Yesterday, 23 May, saw a resumption of massive spam attacks on our Facebook page by pro-regime forces in Syria. Thousands of “we love Bashir al-Assad” style comments posted to anything we post. We seem to have been identified as a ”foreign site promoting hostilty to the government of Syria” (the phrase was something like that).  For us, this is a pain in the neck. The most egregious repeat spam is often filtered by Facebook itself, and we temporarily blocked comments from Syria, but we have encountered serious problems with genuine comments not getting through as a result of all this, and even those that do can be lost in the morass of spam that still gets past the filters and deletion efforts. But our problems are though nothing compared to those in Syria who use the social networks to express protest. They risk their freedom and even their lives for what they put on Facebook. Two good articles explaining how the regime itself is using Facebook to suppress dissent: in the Washington Post and the New York Times.