According to a Turkish news site, the country’s broadcasting watchdog, RTUK, has fined several TV channels for their coverage of the Gezi protests. Halk TV, Cem TV, EM TV and Ulusal TV have all been reprimanded for live-streaming content that is “harming the physical, moral and mental development of children and young people.”
“He said, ‘…I have some information in the intelligence community. and it won’t be a waste of your time.’”
Activist filmmaker Laura Poitras quotes NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.
How the NSA surveillance story broke
…had it not been for social media, the government would likely have succeeded in hiding the protests from many Turks. Turkey is a country that jails more journalists than Iran, and it is hardly surprising that the mainstream Turkish media, which has been additionally co-opted by the authorities through financial measures, broadcast pictures of beauty contests and cooking shows for several days while parts of Istanbul and other cities were blanketed with tear gas.
“On Friday [May 31] I saw on Facebook that there were riots, and I came here [to the center of Istanbul],” a 29-year old teacher named Ulas said in a bar near Taksim Square. “There were many people and we fought them [the police] all night. But on Saturday I spoke to some of my friends here in Istanbul, and they had no idea what was going on. One, a leftist, was at the zoo. This is because they were watching penguin documentaries on the mainstream channels.”
How social media forced Turkish news organizations to change course
[Photos by Victor Kotsev for Fast Company]
“Social media is a bliss. I even tweeted to Jack Dorsey, thanking him for inventing such a big thing that gives all information to people who want to stay impartial and get to the real knowledge through checking through all this information and using their minds.”
25-year old Esin, who has been active in the Turkish protests, both in Gezi park and online.
Hillary Clinton, now on Twitter with the best bio ever.
“Nobody is listening to your telephone calls.”
Twenty four people have reportedly been detained on charges of inciting riots and spreading anti-government propaganda.
The White House is set to propose five executive actions and seven changes to legislation that will limit how patents can be abused by “trolls”.
The moves should make it harder for law suits to be brought by shell companies that hide the identity of the real patent owner, and also limit the filing of patents that are too broad in scope.
“That general license will allow both software and hardware to move forward to Iran and to the Iranian people so that they can have freedom to communicate with each other in ways that they don’t always have.”
During the Egyptian Revolution in 2011, the country’s young people didn’t just vocalize their political dissent; they recorded it on their cities’ walls with murals, posters, and graffiti.
Chinese artist Ai WeiWei has created his first music video, for his single called “Dumbass.” The video recreates the environment of his 2011 prison stay right down to the wallpaper.
Weiwei sees “Dumbass” as a kind of therapy, and an activist message all by itself—it contains criticism of Chinese intellectuals who are trying to change China from within the system.
The sitting Congress has the most women of any in history. Artist Emily Nemens is capturing each of them in paint, and using their likenesses in graphics to show how far we still have to go to bring gender equality to Washington.
The women of Congress, in fabulous watercolor infographics
In a new campaign, Reporters Without Borders shows world leaders flipping you off.
All the leaders depicted are of the nondemocratic sort that some might label dictators—the kind who might restrict the freedom that journalists enjoy in other parts of the world with the kind of gleeful “f*ck you” depicted here.
The Right Geeks For The GOP: To bridge the tech talent gap, 2016 GOP hopefuls might want to pay attention to these Republican tech heavyweights.
