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Thursday, February 3, 2011

The counterrevolution will be tweeted


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The Atlantic's Max Fisher says he's seeing a bunch of suspicious new Twitter accounts praising President Mubarak and condemning the revolution. He points out the tweet above, from an account with four followers and an apparent start date of yesterday.
"Either a bunch of people who REALLY love Mubarak just decided to start accounts or the regime is now pushing Twitter propaganda," Fisher writes.
An Egyptian journalist and pal, Nasry Esmat, says the Arabic part of the tweet translates as "Sedition is more fatal than killing."
Esmat describes it as a relatively common saying, mostly metaphorical and with origins in the Koran. "It means that sedition that creates a split in a nation is more dangerous and more condemned than a murder for its dangerous effects."
The message is addressed to two Al Jazeera accounts and New York University media guy Clay Shirky. Interestingly, Shirky included the names of the other two accounts in a tweet this morning. If a spammer of whatever motivation were watching for mentions of those names, they'd have scraped up Shirky's too. Anyone else getting these?

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