Since news broke of Israel's raid on the Gaza aid flotilla, Global Voices (GV) authors have written more than 25 posts highlighting international citizen media reactions to the events. One of these posts, Israel: Flotilla Clashes are a “Serious PR Disaster”, by Israeli Author Gilad Lotan, became the subject of a passionate discussion in the Egyptian twittersphere. The main points of contention were that the post presents several mainstream Israeli media quotes that mostly defend the raid, and also that the it referenced Israeli government sources, plus an image of knives and clubs released by Israel to support the claim that the military acted in self defense. The debate took place both internally, on the GV Middle East and North Africa e-mail group, and publicly on Twitter. Internally, we all reaffirmed our commitment to presenting a diversity of voices—including those from Israel—from the region, but there was also disagreement and criticism from team members about the framing of this post. We have decided to summarise and share some the public criticism in this post, as we believe it highlights opinions about Global Voices as well as of media coverage of the conflict in general. We also wanted to respond to the specific accusation that Global Voices is not sufficiently critical of itself. It all began when Egyptian blogger Alaa Abdel Fatah sent a tweet with a link to Gilad's post to fellow blogger Sarah Carr: @alaa: @Sarahcarr look at this and barf http://is.gd/czjpZ Sarah Carr responded: @SarahCarr: @alaa But should we expect anything else from GVO? Doesn't it advocate free speech therefore offensive BS like this? This exchange kicked off a public discussion on Twitter in a mix of Arabic and English. Most of the people involved in the discussion that followed have either met in person or online, and follow each other's Twitter feeds and blogs. Egyptian blogger Mona (@monasosh) called the post “dirty”. Mohamed El-Gohary (@IRCPresident), a GV Author from Egypt and co-Editor of GV's Arabic translation team, responded: @ircpresident: @monasosh And since #GVO is about amplifying all voices you should expect this kind of voices since they exist after all. To which Mona replied: @monasosh: @ircpresident if u present their argument wtout obvious critisism then u r supporting them. It's as simple as that. Both El-Gohary (@IRCPresident) and myself, Tarek Amr (@gr33ndata), replied that we didn't think the presentation necessarily reflected a point of view held either by Global Voices or its authors. I also pointed to the special coverage page for the flotilla raid, which listed articles showing a variety of perspectives on the raid. Egyptian GV contributor Eman Abdel Rahman (@Lastoadri) also responded to critiques from blogger Wael Khalil: @Lastoadri: @wael However I need to understand deeper y the post is causing anger, so I would properly address the matter to our internal group #GVO At which point blogger Amr Gharbeia chimed in: @gharbeia: @Lastoadri The story. Outside the quotes, the story is just rubbish. #GVO Representing whose voices? Alaa Abdel Fattah then sent a tweet mocking Global Voices, using a chant commonly used in demonstrations in Egypt. Bahraini Amira Al Hussaini (@JustAmira), GV's Middle East and North Africa editor, responded, asking Alaa to be more constructive. @JustAmira: @alaa excuse me? It's just a bunch of us working – help us by sending links and positive enforcements instead of words like gaban & 3ameel. Alaa replied that GV's editorial policies should be revised to “censor” Zionist perspectives, as those viewpoints “get enough play in mainstream media.” An exchange then took place between Alaa and Jillian York (@jilliancyork), a member of GV's Middle East and North Africa team based in the United States. @jilliancyork: @alaa @JustAmira So does that mean ignoring a segment of the blogosphere just because we deem it nasty? @alaa: @jilliancyork 1 we already ignore large portions of blogosphere so idea is not out of question @jilliancyork: @alaa Absolutely. But is one bias more wrong than another? @alaa: @jilliancyork yes totally. Being biased in support of steve biko good biased in support of apartheid bad @alaa: @jilliancyork IMO GV is not critical enough of it's own, what I read regularly feels strongly biased by authors’ own views & soc network Alaa's assertion that GV “ignores”—or fails to cover—segments of the blogosphere is fair, but that's also because it's humanly impossible to read or link to every blog post that merits highlighting.