wage additional concerted campaigns accusing the Network of insinua- tion, sedition fomenting, and destabilisation of the region. To them, Al Jazeera’s reporting was not limited to live coverage of protests, sit-ins, and confrontations between protestors and security forces; but rather became party to the calls for change by taking side and adopting public demands. For Al Jazeera, its coverage of the protests of the Arab Spring was objective, unbiased, and professional. There is nothing wrong in highlighting and giving a platform to popular demands. The important thing in all of these hours of coverage is that the Network stuck to its motto “the opinion and the other opinion”. In that sense, the affiliation and change equation is the interactive and dynamic outcome of Al Jazeera’s impact on its audience. In recent years, this relation has been consolidated through a new critical me- diator – social media, or what has become known as “social network- ing” (1) . Until 2010, social media; most notably Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube, were, to many Arab users, mere friendship-making, enter- tainment and communication tools. Still, that form of communication, which essentially started a means of escaping the struggles of everyday life, contributed to the entrenching of social media as a critical compo- nent of the emerging Arab public sphere along with a whole array of new changes. In this respect, a report by the Economic Projections Institute of the Mediterranean concluded that in 2010 and 2011 only 15,000,000 Arabs used social media for personal purposes, and that Internet appli- cations ensured reasonable degrees of trust in the information exchange by and, among young people (2) . As early as the first quarter of 2011, the Arab region had witnessed a huge rise in using these media to protest and organize street demonstrations, for various reasons. Arab govern- ments reacted to this sweeping development in different ways. While some governments encouraged citizens to use these platforms and en- gage with governmental policies, others blocked websites and closely (1) Manuel Castells and Gustavo Cardozo, The Network Society; from Knowledge to Poli- cy (Washington DC: Johns Hopkins Centre for Transatlantic Relations, 2005), pp. 14-15. (2) See the Arab Social Media Report , (Dubai Military Administration College, May 2011), on the college’s website: www.ArabSocialMediaReport.com/ (accessed February 16, 2021).
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