moved to an administration separate from that of AlJazeera.net. This is one of the results of the previously mentioned institutional “digital mind-set”, which also included the realisation that the digital world was equal to, if not more important than, the television world. The global- ised direction taken by the network also needed a fast way to address people in other languages. English.AlJazeera.net was first launched in September 2003, quickly becoming “a new source of the network’s influence and dis- semination” (1) , competing with the biggest international news websites in terms of influence on the international media scene and global public opinion. This probably explains why the website was hacked after it published photos of Iraqi prisoners being tortured by American soldiers in the Abu Ghraib prison during the U.S. invasion of Iraq. The Arabic website had also been the target of hacking attempts shortly after the 11 September 2001 attacks. In a short period of time, the English website was able to carry the identity of the network to new horizons, completing its news philos- ophy that went against the grain of traditional media in the region. It transformed millions of users to active consumers, who intentionally follow and seek it out given its news content, as opposed to the type of following that comes from social media referrals. In addition to that, it became an important and appealing source of information on interna- tional developments. The website saw a 110 percent increase in visitors at the start of 2020 compared to the same time period in 2019. This can be attributed to the site’s focus on news that matters to most and conveying events quickly and continuously around the world, not just developments in the Middle East and North Africa. AlJazeera.com and its social media pages have attracted many visitors and readers, with about a third of them from the United States. The site has also focused on producing quality content from South Asia, especially India (2) . In (1) Noureddine Miladi, “Reporting News in a Turbulent World: Is Al Jazeera Re-writing the Rules of Global Journalism?” in Mapping the Al Jazeera Phenomenon: Twenty Years On , Edit- ed by Ezzeddine Abdelmoula and Noureddine Miladi (Beirut: Al Jazeera Centre for Studies and Arab Scientific Publishers, 2016), p. 71. (2) “A Developed Platform at Al Jazeera for Publishing Digital Content”, Al Sharq , 3 March 2020, https://bit.ly/3lf5mIv (accessed 11 October 2020.)
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