Week in Review: July 20, 2016

Hacktivists Release Thousands of TIME Articles

Hacktivists have released close to one hundred years of TIME magazine issues and made them available free online. Michael Best, a freedom of information activist who obtained the files, argues that “they should be freely viewable online as they would in a well stocked library.” The dump includes 3,471 archived issues of TIME Magazine from the paywall-protected section of the TIME website known as “The Vault,” which adds up to over 370,000 pages. While Best dumped the documents on the internet, Thomas White, an English activist who also goes by the name “The Cthulu,” is hosting the files. Although Best has posted government documents online before, he notes that this is a different situation because TIME is a private company. If TIME does not take legal action that forces Best and White to take the documents down, Best hopes to organize them more effectively, so that readers can filter them topically and easily access PDFs. Currently, the issues are arranged by date.

Social Media Celebrity Killed in Pakistan

Qandeel Baloch, a Pakistani women who used social media to achieve her celebrity, was murdered by her brother, Waseem Azeem, last week in an honor killing. Baloch, who used a pseudonym, was originally a contestant on the Pakistani version of American Idol, but she used social media to become famous as a model, often challenging Pakistani cultural norms and mocking prominent figures in Pakistani society. Her brother killed her because he felt that her actions brought dishonor upon the family and “said he found the social embarrassment unbearable.” Some Western news outlets have compared Baloch to Kim Kardashian, but Pakistanis have pointed out that unlike Kim Kardashian, Baloch came from a working class background. Some Pakistanis lauded her efforts to promote feminism, but conservative members of Pakistani society thought that she was too promiscuous online. In the wake of her murder, many expressed their outrage at the killing on social media and via a petition that currently has over 3,000 signatures, but others applauded her brother and argued that his actions were justified. The petition places considerable blame on Mufti Qavi, who some believe helped incite the murder. In the wake of the attack, the BBC published an article detailing some of the online harassment that female Pakistani journalists have faced for reporting on women’s rights and other taboo issues in the country.

What Happened to Turkey’s Internet During the Coup

Over the past week, many have noted the irony that the Turkish government, including President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, relied on the internet that it has so heavily censored to mobilize Turkish citizens in the wake of the attempted coup. As news of the coup broke out, the Committee to Protect Journalists tweeted that there were reports that Twitter and Facebook had been blocked. CNN and Twitter’s public policy team corroborated that the internet was “slowed” in the early hours of the coup and that many may not have been able to access social media sites such as Facebook or Twitter. It is unclear whether the government or the plotters of the coup were responsible for the block, but in an hour service was back up. Then, in a defining moment, Erdogan used FaceTime to call in to CNN Turk to encourage the Turkish people to rise up against the plotters of the coup. Erdogan also tweeted a similar message in an effort to reach the Turkish people.

Erdogan was not the only person in Turkey using social media; the coup plotters used WhatsApp to pass their plans along to one another. Turkish people were using these apps to communicate as well; Zeynep Tufecki