The new media team was also responsible for the Creative Com- mons by 3.0 initiative, which allowed anyone to use the network’s foot- age so long as they gave credit to Al Jazeera. The network’s administra- tion adopted this initiative as a way to support the creative community, academic sectors and independent filmmakers with free and unique content. One of the first fruits of this initiative was the @AJGaza ac- count on Twitter, which gave live updates on the Israeli aggression on Gaza. Al Jazeera was the first international entity that took part in this work, bypassing Israel’s prevention system of not allowing any press teams from reaching the area; and the network received praise from Twitter’s administration at the time for this undertaking. The ability to verify account sources and locations was a new addition for the network. This really paid off during the 2009 Iranian elections, when candidates Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Mir Hussein Mousavi ran highly divisive campaigns that received a lot of coverage. However, as international media were banned from entering Iran during the elections, they turned to using Twitter as a source of news, some of them resorting to using unverified tweets in their coverage. Al Jazeera’s new media team led a verification operation of 600 accounts tweeting profusely about Iran, and found that only 60 of them were tweeting from inside Iran. Thus, the network was the most accurate and credible in its Iran coverage, which had an excellent impact on its reputation. Al Jazeera’s technical role provided it with unique experiences and quick output, which helped the network greatly in following the after- math of the Arab Spring. With the start of 2011, the new media team was a strong central force for ideas and implementing digital projects and operations. They were in an advanced position to support news teams, especially for television, as protests increased in Tunisia and with Al Jazeera journalists being banned from covering events there. Thus, colleagues in the newsroom relied on videos from bloggers, and the new media team took the role of building relationships with these bloggers, verifying the technical accuracy and reliability of their work. This type of footage from these sources became a very important sup- porting factor in covering the Arab Spring. This phenomenon carried great global importance to media outlets everywhere: the strength of the masses armed with their mobile phones. In this same context came
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