Media Law
Facebook rules, regs and crime
The UAE’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) announced a whitepaper on Facebook usage guidelines, terms and conditions this week, to a grateful press that reported on TRA ‘warnings’ to Facebook users. As usual, we ask ourselves the question; how relevant is this for brands online? The whitepaper is, in fact, a good, readable summary of Facebook […]
Saudi plans to regulate Youtube
The Saudi government is planning to monitor and regulate YouTube and other online channels, having this week entrusted the task to its General Commission for Audiovisual Media, established last year to regulate the broadcast industry. There has even been talk of issuing permits to Youtube subscribers, which would appear to signal the introduction of a […]
A wake-up call for aspiring citizen journalists in the UAE (and lessons for Middle East marketers)
The story is now well known and has received media coverage around the world. An incident of road rage in Dubai captured on video by a bystander and posted online inadvertently breaches United Arab Emirates laws, resulting in the arrest of the citizen journalist a couple of days later, even though he removed the video […]
We are all publishers
We are all many things. You can be an oil executive, commuter, father of three or violent crime victim to journalists, depending on whether they’re quoting you on oil prices, late trains, the joys of parenting or the nasty gash in your cheek. On Thursday, all four of the UAE’s English daily newspapers report on […]