Democratic Underground - Syria: Assad regime cracking down on use of social media

Despite the videos continuing to emerge from Syria, Bashar al-Assad's regime is cracking down on use social media, just three months after allowing citizens to have open access to Facebook and YouTube, the New York Times reports.

Security officials are moving on multiple fronts — demanding dissidents turn over their Facebook passwords and switching off the 3G mobile network at times, sharply limiting the ability of dissidents to upload videos of protests to YouTube, according to several activists in Syria. And supporters of President Bashar al-Assad, calling themselves the Syrian Electronic Army, are using the same tools to try to discredit dissidents ...

There are about 580,000 Facebook users in Syria, a 105 percent increase since the government lifted its four-year ban on Feb. 9, according to Fadi Salem, director of the Governance and Innovation Program at the Dubai School of Government ...

Though Syrian officials sought to portray the decision as a sign of openness, human right advocates warned that the government could use Facebook to closely monitor regime criticism and ferret out dissidents as nearby countries erupted in revolt.

The article details a number of accounts of people who say (their) accounts have been monitored and/or hacked:

A man in his 20s living in Syria said that the police demanded his Facebook password late last month after arresting him where he worked and taking his laptop. "I told him, at first, I didn't have a Facebook account, but he told me, after he punched me in the face, that he knew I had one because they were watching my 'bad comments' on it," he said. "I knew then that they were monitoring me."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/middle-east-live/2011/may/23/syria-libya-middle-east-unrest#block-3

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