The war in Syria has been raging for two years now.
An incredibly important part of any conflict is the propaganda war fighting to have the
war represented on your terms.
Well for Syria the internet has proved a crucial battleground for that propaganda war so when
Syria's internet traffic nose dived recently people were concerned.
Google's transparency report showed internet traffic falling off a cliff.
Naturally campaigners for online freedom were up in arms.
The last time this happened in November, Anonymous declared war on President Assad for cutting
off his country from the internet but President Bashar Assad had blamed the rebels.
How is it even possible to cut off an entire country from the internet?
Well Syria is connected to the internet by just four cables and three of those go through
the exact same router.
Compared to the network infrastructure of somewhere like the UK the internet in Syria
is incredibly flimsy.
An analyst done by cloud flare suggested that the last time this happened was due to a systemic
failure probably done by the government but so far this latest internet cut off has not
been explained.
In response to the blackout Google and Twitter have reinstated their 'speak to tweet' service.
It's supposed to allow people to use their phones to send Twitter messages but this time
round even mobile phones, land lines and even now satellite technology which has been used
to communicate anonymously have all been effected by congestion.
Because communications have been so severely affected propaganda is having a hard time
getting out of Syria and that's a big deal for this war.
You can't really overstate the importance of propaganda in this conflict.
At first it was the rebels that were winning the propaganda war.
Every brigade seemed to have a social media wing which was documenting atrocities and
alleged war crimes conducted by the regime.
There were so many of them that bloggers based in the UK were even able to figure out what
kinds of weapons were being used all from their home.
But in response, a huge number of pro Assad channels have been set up.
They show gruesome executions, beheadings and over alleged war crimes conducted by the
opposition.
And they've also shown to people in the West that some of the rebel groups are not fighting
for democracy as we're often led to the believe by politicians and the media.
In the last few months the online propaganda war has been taken to the next level thanks
to the emergence of the Syrian Electronic Army.
They've been hacking Twitter accounts and media organisations that they believe have
been too pro-opposition.
They even managed to get into three different BBC accounts in one go sending a horrific
video of a beheading to all of the people subscribed to those BBC Twitter services.
The BBC Weather account even sent an update about a chemical weapons cloud heading towards
Damascus and recently they hijacked The Onion's Twitter feed after an article titled "You
have allowed me to kill 70,000 people" was published on The Onion's website.
The Syrian Electronic Army even managed to take down Harvard's website and they left
a picture of Assad and a message for the university on a Syrian flag.
A hijacked Associated Press Twitter account even tweeted this.
It caused Nidal Jones to nosedive losing 140 billion dollars in just 90 seconds and if
ever there was a case of how powerful awful online propaganda can be it's this.
At this stage we can only speculate as to who is behind this Syrian internet outage
but whoever has done it has done it to some purpose.
We want to hear your thoughts about all of this in a comment.
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videos we've made about Syria.
We'll see you guys again next time.