142 Voice for Rebellion and Relief supported the dictatorship. Kenan, a Syrian American law student from Chicago, helped to launch an awareness project on Twitter called “The Syria Campaign.” It was a core group of seven or eight or so Twitter users who were Syrian, and we would come up with a hashtag and try to do whatever we could to get that hashtag to trend. We had a few really memorable ones. I remember we did a campaign in summer of 2011 against Shell Gas because they were still operating in Syria. So we got an audience in the media because the media was following [our] weekly Twitter campaigns, and we were able to deliver messages. Respondents who participated in the Syrian uprising on the ground testified to the importance of this broadcasting work. Ibrahim al-Assil, a student in Britain at the time that the revolution broke out, returned to Damascus in the summer of 2011 to join protests and organize what became known as the Syrian Nonviolence Movement. He attested how Syrians abroad played a pivotal role in helping publicize their amateur videos of protests. They were in the US, the UK, Qatar and the UAE and other countries as well. I used to ask for a lot of help from them, especially because they have faster [internet] connections. In Syria, we used a kind of VPN to be secure, which made the connection even slower. So for anything that needs to be done online, anyone outside Syria was very helpful – and also to get in touch with the media. So for example, when civil disobedience took place in Syria in December 2011, the majority of the work [publishing] documentation of it and getting in touch with the media was done outside Syria. When Ibrahim was forced to return to Britain, he then took up this work himself, hoping that diaspora campaigns to name and shame the regime would prompt their host-country governments to intervene. Syrians also held “teach-ins” and other awareness-raising events at universities and places of worship. Haytham, leader of the Rethink Rebuild Society in Manchester, held a tribute to a British doctor named Abbas Khan who worked as a medical volunteer in Syria before he was tortured to death in a regime prison in 2013 (Siddique and Borger 2013). His two brothers came here, and [one] gave a very emotional speech. Three members of Parliament, the Greater Manchester Commissioner, and the mayor of Manchester were there also. It was a memorial for Dr. Abbas, but we also told the audience, look, he is just one example of tens of thousands killed in Syria and tortured. We called on the UK government to act on [behalf of those inside] Syrian prisons. Meanwhile, as Yemen’s revolution evolved into a series of prolonged and predominantly peaceful urban sit-ins across the country, Yemenis in the United States and Britain also worked to broadcast the claims of independent protesters to the public and the press. This was important because although freelance journalists and some Al Jazeera reporters managed to evade the regime’s deportations of journalists in March, these brave individuals faced numerous obstacles to reporting on events outside of the main protest encampment in Sanaʻa. Yemenis initiated broadcasting work on social media, posting updates on forums such as the London-based Yemen Revolution UK’s Facebook page. Ahlam, an activist in New York, worked with her colleague https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009272148 Published online by Cambridge University Press