Turkey’s Prime Minster called Twitter and social media “the worst menace to society” on Sunday, blaming it for the protests that are rocking Istanbul for a sixth day.

At the heart of the protests is a controversial redevelopment project that was due to convert a six-block green area in Istanbul into a new shopping center. What began as a small gathering in Taksim Gezi Square, expanded once the focus of the demonstrations widened into a general critique of the Turkish government. Twitter played a huge role in spreading awareness of the demonstrations, with use of the hashtags #occupygezi and #direngeziparkı exploding. Within a twenty-four hour window, as many as two million tweets using the protests-related hashtags were generated, and approximately 3,000 tweets per hour even after midnight local time.

Turkish police added fuel to the fire after attempting to disperse the protesters with water cannons and tear gas. Makeshift tents set up in Taksim Square — akin to those during the Occupy movement in the U.S. — were set ablaze in the early morning hours. Rather than shrinking the protests, the police action seemed to widen them, leading to as many as 10,000 Turkish protesters flooding the streets. Images of protesters in homemade gas masks circled the Internet, alongside YouTube videos of demonstrators facing further attack from the police.

Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan took to state television to denounce the protesters and deny the legitimacy of their complaints. “There is now a menace which is called Twitter,” Erdogan told the cameras. “The best examples of lies can be found there. To me, social media is the worst menace to society.” Erdogan also made clear that he doubted the spontaneous nature of the protests, claiming that opposition leaders’ “foreign links” were at play in their organization, informing the country that he had ordered intelligence agencies to investigate these ties and that the development project would move forward.

But the Prime Minister’s comments have not been received well, at home or abroad. “People want to have a say in how their city is run — at least they don’t want one man to decide on every aspect of their lives,” Asli Aydintasbas, columnist for Turkish newspaper Milliyet, told ThinkProgress. One of the critiques towards Erdogan and his ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) is their unwillingness to form consensus, using their majority in Parliament to pass through several controversial measures absent of any moderation to appease the opposition.

According to CAP’s Michael Werz, Twiiter is filling the role traditionally held by the mainstream media in Turkey thanks to the ongoing suppression of the press during Erdogan’s time in office.
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A writer in Saudi Arabia prompted his readers to sexually harass women in newly integrated public places, unleashing a war of words in the digital sphere over the country’s views towards women.

Abdullah Mohamed al-Dawood, author of several self-help books published in Arabic, took to Twitter recently to call on his followers to harass and molest women who had been hired to serve as cashiers in Saudi grocery stores. Using a hashtag that roughly translates to “harass_female_cashiers,” al-Dawood urged the nearly 100,000 people following his account to take action against new laws against sexual harassment the Kingdom is considering rolling out.

In one tweet, al-Dawood explained that the mixing of genders in combination of new anti-harassment laws was akin to giving up guarding banks while still punishing those who rob from them. In another, as translated by the Financial Times, the author used a story of a man who wished to prevent his wife from going out while he was attending prayers to illustrate his point. In the story, the man molests his wife in the street under the cover of darkness, prompting the wife to never to wish to leave home again.

At least one conservative Saudi cleric, Khalid Ibrahim al-Saqabi, has backed al-Dawood’s thinking, saying that the proposed law against harassment in mixed gender environments was “only meant to encourage consensual debauchery.” The campaign has opened a fierce debate between al-Dawood’s supporters and those who are in favor of the government’s attempts to kickstart the moribund parts of the Saudi economy not based on petroleum exports.

As part of this campaign, itself an effort to drive down unemployment and the amount of money the government spends on its social programs, women are being slowly introduced from their previous segregated working environments into mixed gender ones of the sort al-Dawood is condemning. Women have also been granted some modicum of rights in the recent past, including the newly possessed right to ride a bicycle in public — though only when accompanied by a male relative, completely covered, and not for transportation purposes. This lack of transportation, which exacerbates the ban on women driving, is serving as a hindrance to efforts to integrate women into public working environments.

In all, women’s rights have a long way to go in Saudi Arabia, which according to the World Economic Forum ranked 131 out of 135 countries on issues of gender equality in 2012, until they reach anything resembling parity with their male counterparts. Despite the efforts of al-Dawood and his supporters, however, some strides are being made to bring the country up to par. This year saw the launch of country’s very first campaign against domestic violence, as well as the appointment of women to an official advisory council to the King for the first time in history.

A new report out Thursday finds that right-wing extremists on Twitter are “highly engaged” with the mainstream conservative movement and the Republican Party and highlights the role the GOP has to play in countering their more violent fans.

The report — titled “Who Matters Online: Measuring influence, Evaluating Content and Countering Violent Extremism in Online Social Networks” — originally sought to examine the way that extremists use social media to interact among themselves, in this instance focusing on white nationalists’ use of Twitter. But throughout their investigation, the study’s authors, International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation associate fellow J.M. Berger and Bill Strathearn, inadvertently discovered something interesting.

They began with 12 “seed” Twitter accounts for their unambiguous status as white nationalists. The authors then created a dataset of 3,542 Twitter users who interacted with those 12 seed accounts, of which 44 percent self-identified as white nationalists. After analyzing the interactions between the 3,542 users and the 12 seed accounts, the authors identified the 200 top-scoring accounts, of which 83 percent self-identified as white nationalists (for the top 400, the self-ID rate was 74 percent).

The real surprise came almost accidentally, when studying the content of the tweets members of the dataset sent out, with a substantial amount of it linked to the conservative movement in the United States and the Republican Party. Among the most popular hashtags used by those featured in the dataset included “#tcot,” or top conservatives on Twitter; “#teaparty,” and “#gop.” The study also looked at the links these users sent out, categorized into mainstream, content-neutral, alternative, and extremist categories. More than half of the alternative links these users sent out were also to conservative websites, such as World Net Daily and Brietbart.com.

The authors of the study determined that the usage seemed to be “driven more by white nationalists feeling an affinity for conservatism than by conservatives feeling an affinity for white nationalism.” They were also quick to note that the data were pulled during a period of time surrounding the Republican National Convention, potentially providing a boost in references to the GOP. However, a comparison group — composed of left-wing anarchists — did not yield similar results linking them to progressive ideals or the Democratic Party.

This seemingly unidirectional engagement, however, has a potential upside. Due to their influence, the GOP could help reduce the affect that violent extremists have on the national stage, the report says:

Since the data suggests white nationalists are actively seeking dialogue with conservatives, CVE [countering violent extremism] activists should enlist the help of mainstream conservatives, who may be considerably more successful than NGOs at engaging extremists with positive messaging. Further research may also suggest avenues for engagement between other kinds of extremists and other mainstream political and religious movements.

The report comes out on the heels of a Southern Poverty Law Center report identifying a spike in far-right anti-government groups, with their number having reached an “all-time high” in 2012. As the Republican Party is desperately seeking to rebrand itself from being seen as a “scary” party of primarily white people, it would do well to listen to the ICSR’s recommendations and not those of people who would defend slavery.