Viber, Twitter and Instagram are blocked.

Other countries censor and monitor such sites, demanding the owners to provide information on their users. Many countries have been implicated in these invasions of privacy, chief among them the US.

Google, Facebook, Twitter and Yahoo, among others, have issued transparency reports. In its report published last September, Google confirmed that it "regularly receives requests from governments and courts around the world to hand over user data".

The report also revealed requests had been increasing at high rates over the five years it has kept record.

Facebook earlier this month reported 34,946 requests for information in the first half of this year, a 24 percent increase since the second half of 2013.

In April, Twitter asked the US government to issue its own transparency report, which includes information on the nature and number of requests for Twitter user information. The government has refused.

Status update: I'm in jail

But governments do not just request user data from social media companies or automatically block these websites; they also monitor and arrest people who post things deemed offensive or dangerous.

Saudi Arabia recently arrested Soad al-Shamri. A man named Alaa Abdul Fatah was arrested in Egypt based on being mentioned in another Twitter user's post.

In Lebanon, the government has used its "cyber crime and intellectual property rights bureau" to arrest Facebook users - the latest example the arrest of a man named Karim Hawa for his comments about the interior minister.

This is an edited translation from our Arabic edition.
The names in this article have been changed to protect identities.