Digital platforms have empowered individuals and communities to re-negotiate long-established notions of religion and authority. A new generation of social media influencers has recently emerged in the Muslim world. They are western-educated, unique storytellers, and savvy in digital media production. This raises new questions on the future of Islam in the context of emerging challenges, such as the openness of technology and the often-perceived closedness of religious and cultural systems within Muslim societies. This paper uses a multiple case research design to examine the roles of social media influencers in reimagining Islam and reshaping spiritual beliefs and religious practices among young people in the Gulf Region, the Arab world, and beyond. We used thematic analysis of the Instagram and YouTube content of four social media influencers in the Gulf Region: Salama Mohamed and Khalid Al Ameri from the United Arab Emirates, Ahmad Al-Shugairi from Saudi Arabia, and Omar Farooq from Bahrain. The study found that social media influencers are challenging traditional religious authorities as they reimagine Muslim identities based on a new global lifestyle.

Self-censorship, the deliberate suppression of one’s own right for expression, has lately become a systematically normalised practice in Moroccan media. Since privatisation of the press in the 1990s, critical reporting on sensitive matters of genuine public interest has not been as conspicuously scarce as it is today. Both content quality and normative social responsibilities of the press have been subverted because of excessive self-censorship. This paper draws on this problem to assess Moroccan journalists’ perception of their experience as self-censors. It gauges the personal, institutional, environmental, and discursive considerations that they recall while dealing with sensitive events and critical topics. The assessment draws on the assumption that self-censorship is a highly conscious experience whereby journalists are fully aware of the risks accompanying news reporting in Morocco. Their consciousness accordingly makes them forestall undesirable reactions from authorities and eventually either avoid certain topics completely or implement specific maneuvers when they have to report them. The paper uses a quantitative procedure to survey 120 journalists working in 9 popular newspapers and newsmagazines. The findings confirm the preset hypothesis relating the practice of self-censorship to journalists’ state of self-consciousness and absence of professional agency. The findings also underscore important implications like: (a) journalists’ socioeconomic profile as a potential predictor of their tendency to self-censor, (b) an extrapolated perception of gatekeepers and impermissible redlines, and (c) organisational culture as primary cultivator of self-censorship.

The ever-mutating socio-political environment within which the Moroccan private press has evolved since the beginning of the 1990s has made it difficult for researchers to trace its general features over 25 years. After contextualising the non-partisan media takeover in the 1990s, this paper proposes a rereading of the political history of the Moroccan private press by dividing it into four periods: Uncertain Beginnings (1991–1998), Free Retrospection (1999–2005), Confrontation and Censorship (2006–2011), and Normalisation and Self-censorship (2011–2016). The designation of each phase draws on a scale of six indicators: political environment, media environment, principal titles, editorial features, ratings, and censorship. The paper focuses on the interaction between the press and the authorities along these phases and draws the implications of this interaction for the social functions of the private press and the status and utilities of press freedom in Morocco.