Regime’s social media campaign backfires
Hashtag created by Syria’s national news agency is met with grim satire
On June 22 Syria’s national news agency’s English Twitter account, @ SANA_English, asked its followers to share their pictures of fun in the sun, to mark the summer season.
Creating the hashtag #SummerInSyria, the agency tweeted: “Now that #summer is upon us, snap us your moments of summer in #Syria using the hashtag #SummerInSyria.”
Perhaps not a very good idea because it got very hot, very quickly. Twitter users were not in the mood for leisurely indulgence. They flooded the online trend with pictures and posts about the devastation caused by the ongoing Syrian civil war accompanied by sardonic captions conveying the grim reality.
@MayorKhairullah, a USbased Syrian activist, tweeted: “When the crater of a barrel bomb is turned into a swimming pool, U know U R spending #SummerInSyria.”
Another Twitter user @AlanaBowker posted a grim picture of a toddler standing in the rubble left behind after a bombing. She wrote: “#SummerInSyria Just a few more barrel bombs, and this will all be white sand.”
A screengrab posted by Twitter user @al_7aleem taken from inside a destroyed house looking onto a bombed building complex read: “.@SANA_English Just having some tea enjoying the view from my balcony. #Homs #SummerInSyria”
A picture posted by the same user showed dead bodies lying on bare ground. The tweet read: “.@SANA_English Sunbathing! Enjoying the Syrian weather a few blocks from the presidential palace. #SummerInSyria”
Contrast
A collage of grisly photographs of the injured and dead along with a Syrian warplane was posted by @The_47th with the comment: “Assad & his state media want you to enjoy #SummerInSyria.”
Soon, the commenters were not just regular Twitter users. International newspapers and diplomatic agencies began tweeting on the contrast between the hashtag and Syria’s reality.
The US Embassy verified the Twitter account in Syria posted ten tweets, both in Arabic and English, with pictures of infrastructure and facilities bombed by the regime using the hashtag.
One of the tweets read: “10 barrel bombs destroy Busra Hospital, only health facility 4 neonatal + dialysis in #Dara’a. #SummerInSyria #Syria”
In direct contrast, the theme of ‘normality’ is recurrent in tweets posted on Sana’s Twitter account. Pictures of everyday life in Syria are common, along with tweets ranging from Ramadan showjumping equestrian championships to an event calendar promoting pool parties. The account features many such updates from a Syria apparently untouched by death and destruction.
The writer is a trainee with the Readers’ Desk at Gulf News