Media battles grip the Syrian online sphere

DUBAI (Dina al-Shibeeb)

Online Syrian activists derided the government portrayal of the anti-regime protesters as
“infiltrators” or “saboteurs”, and raised the alarm over the government’s trickery to trace the activists where-about via the creation of false websites to take the activists’ IPs and arrest them. “I am an inflator, and I am proud,” said one tweet, with another emphasizing his ‘saboteurs’ working by saying “I am an inflator, therefore I exist.” Meanwhile, a Syrian and an observer for the online activism taking place, kept his identity anonymous for security reasons, told Alarabiya.net that the “government is using cookies, and is creating bogus internet links to trace addresses of online individuals, ” adding “at times they join the online groups and pretend to be anti-regime activists just to collect more names and trace more people.”

Controversial video

Activists have also warned of the government’s efforts to downplay the authenticity of their activism, by claiming that the government staging a video done by them which shows a number of peaceful protesters among them a veiled-women being attacked by a police wearing civilian clothes.

The anti-Syrian regime protesters claimed that the government is trying to place the video as the activists’ doing to accentuate ‘lies’ being made by the activists to discredit their activism as full of ‘lies’.

“One kind of a theatre play, couple of dogs from the regimes out on the streets,” said one commentator on Youtube.

Meanwhile, a page for the Syrian Revolution 2011 has attracted 65,822 followers on the social network website, facebook, and has called for more protests in front of the Justice Palace in Damascus at 12 p.m. Tuesday.

The facebook page also said that there are current protests taking place in al-Saliba neighborhood in Ladikiya, Syria’s main sea-port city on the Mediterranean, and in Ariha city also on the Mediterranean front. But in one of the comments coming from a person claiming to be from al-Saliba said “We want a clean, honest revolution and not a revolution of lies; I am in Saliba and there is no such protest.”

Other commentators on the group’s facebook page slammed the Syrian regime and encouraged others to break the fear factor. “Protests in big cities have succeeded; step by step fear will be broken,” said one person.

‘Infiltrators’ working for Lebanon

Another group titled “We are all with Bashar al-Asad” has only 67 people. The group claims that what happened in Deraa is the doing of ‘traitors’ who are working for the former Lebanese prime minister Saad al-Hariri and the Fatah al-Islam, the Islamist group based in a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon.

Another facebook page which intends to hold a protest pro the Syrian President Bashar al-Assad on March 26 is receiving less followership, with only 383 followers.

The Syrian Revolution 2011 which started its online activism against al-Assad’s 11 years rule late January on facebook, had initial followers of more than 6,000 , but its 65,822 followers number beat its previous competitor, a pro al-Assad group who is currently having 14,674 followers.

On Friday, Syria’s security forces lashed out against protesters and killed five with dozens of demonstrators arrested on charges of hurting the state’s image.