I don't understand this. AFAICT, parent is implying it's meaningful to compare Middle Easterners sharing information about protests and violence, and Westerners sharing unverifiably truthy HuffPo/Breitbart/whatever articles.

It's true that both of those examples boil down to 'humans digitally sharing information', but the circumstances surrounding both the humans and the information are so different as to make this kind of reductive comparison useless.