To stop protests,Syria cracks down on social media

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.

In contrast to the Mubarak government in Egypt,which tried to quash dissent by shutting down the countrys entire Internet,the Syrian government is taking a more strategic approach,turning off electricity and telephone service in neighbourhoods with the most unrest,activists say.

They are using these tactics to cut off communication for the people, said Dr Radwan Ziadeh,director of the Damascus Centre for Human Rights Studies. He said the Facebook pages of at least two close friends had been recently hacked and now featured conspicuously pro-government messages.

With foreign journalists barred from the country,dissidents have been working with exiles and using Facebook,YouTube and Twitter to draw global attention to the brutal military crackdown on protesters that has killed more than 700 people. The Syrian Revolution 2011 Facebook page now has more than 1,80,000 members.

The only way we get information is through the citizen journalists, said Ammar Abudlhamid,a Syrian activist based in Maryland.