Crafting the good citizen, streaming the good king: Notes on press freedom, hegemony and social contention in King Abdallah II’s Jordan Rossana Tufaro Abstract During the mandate of King Abdallah II, press freedom in Jordan has undergone a significant contraction. This has progressively endowed the Hashemite monarchy and its organic incumbents with an unprecedented directive control over the circulation and the framing of events in the country – hence over the capacity to strategically filter from above the diffusion of politically sensitive news, silence voices of political challengers, and orient domestic and international opinion. This paper aims to provide a preliminary assessment of the role played by the enforcement and the strategic application of restrictions on media freedom in consolidating King Abdallah II’s rule, by scrutinizing how the cumulative strategic application of press restrictions succeeded or failed to validate King Abdallah II's international reputation of a moderate and progressive leader, and legitimize the neoliberal upgrading of the authoritarian bargain with his domestic constituencies. Keywords: Right to Information, Press Freedom, Civic Space, Jordan, Social Movements To cite this paper: Rossana Tufaro, "Crafting the good citizen, streaming the good king: Notes on press freedom, hegemony and social contention in King Abdallah II’s Jordan ", Civil Society Knowledge Center, Lebanon Support, July, 2021 . DOI: . [ONLINE]: https://civilsociety-centre.org/paper/crafting-good-citizen-streaming-good-king-notes-press-freedom- hegemony-and-social-contention Introduction In recent years, press freedom in Jordan has undergone a significant contraction (Alnajjar 2021). The repressive shift arrived concurrently with the steady rise in contentious mobilizations that the country has been experiencing since 2011, as a result of the progressive degradation of the average living conditions and the state reiteration of tight IMF-backed neoliberal reforms. Currently, Jordan is ranked 129 out of 180 in Reporters Without Borders’ World Press Freedom Index (RSF 2021). Following the stringent legislative initiatives which hit online journalism and social media against the backdrop of 2011 Hirak, the independent coverage of local news, as well as the space for a plural political debate on online outlets have experienced a severe blow. Since 2013, on the grounds of the lack of official licensing, hundreds of websites have been blocked. Also, after the enforcement of the 2015 cybercrime law which made the publication of articles and comments liable to penal sanctioning, journalists’ self-censorship significantly increased. Equally important, the new legislative cadre enabled