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BEIRUT The last rebel fighters have left the Syrian town of Zabadani near Damascus as part of a reciprocal evacuation deal for four besieged towns that had been interrupted after a bomb attack hit one convoy, state media and a war monitor said on Wednesday.

Thousands of people also left the rebel-besieged Shi'ite towns of al-Foua and Kefraya in Idlib province under the deal.

"Al-Zabadani has become completely empty of militants" who either evacuated or accepted government rule, state television said, broadcasting from the town which had long been under siege by pro-government forces.

State media said around 500 rebels and their families departed al-Zabadani and nearby areas for rebel-held territory in northwest Syria.

The Syrian Observatory for Human Rights said 3,000 people left al-Foua and Kefraya heading toward Aleppo city, which the government controls. They included nearly 700 pro-government forces, the Britain-based war monitoring group added.

Under the agreement between the warring sides, civilians and pro-government fighters were being moved out of the two Shi'ite towns, in exchange for Sunni rebels and civilians getting bussed out of the towns of Zabadani and Madaya.

The evacuations had been stopped after a bomb attack on a convoy of evacuees from al-Foua and Kefraya on Saturday reportedly killed 126 people, including more than 60 children.

Alaa Ibrahim, governor of the Damascus suburbs, told state television in Madaya that the government would "gradually restore all its services" now that rebels had left the town. The same would soon happen in Zabadani, he said.

Thousands of Syrians have evacuated mostly besieged rebel areas in recent months under deals between President Bashar al-Assad's government and insurgents fighting for six years to unseat him.

Ambulances brought wounded people from the convoy attack into government-held Aleppo and took them to hospital on Wednesday, state media said.

Several people from al-Foua and Kefraya who were injured in the blast told Reuters they had spent three days in rebel territory, where they received first aid and food, before arriving in Aleppo.

"My face was dripping with blood," said Fatmeh Yassin, 18, who suffered eye injuries from the blast. "Later, they took us to a hospital around Bab al-Hawa" near the Syrian-Turkish border.

Yassin lost her brother who had been in the convoy with her and "hadn't heard anything about him in days," she said at a hospital in Aleppo.

Sharif al-Hussein from Kefraya waited at the same hospital for doctors to check his 6-year-old son.

"There is shrapnel in his eyes because he was sitting at the window of the bus when the explosion happened," said al-Hussein, who had also received emergency aid in the opposition area near the Turkish border.

"They told us this morning to get ready for the (Syrian Arab) Red Crescent to come get us," he said. "We couldn't believe it."

(Reporting by Ellen Francis and Angus McDowall in Beirut, Kinda Makieh in Damascus; Editing by Andrew Heavens and Hugh Lawson)

WASHINGTON A Russian government think tank controlled by Vladimir Putin developed a plan to swing the 2016 U.S. presidential election to Donald Trump and undermine voters faith in the American electoral system, three current and four former U.S. officials told Reuters.

JERUSALEM Israel's military said on Wednesday it believes Syrian President Bashar al-Assad's forces still possess several tonnes of chemical weapons, issuing the assessment two weeks after a chemical attack that killed nearly 90 people in Syria.

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Syria evacuations resume, bringing Damascus-area town under state control - Reuters

National governments remain the single largest source of revenue for news organisations in Africa. In Rwanda, for example, a staggering 85-90% of advertising revenue comes from the public sector.

In Kenya, its estimated that 30% of newspaper revenue comes from government advertising. In 2013, the government spent Ksh40-million in two weeks just to publish congratulatory messages for the new President Uhuru Kenyatta.

But with a general election coming up this year in August, the Kenyan government has decided to stop advertising in local commercial media.

In a memo, reportedly sent to all government accounting officers, the directive was given that state departments and agencies would only advertise in My.Gov a government newspaper and online portal.

Electronic advertising would only be aired on the state broadcaster the Kenya Broadcasting Corporation.

Its difficult not to characterise the withdrawal of state advertising from commercial media as punitive. Without this revenue stream newspapers are likely to fold.

Worse still, efforts to withdraw government advertising from commercial media can be interpreted as a worrying way to undermine the freedom of expression.

Starving news media of revenue is a means of indirect state control. This has been the case in countries such as Serbia, Hungary, Namibia, Lesotho and Swaziland.

But to fully understand the link between government spend on advertising and media freedom its important to take a historical perspective.

How did we get here?

The 1990s saw the adoption of multi-party politics in many African countries. This led to relatively liberal constitutions in South Africa, Kenya, Nigeria and Ghana among others.

Since then, most African governments have grown anxious about their inability to control the local news agenda, much less articulate government policy.

For governments in countries such as Ethiopia, Uganda, Zimbabwe and more recently Tanzania, controlling the news agenda is seen as a means to stay in power. Views that compete with the state position are often cast as legitimising the opposition agenda.

This is part of a much broader strategy for political control which Africanist historians and political scientists have called the ideology of order. This is based on the premise that dissent is a threat to nationbuilding and must therefore be diminished.

The narrative was popularised by most post-independence African governments and emphasized through incessant calls for what they liked to call unity.

In Kenya, former president Daniel Moi even coined his own political philosophy of peace, love and unity. Citizens were expected to accept this narrative unequivocally. Dissenting views were undermined through state-controlled media such as Kenya Broadcasting Corporation and newspapers such as the Kenya Times.

From the 1960s 1980s, African governments conveniently used the nation-building argument to suppress legitimate dissent. Opposition was punished by imprisonment, forced exile and even death. This was common practice in Kenya, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Uganda, and in West Africa more generally.

The current political climate on the continent is premised on constitutional safeguards including the protection of free speech which make these kinds of punishments unlikely in the present day.

Many countries now have institutional safeguards including fairly robust judicial systems capable of withstanding the tyranny of naked state repression.

As a result, the media is controlled in subtler ways and its violence is softer. Its against this background that I interpret the withdrawal of government adverts from the commercial media in Kenya.

Controlling media budgets

In Kenya, the decision followed a special cabinet meeting which agreed that a new newspaper would be launched to articulate the government agenda more accurately.

The government also argued that the move was part of an initiative to curb runaway spending by lowering advert spend in Kenyas mainstream media and directing all the money to the new title.

A similar move was made in South Africa last year when the governments communications arm announced that it would scale down government advertising in local commercial media.

Instead, advertisements would be carried in the government newspaper Vukuzenzele. The decision withdrew an estimated $30-million from the countrys commercial newspaper industry.

The South African government also claimed that the move was made to reduce government spending. But critics have argued that the decision was made to punish a media outlet thats been particularly critical of President Jacob Zumas presidency.

In both countries the decisions have hit at a particularly hard time for the media industry, providing governments with the perfect tool with which to control the press.

Will a free press survive

Commercial news media is going through a period of unprecedented crisis. The old business models are unable to sustain media operations as audiences adopt new ways of consuming news.

More than that, mass audiences are growing ever smaller. Newspapers particularly havent been able to adapt to the changing profile of the old versus the new newspaper reader.

The effect has been that newspapers are no longer as attractive to advertisers. As such, they have to rely a lot more on state money and patronage for survival.

To sidestep state control commercial media in Africa must rethink their business models and diversify their revenue streams.

It wont be an easy road but non-state media must also work hard to disrupt this re-emerging narrative of order. Nation states cannot revert to the dark days when government policy was singular and alternative viewpoints were silenced or delegitimised.

The Conversation

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How African governments use advertising as a weapon against ... - Rand Daily Mail (registration)

Russia's media regulator says Twitter has agreed to store some of its users' data inside Russia, a move that would comply with domestic law but stoke further fears about user privacy and surveillance.

The agency, known as Roskomnadzor, said on April 19 that Twitter is in the process of determining "what information about Russian citizens and organizations in commercial relations with Twitter in Russia can be stored in the Russian Federation."

"We expect we will be able to send this commercial data to Russia by the middle of 2018 and notify you of this at that time," the agency quoted a Twitter public policy and communications official, Sinead McSweeney, as saying.

The California-based company refused to comment.

The reported decision by Twitter comes two years after a law took effect requiring Russian and foreign companies to store data for customers who are Russian citizens on servers housed on Russian territory.

The law has sparked wide concerns among privacy advocates who feared it would further restrict speech in Russia, where the Internet has served as a freewheeling and largely unhindered forum for public debate, particularly compared with traditional media outlets that are state controlled.

The measure reflected a marked tightening of control over media and the Internet by the Kremlin. President Vladimir Putin has publicly called the Internet a "CIA project."

Regulators have also adopted increasingly strict regulations on bloggers, requiring them to register if they reach a certain threshold of readerships or followers.

Companies that don't comply with the new Russian law are to be included in a blacklist, under court order by Roskomnadzor, and subject to a fine of up to 300,000 rubles, or about $5,000.

Blocking Violators

Roskomnadzor can also order Internet providers to block access to violators.

Many of the world's biggest and best known Internet companies have taken a quiet approach in determining whether to comply with the law.

But Roskomnadzor in November ordered the professional social networking site, LinkedIn, to be blocked from Russian Internet service providers for not complying with the new regulations.

In Russia, authorities have also moved to outright censor some material deemed politically sensitive.

Late in March, the Russian Prosecutor-General's Office asked Roskomnadzor to block access to webpages and videos posted on YouTube, the popular blogging site Live Journal, and the social networking site VKontakte, that were promoting unauthorized political demonstrations tied to anticorruption crusader Aleksei Navalny.

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Media Regulator Says Twitter Will Comply With Law, Locate User Data In Russia - RadioFreeEurope/RadioLiberty

Narcissism and social networking -- ScienceDaily Science Daily Social networks are an ideal stage for narcissists to showcase themselves. Accordingly, a lot of people with narcissistic traits are drawn to these platforms as a ... and more »

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Narcissism and social networking -- ScienceDaily - Science Daily

LEONID BERSHIDSKY

Last updated09:53, April 20 2017

Reuters

Founder of Telegram Pavel Durov: "It's pointless and time-consuming to maintain increasingly obsolete friend lists on public networks."

ANALYSIS: The man who set up the most popular social network in Russia axed all of his online friends in one fell swoop this week. Having them, he wrote, was so 2010.

That may be a sign of the times: Predictions from a few years ago that social networks would lose ground to messenger apps appear to be coming true.

Pavel Durov has often been called Russia's Mark Zuckerberg because he set up a Facebook clone called Vkontakte, which quickly beat the original in Russia because it became the medium for sharing pirated movies and music.

Durov lost control of the network long ago, and the piracy is somewhat less rampant, but Vkontakte is still far ahead of the competition in its home country.

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Durov, meanwhile, has funded the development of a messenger app, Telegram.

Based in Berlin and structured as a non-profit, the messenger has about 100 million monthly active users - formidable yet far less than industry leaders such as WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger (who claim a billion users each).

He explained his decision to purge: "Everyone a person needs has long been on messengers. It's pointless and time-consuming to maintain increasingly obsolete friend lists on public networks. Reading other people's news is brain clutter. To clear out room for the new, one shouldn't fear getting rid of old baggage."

Durov is right when he says everyone is on messengers these days.

Back in 2015, messengers overtook social networks in terms of total active users. And back in 2014, when Facebook separated Messenger from its main offering, Zuckerberg himself acknowledged the trend, saying that "messaging is one of the few things people do more than social networking".

And the messengers' growth is faster than that of social networks: Facebook Messenger's mobile audience increased 36 per cent in the between July 2015 and June 2016, while Facebook's grew 19 per cent, according to Comscore's mobile app report.

By measures that register actual human engagement- rather than fake accounts and bot activity - Facebook does not seem to be growing at all.

In 2016, its users generated about 25 per cent less original content than in 2015. The time users spend on Facebook dropped from 24 hours in mid-2015 to 18.9 hours in February, Comscore reported.

There are no reliable data on why humans are less enthusiastic about social networks today than a couple of years ago.

But chances are it has to do with fatigue from living in a public cage, irritation with the growing amount of invasive advertising, perhaps belated privacy concerns since the advertising often seems to follow browsing histories and the content of supposedly private messages.

Then there's the prevalence of low quality content and the potential of being confronted by disturbing acts of video streaming.

Messengers are a safer ground: They're about personal communication, not broadcasting.

Zuckerberg, who has been touring the USin what some see as a pre-presidential campaign and others as a series of focus groups to turn Facebook into a community-building tool, appears to have seen this trend coming long ago. Facebook, after all, owns the two most popular messenger apps.

If the numbers keep shifting from social networks to messengers, advertisers will figure out that something is wrong with the platforms they've been paying.

YouTube's advertising boycott is likely just a precursor of things to come, including better analysis of usage and engagement metrics. When the ad-based social network model is challenged - or even before that - Facebook will be forced to monetise its messenger offerings. That may undermine the quality of these products, as advertising did with the social networks.

Snap, now forced to make money as a public company, may already be experiencing the fallout. Time users spend on it is declining.

After having hijacked user attention and advertising money from professional content producers, social networks may be facing a reality check.

As people figure out what they want from the digital revolution, there may be far less money in facilitating content sharing than in creating the content itself.

Instead of submitting to the mercy of Facebook's massive audience, traditional publishers should have faith that the public will always demand professionally crafted content, no matter where it is shared.

The social networks may look like all-powerful intermediaries now, but they may not be around forever.

-Bloomberg

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Social networks are fading as messenger apps rise up - Stuff.co.nz