Ahmed Zidan/CPJ Deputy Director, Digital and Social Media

Ahmed Zidan, CPJ’s deputy director, digital and social media, previously worked as social media editor of Radio Netherlands Worldwide, reporter and contributor to the Arabic desk at RNW (Huna Sotak), and editor of ArabNet. He was the editor of Mideast Youth, which won the 2011 Best of Blogs award from Deutsche Welle. Follow him on Twitter @zidanism. His public PGP encryption key can be found here.

Features & Analysis

Emily Bell: Tech companies must ‘wake up’ to their role in Ukraine war disinformation

As Russia wages an information war alongside its physical war in Ukraine, tech companies have responded with measures small and large, from reducing the visibility of propagandistic social media posts to blocking Russian state-affiliated media, to going beyond international sanctions by pulling out of the country altogether. Meanwhile, Ukrainian journalists, citizens, and officials have used…

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Features & Analysis
A 3D-printed WhatsApp logo is seen in front of displayed coronavirus disease (COVID-19) sign in this illustration taken March 19, 2020. (Reuters/Dado Ruvic/Illustration)

First Draft’s Aimee Rinehart on fact-checking coronavirus misinformation

While digital communication enables the public to receive critical information about the COVID-19 pandemic in real time, the same tools are enabling an “infodemic” of misinformation that “can hamper an effective public health response and create confusion and distrust,” according to the United Nations.

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Features & Analysis
A screen shows a CCTV state media broadcast of Chinese President Xi Jinping's visit to Wuhan at a shopping centre in Beijing on March 10, 2020. Researchers at Citizen Lab have documented Chinese platforms censoring keywords related to the outbreak of the novel coronavirus. (Reuters/Thomas Peter)

Q&A: Citizen Lab documents Chinese censorship of coronavirus keywords

Li Wenliang, a doctor in Wuhan who was reprimanded for warning colleagues of a new coronavirus earlier this year, used the messaging app WeChat to share his concerns on December 30, 2019, according to The Wall Street Journal.

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Features & Analysis
El Salvador's President Nayib Bukele with U.S. President Donald Trump on the sidelines of the 74th session of the United Nations General Assembly in New York on September 25, 2019. Journalists in El Salvador told CPJ that online harassment has intensified since Bukele came to power in June. (Reuters/Jonathan Ernst)

Salvadoran President Bukele’s anti-press rhetoric echoes Trump

Mariana Belloso, a Salvadoran journalist and radio presenter, was home after work with her family on June 30 when she was retweeted by the president, she told CPJ in October. Then the abuse began.

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Features & Analysis
A Snap banner covers the facade of the New York Stock Exchange in March 2017. The social media company's transparency report shows it received and complied with three government takedown requests for the Al-Jazeera Discover channel. (AFP/Bryan R. Smith)

Undiscoverable: How Al-Jazeera’s Snapchat channel disappeared from three Gulf nations

Search for “Al-Jazeera” on Snapchat, and the first result that comes up is a ubiquitous publisher channel in the app’s famed vertical layout. That is, unless you are in Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates (UAE), or Bahrain. Users in these counties are instead offered a list of stores and restaurants that bear a similar…

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Features & Analysis

How Turkey silences journalists online, one removal request at a time

On June 19, Abdülhamit Bilici, the last editor-in-chief of the now-shuttered Turkish paper Zaman, tweeted about the decline of press freedom in his home country. If you can see his tweet, you are probably not in Turkey because it is among the over 1.5 million tweets belonging to journalists and media outlets censored there under…

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