Broadcasting 141 who had done similar work during the Egyptian revolution for help in getting around Libya’s internet blackout. His colleague, Abdulla Darrat, Abdulla’s spouse and media professional Sarah Abdurrahman, and a Senior Researcher at the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab, John Scott Railton, build @feb17voices (Railton 2012). This platform allowed Libyans to call a phone number and record their eyewitness accounts in English and Arabic, with translation provided by Abdulla and Sarah; Hamid also linked this information to Enough Gaddafi’s website. According to Railton, after the media “showed up in Benghazi,” they switched to broadcast from more isolated places such as Misrata and the Nafusa Mountains. A youth named Haret worked simultaneously and independently from Birmingham, England, to set up a Twitter account and website called LibyaFeb17 to “translate and transcribe” all news coming out of Libya in Arabic to English. Haret said, I wanted to make that media window for the international world to look at what’s happening without any bias. I say the word bias loosely, because I was really focusing on the pro-revolution events. But without any additions from myself. A handful of Libyan American women activists in the Washington, DC, area also formed a group called Libya Outreach that issued regular “situation reports” about the uprising and emailed them to government bureaus and think tanks. Assia recalled that a key part of their work in the early days of the revolution “wasn’t just spreading information but capturing misinformation and labeling it as misinformation.” In doing so, activists worked to monitor and triangulate reports and counter rumors. Ayman in Oklahoma took it upon himself to post near-hourly updates about the situation on the ground on the website of the National Conference for the Libyan Opposition, “in Arabic – so targeting the Libyan people.” By broadcasting information abroad and into the homecountry, activists combatted regime propaganda. Tasbeeh of Los Angeles recalled, “It did feel like we were transistor radios because there was no one else to take up this mantle. We felt a responsibility to transmit those voices.” Like their Libyan counterparts, Syrians who dared to resist the Assad regime inside the country faced extreme risks for participating in pro-Arab Spring candlelight vigils and filming protests on their cell phones. In response, Syrians abroad broadcast information coming from the ground to global audiences in the hopes of gaining outside sympathy and support for the cause. Razan, daughter of an exiled Syrian dissident in London, worked directly with a network of activists on the ground on Twitter to do just that. Her responsibilities included live-tweeting their protests, for example. I had a lot of contact with people on the ground. We had online meetings. Several would tell me, “I’m going out on protest now, please tweet it.” That was probably the best work I ever did, being in contact with people on the ground, translating for them. [They produced] a magazine and I was also part of the translating team. The Arabic one was distributed inside Syria – a very dangerous business – and the English one was online. In addition to criticizing the Assad regime by publicizing videos showing acts of defiance and state violence, activists also worked to name and shame entities who https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press