Tunisia, as compared to listening rates in the United States (1) . In November 2017, Al Jazeera started its audio service, Jetty, for English-language speakers. It was highly popular among its followers and won several awards, including the Kaleidoscope award. Al Jazeera has also provided an audio service to mobile users in low and slow internet coverage areas so they are able to access Al Jazeera News and Al Jazeera English broadcasts in the Middle East, Southwest Asia and South America. 3. Al Jazeera and Social Media Platforms Since the start of the 1990s, social media networks began to garner more interest, with the advent of platforms like Classmates.com in 1995 and SixDegrees.com in 1997. These platforms really took off in the late twentieth century, imposing themselves as a means of communication between individuals, groups, institutions and even countries, especially after MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and other similar social media net- works were launched. One of the natural outcomes of this was that users now took on the role of producers and correspondents, with an impact on the coverage of events, as well as key players in formulating news. It has become the norm for all media outlets to have accounts, channels and broadcast stations on social media outlets to share their message in a digital space to different categories of users. In this aspect, Al Jazeera was not a novelty among large media networks, but it did take ownership and leadership of this initiative. In November 2006, Al Jazeera English launched its channel on Facebook and YouTube to upload its news and programme content, followed by its Twitter account in April 2007. Both AlJazeera.net and AlJazeera. com began to broadcast their channels on their respective websites in May 2007, then on YouTube in March 2010. Al Jazeera was the first channel in the world to create local digital pages for its external bureaus with special video productions. This gave it a unique presence at a time when some news channels around the world did not have local channels on these platforms. The interest in this type of platform came in (the)
(1) “NU-Q Middle East Media Survey Reveals Reduced Trust in National Media”, Northwest- ern University, 8 December 2019, https://bit.ly/3iNucxB (accessed 6 October 2020).
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