"These are the background case notes complied for MEMO 2018.1: Challenging Truth and Trust: A Global Inventory of Organized Social Media Manipulation. For details on the methods behind this content analysis please see the methodology section of the report. This document contains data from over 500 s...ources organized by country. The sources include high quality news articles, academic papers, white papers, and a range of other grey literature. As an annotated bibliography, the country cases here make use of significant passages from these secondary sources, and every effort has been made to preserve full citation details for future researchers. The full list of references can be found in our public Zotero folder, with each reference tagged with a country name." (p.3)
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"This paper compares and contrasts four centers: The Center for Investigative Reporting in Bosnia-Herzegovina (CIN), The Journalism Training and Research Initiative in Bangladesh (JATRI), the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism in Jordan (ARIJ), and The Caucasus Media Investigations Center (...CMIC) in Azerbaijan. No officials or funders ever announce failures or label projects like these failures. But this paper posits that those centers designed and run by journalists to actively report are more effective in fulfilling their role as watch-dogs, as well as more sustainable. They perform better at developing future practitioners and instilling an investigative reporting tradition in new places. This examination suggests that donors hoping to implant successful centers increase their chances when they match ambitions to the political and legal climate of host countries, commit to multi-year involvement, and select passionate leaders with clout in the eyes of other journalists in their host regions. This study suggest that centers designed by outsiders and run by non-journalists tend to evolve into generalized research, resource and training centers." (Introduction)
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"Internet censorship poses a large and growing challenge to online freedom of expression around the world. Censorship circumvention tools are critical to bypass restrictions on the internet and thereby to protect free expression online. Circumvention tools are primarily designed to bypass internet f...iltering. Therefore, the core principle behind these technologies is to find alternative paths for data packets. These alternative paths use one or more collaborative servers in order to bypass the network of blocking mechanisms. This document provides a comparison among different circumvention tools, both in terms of their technical merits, as well as how users of these tools describe their experience with them. The countries included in this report are Azerbaijan, Burma, China and Iran." (Executive summary, p.9)
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