Defending Gaza on the Internet

Ten years ago united states of America pounded Baghdad, I was in my 8th grade, I went out for a rally with my friends to express my anger, we rounded the neighborhood cursing, when I went home, I just followed the scenes of pounding on TV and I wished at that time that I would had a way to make the whole world listen to my voice.

Now it happens all again, but now there is a different factor, it is the internet and its new techniques that can be used to defend our important cases.

Gaza is burning, while our children had turned into dead bodies, the scenes of damage, destruction and fear get bodies shaken, maybe we can't change anything in real life as the courage Palestinian resistance is doing, but we can and it is possible to make an effect on the public opinion level, this could be either locally or world wide.

You can contribute in defending Gaza, and do not under estimate yourself whatever what; every word you write down could have its effect.

The Mudawen.net, the community of Syrian blogs, has launched a special page for Gaza where posts about Gaza and photos from Flicker ,videos from YouTube , groups from face book and twitter updates are submitted.

The latter one is the one which I care about now, this is because twitter is mysterious for many people, and lately it had been used as a way to get public opinion after launching the twitter search engine that depends on hashtags.

Following is the explanation of interacting on twitter for beginners.

Twitter is a page that gives you a box that asks you: "what are you doing now?" you could for example write down your answer as "I am reading Aloosh's Blog" then you put the blog's link, when your status got published; it reaches out all your friends who follow you using the web or using the mobile phone ( which is un supported in all countries and frankly I did not like this service a lot), taking into consideration that long links are abbreviated into short links using tinyurl.com site immediately.

This is how the ads-on appears in Firefox

Now,it may seems that it is complicated to follow your friends through the web, now it is the role of amazing Adds-on that comes from Firefox browser, this Adds-on allows you to follow your friends, publish your status, reply other users and sending direct special messages to them, this what is so called firefox twitter ads-on.

From the picture you can note three tabs:

Recent: which represents the last thing you wrote

Replies: which represents the replies you got either they are replies on what you wrote or replies on your other replies

Messages: recent direct messages you've got

Notice the chain shape beside the Recent tab, in case you press the chain the link to the page you are currently in would be submitted directly.

Let us go to twitter search engine and enter the tag "#gaza", (and this is what is called hashtag) , a page contains recent messages that includes this tag and was collected from all twitter users are displayed to you, now this page could be so complicated to you , but let us consider the following example:

Message that appears as search result of the tag Gaza

Now, how do you interrupt such message? The photo of the sender is clear, his name is avinun, and he had sent his message as a quote "Bombing 1.5 million people in a cage" followed by a link to the site the news was taken from .

Notice that we had two tags too: #Israel and #Gaza, these are used to guarantee that the user message would be shown as a result upon searching on one of the two tags or both of them.

In the footer; you can see the Reply tab, when pressing it; you will be forwarded to your page in order to write your reply, if you are one of this person followers, no need to be forwarded, you can use Recent list to reply him, and when this person replies you once again, the answer would be available on your twitter webpage in Replies list or in same list in twitterfox.

So what happens when you reply? You should include the tag in your replay if you want this replay to be shown as a search result, otherwise it would be only sent directly to the person you sent to . Below is the picture of two persons replying each other and included the tag "#gaza" in their messages.

Two consecutive replies as shown on twitter search engine

Now we had two pictures: one is small while the other is the big one, this means that this one belongs to the big picture in replying person with small picture, now let us read the message:

reland1 replies at asteris (the code @ means replies at) , reland1 has included the tag in his reply and says that IDF burned by media many times, Now we need to know the story of this reply, which means that we need to know the right sequence of conversations that this reply was included in, we press Show Conversation and this what we have:

Conversation with yellow color means that is shown as search result

Now we understand the conversation, where we watch asteries replies reland1 saying: "so that give them the right to blanket the conflict from the eyes of the world? CNN's Clancy was arguing this earlier,btw",notice that the conversation with yellow box color is the one that would be displayed in search result for it includes that tag "#gaza", conversations have descending order, which means that the oldest are shown first and the recent are shown below them.

The view Teet link is used to point to this conversation, just copy the link and use it in pointing to this message, this is should be a permanent link.

Moving to an advantage which exists in twitterfox, which is called "Retweet" or abbreviated as "RT", assuming that you are browsing the internet when you get an alert from your twiitterfox that you are receiving a new update from your friend, you press Recent and read the message which you consider it worth publishing, you can simply right click twitterfox and chose "Retweet":

Using twitter Firefox, you can send the most important updates

But be careful, your message won't be displayed among search results unless it contains the right words, so if you want your message to be included you have to add the tag "#gaza", this could consume some letters since re-sending few letters and symbols could affect the default message size, maybe you should delete or re-format your message again.

Resending operation as shown by the search results

Now I believe you can read the message clearly, it is obvious that you should have the least level of English language knowledge, or you can follow twitter updates about Gaza in Arabic language only. Twitter is a strong mean of media, you can use it through mobile phone or even facebook, you can search in more accurate way using the advanced options given to you by twitter search engine.

Publish facts, reply lairs, face them using photos and videos, let them know that they can't say what they want any more without getting someone to reply them. Let them know that we exist, that we read for them and ready to reply them, we are not going to allow corrupting the image of the resistance and the Palestinian people while the ways of defending are available for everyone !

Note: you can check the original post in Arabic at Aloosh Blog at the following link; Original author approval for the translation was considered, please forgive any miss in translation.