Syria Today | Syria on the World Wide Web

Last year, due to an ongoing uprising, global interest in Syria, which used to be a little-known country, increased significantly. Therefore, in 2011, Syria's presence on the Internet grew tremendously, as did the amount of material about Syria uploaded to it, since more people inside and outside Syria searched for and shared information on the country.

According to Google Analytics, a website which provides statistics based on data about use of the search engine, by mid-November last year, searches for the term "Syria" grew by 88 percent, while in 2010, such growth stood at only 40 percent.

Moreover, in 2011 there were 475,000,000 sites with images of Syria, a huge rise compared to the only 23,400,000 such websites in 2010.

Syrians' interest in using the Internet to search for and upload information about their country has also dramatically shifted. According to the World Internet Stats website, by mid-2011, 19.8 percent of Syrians (some 4,469,000 people) were using the Internet.

"Before 2011 I used to follow news on Lebanon and Palestine; today I am obsessed with news about Syria," Nour Mahfouz, a trainee lawyer in Damascus, said. "My daily routine is logging onto the net and looking for what is going on. I mainly depend on social networks to follow the news."

Indeed, social networks have become an extremely popular way of publishing news and opinions on events in Syria. According to Topsy tweet count in early December, there were over 5m posts on Twitter tagged "#Syria".

Every day more and more material and videos are being uploaded on the web as both a part of traditional media outlets and a new kind of "citizen journalism" that ordinary Syrians have learned to practice without being trained.

By December 3, 2011, there were 395,000 visual clips on YouTube tagged in English or Arabic as related to Syria. In 2011, around 56,700 new videos were uploaded, compared to only one third of this number back in 2010. Many of them were posted from inside Syria, although the exact number remains unknown, as Syrians often use software which make their locations difficult to detect.

While social media platforms are no longer officially banned in Syria, Internet users face problems in accessing them from inside the country. For this reason, and because of fears of being detected through IP addresses, many activists and regular users use proxies and virtual private networks (VPN) to work around the blocks. Many consider these secure browsing methods a necessity as they believe the government has been tracking internet users and activists though IP addresses. One activist told Syria Today on condition of anonymity: "I never surf the web or even check my e-mail without a proxy. The security are following all our actions, and this was true even before March 2011."