Syrian 'Citizen Journalists' Use Social Media to Spread News
VOA News 조회 수 362 추천 수 0 2012.04.10 00:24:09This is the VOA Special English Technology Report, from http://voaspecialenglish.com | http://facebook.com/voalearningenglish
Social media
networks have come to play an important part in the political unrest in Syria.
The Syrian government barred most media from the country after the unrest began
a year ago. But that has not stopped Syrians from getting out information to the
rest of the world. Many Syrians have turned to social media like YouTube,
Facebook and Twitter to help spread reports about what is happening in the
country. Hundreds, possibly thousands of videos have appeared on YouTube and
other social media sites in the past few weeks. With few foreign reporters in
Syria, social media have become a major tool for telling the world what is
happening. Many news organizations have had to depend on reports and videos from
people they call citizen journalists.Emanuelle Esposti is a blogger in Britain
who has been studying the use of such videos by foreign media. She says it is
very difficult to know where a video has actually come from or who made it or
why. In early March Syria's deputy oil minister resigned to join the opposition.
In a video on YouTube, Abdo Husameddine had a message for the government of
President Bashar al-Assad. He said it had, in his words, "brought a year of
sadness and misery to those you claim to be your people." He also said the
government had deprived its people of basic needs and humanity and brought the
country to the edge of disaster.Abdo Husameddine was the highest official to
leave the government since the unrest began. In the video he urged other Syrian
officials to resign. Syrian opposition activist Abdi Hakim Ijburi also knows
about the importance of social media. He used social media to contact other
opponents of the government. He says many of them wanted to hold protests like
those that took place in Egypt and Tunisia. "At first, we started using
Facebook, YouTube and Twitter to get a group of young people and activists
together," he says. "And from that group we started organizing." In his
hometown, activists started writing anti-government graffiti on walls.Abdi Hakim
Ijburi says that as the protests grew, he was captured and tortured. He escaped
to Lebanon, like thousands of other Syrians. He says there were lots of people
in his hometown that he did not even know were part of the opposition movement,
or sympathetic to that movement. In his words, "If it hadn't been for the social
media we wouldn't have become united." For VOA Special English, I'm Alex
Villarreal.
(Adapted from a radio program broadcast 12Mar2012)
원문출처 : http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWpRD714jHs&feature=youtube_gdata
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