The ACRPS organized the fifth International Winter School (IWS) under the title “Social Media, Surveillance, and Societies of Control,” from 6-11 January 2024. In this round, 19 researchers presented their research projects in dedicated sessions, focusing on different aspects of social media and surveillance in different regions and examining it in relation to a variety of social and political issues.
The first day of the IWS began with welcoming remarks from Arab Center Researcher Hani Awad, who highlighted the main aims and purposes of the International Winter School and introduced the topic of this year’s program. He noted that the program provides the opportunity for PhD students and early career researchers to network with regional scholars and gain substantive knowledge. This round explores the interaction between social media, surveillance, and control by governments and corporations and the vulnerability of popular culture to manipulation and control through social media. Participants will look at social media and surveillance in different contexts such as the United States, Egypt, Iran, India, Saudi Arabia, Palestine, and Nigeria, examining a variety of social and political issues.
David Lyon, Former Director of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University, Kingston, and a pioneer in Surveillance Studies, delivered the first lecture of the IWS titled “Popular Metaphors for Surveillance and Why They Matter”. He explored three popular metaphors used in relation to surveillance: “Big Brother”, “Panopticon”, and the “Eye of God”. Lyon claimed that the use of these metaphors in the public evaluation of surveillance is important because they offer civil society opportunities to interact with public issues, which are bound up with the power of large corporations and their relationship with governments on the one hand, and with human rights, justice, care, and social-political participation, on the other.
This was followed by the first session of the IWS, in which Kawsar Ali presented her paper titled “The Empire Types Back: Palestinian E-Resistance and Its Settler Colonial Contexts,” offering examples of oppressive measures of the settler colonial authority of the Internet, as well as how Internet users, such as Palestinians and their allies, mobilize the Internet to “type back”. The session also featured a presentation by Ayah Soufan on “Exploring War Narratives, Digital Initiatives, and Censorship in the Israeli War on Gaza,”. Soufan’s paper used the ongoing Israeli war on Gaza as a case study to discuss how narratives play a crucial role in self-identification, justification, and defiance, evolving through daily adjustments and social media engagement.
In the second session, Ashraf Abumousa presented his paper titled “Humanitarianism in the Era of Digital Colonialism: The Case of Palestine”. Abumousa explored the impact of Israeli surveillance and control of the Palestinian digital space on humanitarian work. Itxaso Domínguez de Olazábal then presented her paper titled “Digital Redlining in Historic Palestine? The Political Geography of the So-Called 'Digital Divide”. She examined how Palestinians are not only digitally redlined but are also stripped of their autonomy and privacy online, due to the pervasive use of surveillance logics and technologies and the multiple dimensions of information restrictions.
Day Two of the Fifth ACRPS International Winter School, began with a lecture by Associate Professor of News, Social Media, and Public Communication at the School of Communication at Simon Fraser University, Ahmed Al-Rawi. The lecture, titled “Misinformation, Surveillance, & Trolling on/in the Middle East,” focused on the evolving phenomena of misinformation, trolling, and surveillance in the Middle East. He argued that in some Arab countries, the state is not the only party involved in information operations but many political parties and even militias have developed their own cyber armies used to discredit their opponents and silence dissent. Using large datasets, interviews with human rights activists, and guided by empirical evidence, he showed how critical journalists and activists are often targeted with coordinated social media disinformation campaigns to tarnish their credibility and harm their reputation.
Following the presentation, there was a roundtable discussion on the role of social media in war, which Ahmed Al-Rawi, Marc Owen Jones, Mohamad Hamas Elmasry, Mohamed Zayani, Nadim Nashif contributed to by drawing on their own research. Some of the most notable contributions looked to issues such as how the use of social media has engendered a mix of algorithm-driven content curation, misinformation, and disinformation, leading to a fragmented and polarized understanding of conflicts and the weaponization of social media by various actors for propaganda.
After the roundtable, two participants presented their papers. Ahmad Abozaid presented his paper “Counterterrorism, Cybercrimes Legislation, and the Robustness of Digital Autocracy,” which illustrated the dialectical relationships between counterterror discourse and human rights violations. Elsayed Elsehemy Abdelhamid presented his paper “Digital Contestations in Former Prisoners’ Counter-Narratives and the Formation of Liminal Subjectivities,” paying attention to the forms of solidarity that social media potentialize in connecting former prisoners.
The opening lecture for day three, “From Greenwashing to Pro-Dictator Tweeting: Harmful Deception Operations on X,” was given by Professor of Middle East Studies at Hamad bin Khalifa University, Marc Owen Jones. Jones explored the manifestation of climate change propaganda and astroturfing polarization strategies in Sudan on social media. The case studies highlighted the difficulties conceptualizing the “deception order” and “deception operations”, proposing a model to determine the interactions between deception agents and geopolitics.
Later, two participants presented their papers. Isadora Borges Monroy discussed her paper “Who is Mass Online Surveillance for? Framing Effects and Intergroup Relations’ Effect on Public Opinion,” measuring competing privacy claims and attempting to advance the privacy/surveillance literature beyond self-referential privacy concerns and sociodemographic heterogeneity. Noor Hamwy’s paper “The Influence of Disinformation on Identity-Based Grievances: A Study within the Jewish Diaspora of the United States” investigated the impact of disinformation on identity-based grievances and its potential role in fortifying in-group loyalty.
The third day concluded with a workshop by Fadi Zaraket, Associate Professor at the Doha Institute for Graduate Studies and Founder of the Digital Arabic Social Spaces Research Unit at ACRPS, titled “Reverse Engineering Social Media”. The workshop introduced a reverse engineering approach to social media platforms. It also presented methods to leverage reverse engineering to collect data and information and reconstruct it in a way that enables systematic academic studies.
Day four began with a roundtable on “Social Media, Surveillance, and Societies of Control”, featuring Ahmed Al-Rawi, David Lyon, Heather Jaber, Marc Owen Jones, and Taha Yasseri. The roundtable reflected on the main theme of this year’s IWS, focusing on two main concepts: surveillance and societies of control. The roundtable discussed the interaction between social media, surveillance, and control by governments and corporations, and the vulnerability of popular culture to manipulation and control through social media.
The two participants, Bruno Schmidt-Feuerheerd and Laura Schuhn then presented their papers. Bruno Schmidt-Feuerheerd’s paper “Posts, Patriots, and Propaganda: Nationalist Mobilization in Saudi Social Media” used Saudi social media as a case study to demonstrate how the state depends on the mobilization of its supporters to advance pro-government talking points. Laura Schuhn’s paper “The Transformation of State-Society Relations in the Digital Age: Social Media as a Responsiveness Facilitator in Saudi Arabia in Light of Climate Change,” discussed how social media serves as a facilitator of responsiveness in autocratic contexts.
The last two participant presentations focused on women’s digital activism in Iran. Parichehr Kazemi’s paper titled “Between Stealth and Capture: The Dynamics of Resistance and Repression in Iranian Women’s Digital Activism” looked at how the state attempts to quell women's opposition and how women shape their activism in response to state repression. Mitra Shamsi’s paper titled “Mediation of Iranian Feminist Activism: Politics of Visibility” argued that women’s campaigns are performed in hybrid spaces where online and offline platforms, alternative digital and mainstream media, are intertwined to mobilize support and catch the attention of both local and international mainstream media.
The second half of the Winter School included two lectures, a workshop, and seven participant presentations. The two lectures covered a diverse range of issues related to surveillance and social media. The fifth day of the Winter School included a lecture by Professor of Cultural Anthropology at Duke University, Rebecca L Stein, titled “War, Social Media, Visual Politics”. Drawing on her earlier writings on “digital militarism”, Stein focused on the attempts of the Israeli state and its supporters to manage the visual evidentiary field, and the state-anxiety generated by the proliferation of Palestinian smartphone witnesses in Gaza, with their ability to generate images of Israeli state aggression in real time.
The sixth day of the school began with a lecture by Taha Yasseri, Professor at the School of Sociology and a Geary Fellow at the Geary Institute for Public Policy at University College Dublin, on “Can Crowdsourcing Rescue the Social Marketplace of Ideas?”. Yasseri discussed the potential advantages and drawbacks of community-based approaches to content moderation on social media, based on past research and initial analysis of Twitter’s Birdwatch data. Yasseri’s analysis generally supported a community-based approach to content moderation, but also warned against potential pitfalls.
On the fifth day, Deborah Dike and Guendalina Simoncini presented their papers. Deborah Dike’s paper “Surveillance and Counter Surveillance in Nigerian Social Media Activism: 2020 #EndSARS, Twitter and VPNs” focused on Nigerian state surveillance during the 2020 #EndSARS campaign. Guendalina Simoncini’s paper “Overcoming Digital Insecurity, Rethinking Safety: Feminist Tunisian Cyberactivism in Times of Democratic Regression” discussed how digital security is conceived and perceived by feminist cyberactivists in Tunisia and what strategies they implement to protect themselves in online and offline political activism. This was followed by presentations by two other participants, M M Waseem and Hiba El Bayed. M M Waseem examined digital authoritarianism in the context of India. Hiba El Bayed’s paper examined whether MENA countries have succeeded in adopting sufficient legal provisions that balance effective surveillance of social networks and effective protection of populations by reducing their vulnerabilities.
On the sixth day, Amin Naeni, Amin Majidifard, and Elaheh Eslami presented their papers, discussing disinformation, labeling, and women’s online businesses in Iran. Naeni’s paper “Securitizing Public Protests: Exploring the Role of State-led Online Disinformation Campaigns in Iran” examined how the Iranian government has employed online disinformation campaigns to securitize street protests and frame the suppression as a measure to protect public safety. Majidifard discussed the social media labeling strategies within the “Women, Life, Freedom” Movement in Iran. Eslami’s paper “Governing through Empowering: Women’s Online Home-Based Businesses and Competing Value Regimes in Post-Revolutionary Iran” examined women’s entrepreneurial activities in the context of modernity and development in Iran.
The last day of the school ended with a workshop “Using Social Media and AI for Community Safety: Tools, and Case Studies” by Hamdy Mubarak, Principal Software Engineer at Qatar Computing Research Institute. The workshop explored tools that can be used to increase community safety. Using social media and AI, Mubarak presented case studies to better understand political conflicts, rumours and opinions about COVID-19 vaccinations, attacks on Qatar before the World Cup, biases, and propaganda.
Winter School
