· September, 2009

Stories about Syria from September, 2009

The Power of 140 Characters: Twitter in the Middle East

  21 September 2009

The massive, sustained protests in Iran this past month against the regime’s apparent falsification of the presidential election results was enabled by widespread employment of new communication technologies. Among them is Twitter, the micro-blog which enables its users to distribute short messages of no more than 140 characters (‘Tweets’) via...

Syria: Blogger Kareem Arbaji Sentenced to Three Years in prison

  19 September 2009

On September 13, 2009, the Syrian State Security Supreme Court sentenced the young blogger Kareem Arbaji to three-years prison for “publishing mendacious information liable to weaken the nation’s morale,” under article #286 of the Syrian penal code. The thirty- one years old economics graduate, Kareem Arbaji, has been detained for...

Once again, Syria bans Facebook

  17 September 2009

Editor's Note: Facebook has been blocked in Syria consistently for the past two years; therefore, the statement that a ban will be “reintroduced” is incorrect. The linked article from  ‘Al Quds Al Arabi’,” which has since been removed, did not actually claim that Syria planned to reintroduce a ban.  The...