Hwaida, you’ve covered the civil war in Syria since 2011. How have the tech tools that you’ve used for that evolved over the past eight years?

Hwaida: When I joined The Times in 2007, my laptop and my mobile phone and landline were almost the only tools I used for reporting. Back then, social media wasn’t widely available in Syria. Facebook was banned, but people used it discreetly.

After 2011, Syrians started to find different ways to communicate with the media. So I activated my Facebook account and created a Skype account.

Syrian activists began trying to mobilize international and domestic support for protests against the regime of Bashar al-Assad. Uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt in 2011 also inspired Syrian activists, who drew on the same tools and methods used by other Arab activists. They posted videos to YouTube, created Twitter hashtags and attempted to portray a rising nonviolent Syrian protest wave through online media. With the absence of journalists on the ground, social media and the internet proved essential to the international coverage of Syria.

I’ve now used almost every single communication technology to reach Syrian contacts, from satellite phones to Skype to YouTube to Twitter to WhatsApp to Facebook. I used them to chat with people I never thought I would reach.

You had some issues being blocked by WhatsApp, which is owned by Facebook. Why?

Hwaida: I joined about 150 WhatsApp chat rooms, including Islamic State ones that became super active — in order to do my reporting. I was blocked by WhatsApp more than once because I was violating its terms by joining ISIS-related groups, which are generally barred on the service.