Category Archives: Censorship

Chinese censors blocked information on the blind activist at the center of a diplomatic storm this year.

STORY HIGHLIGHTS

Hong Kong (CNN) -- Draconian laws, brutal attacks against bloggers and politically motivated surveillance are among the biggest threats to Internet freedom emerging in the last two years, according to a new report from free speech advocates, Freedom House.

"Freedom on the Net 2012: A Global Assessment of Internet and Digital Media," looked at barriers to access, limits on content, and violations of user rights in 47 countries across the globe. Estonia was rated as having the greatest degree of Internet freedom, while Iran, Cuba and China were viewed as the most restrictive.

While social media was key in the uprising in Egypt, censorship there continues apace, says Freedom House, a U.S.-based independent watchdog organization.

Although online activism is increasing, the report said authoritarian regimes were employing a wider and increasingly sophisticated arsenal of countermeasures.

Read more: The full report

According to Freedom House, China has the world's largest population of Internet users, yet the authorities operate the most sophisticated system of censorship. Its "great firewall" has become notorious for literally shutting down Internet "chatter" it views as sensitive. Earlier this year, censors blocked related search terms to prevent the public from obtaining news on prominent human rights activist Chen Guangcheng, who caused a diplomatic storm when he escaped house arrest to seek refuge in the U.S. Embassy in Beijing.

Read more: News on blind activist's escape

Major web portals and social networking sites, though not state-owned, have had to comply with strict government censorship rules -- or risk being shut down. After launching a campaign to clean up "rampant online rumors," Chinese authorities in March ordered the country's leading micro-blogging sites -- including Sina Weibo -- to disable their comment function for three days. In China, bloggers are also required to register their real names -- though it's not clear how many have complied with the rules.

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Big Brother still watching: Internet censorship on the up, report says

Published: Sept. 28, 2012 at 3:13 PM

WAHINGTON, D.C., Sept. 28 (UPI) -- Internet censorship is increasing as authoritarian regimes attempt to impose more restrictions on online activism, a U.S. watchdog organization reports.

Free speech group Freedom House said repressive laws, violent attacks on bloggers and government surveillance are among the biggest emerging threats to Internet freedom, CNN reported Friday.

Freedom house analyzed restriction of access, content censorship and violations of users' civil rights in 47 countries.

Iran, Cuba and China were the most repressive in terms of restricting Internet usage and freedoms, the group said.

Authorities in China conduct the most sophisticated censorship efforts, Freedom House said, because major Web portals and social networking sites, even though not state-owned, must obey with strict government censorship rules or risk being shut down.

Beijing's influence as an "incubator for sophisticated restrictions" has not gone unnoticed, the group said, with governments including Belarus, Uzbekistan and Iran following China's model for their own Internet crackdowns.

"The findings clearly show that threats to Internet freedom are becoming more diverse," Sanja Kelly, a project director at Freedom House, said.

"As authoritarian rulers see that blocked websites and high-profile arrests draw local and international condemnation, they are turning to murkier -- but no less dangerous -- methods for controlling online conversations."

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Global censorship of Internet on the rise

Government censorship isnt confined to the religious hotbeds of the Eastern Hemisphere: Googles top executive in Brazil was just released from custody after YouTube refused to take down a video critical of a local candidate. The recently freed Fabio Jose Silva Coelho is set for an undetermined court hearing after YouTube did not remove a salacious video allegedly revealing details of a mayoral candidate demanding her lover get an abortion. Since 1965, Brazil bans content that offend the dignity or decorum of the electoral process. Google is appealing the decision that ordered the removal of the video on YouTube because, as a platform, Google is not responsible for the content posted to its site, the company reports.

Brazil has also sided with a few Middle-Eastern and Asian nations in demanding that Google take down an offensive anti-Islamicvideo responsible for deadly riots around the world. Google agreed to censor the video in a few countries, such as Egypt and Libya, but not take it off the site and is (apparently) not taking it down in Brazil either.

The struggle highlights the growing struggle between self-expression, sovereignty, and the pervasiveness of technology.

[Via The Hill, Via Reuters]

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Censorship In The Americas: Google Brazil Chief Just Released From Custody

Polling day procedure may have been in place, but censorship ruined any chance of a free parliamentary election in Europes last dictatorship, says Andrei Aliaksandrau

Alexander Lukashenko turns up to cast his vote in Belaruss parliamentary election, accompanied by his son Nikolay

Last Sunday the people of Belarus learnt the new composition of the lower chamber of its parliament. But you cant really say that members of the parliament were elected. Most observers say that there are no genuine elections in Belarus, and that the parliament is insignificant because the power of the president is almost complete. A large part of the population shares that view.

The Belarus authorities claim that elections in Belarus are transparent. Journalists joke that they are so transparent that they are almost invisible. Although the Central Election Commission claimed that 72.3 per cent of voters went to the polling stations, independent observers say that turnout was no more than 35-40 per cent. The authorities falsified the turnout to give the elections the veneer of legitimacy.

There are no surprises in the composition of the new parliament. Most of the democratic opposition boycotted the election in different ways. Some parties European Belarus, the Christian Democrats and the Belarusian Movement announced from the start that they were not participating in the farce. Others, including the United Civil Party and the Belarus National Front, decided to get candidates registered to give themselves a platform but later withdrew, denouncing the election as a fraud. Some opposition parties ran candidates all the way through to election day but predictably without any success.

The lack of unity of approach among the opposition was criticised by civil society groups. All of the opposition was really in favour of a boycott, said Uladzimir Matskevich, chair of the coordination committee of the National Civil Society Forum. Even those people who called for participating in the campaign until the bitter end did so only in order to use the opportunity for publicity. So why not agree about a common strategy from the very beginning?

The disunity of the opposition meant that it failed to send a clear message to voters. If ordinary people boycotted the election it had little to do with activities of oppositional groups and a lot to do with a general sense that the National Assembly has no real influence because of the overwhelming power of the president.

We dont have public politics in Belarus, said Zhanna Litivina, chair of the Belarus Association of Journalists (BAJ). Even when we had election debates on TV, it was obvious the candidates themselves did not really care about them.

A BAJ analysis of election media coverage shows that the state media, which are dominant in the country, misrepresented the campaign, focusing on the Central Election Commission rather than candidates or their programmes. There were cases of direct censorship as state TV refused to broadcast candidates statements. Debates were never live but always pre-recorded. No appeal for a boycott of the elections ever appeared in the state media.

The official explanation from Lidzija Yarmoshyna, the CEC chair, was that airtime was dedicated to campaigning, not boycotting. According to the chair of the United Civil Party, Anatol Labiedzka, 32 addresses by the partys candidates were not broadcast and state-owned papers refused to print 11 of its candidates programmes.

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Belarus’s illusion of democracy

While Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is in New York, his cronies at home are shutting every single one of their citizens out of the internet. Their reasoning: 'we may get attacked by zionist viruses.' Riiiight.

On Sunday, the Iranian state television network announced that Google and Gmail would be blocked "within a few hours." The ban will remain in effect until further notice.

Meanwhile, a government deputy minister announced they were going to put all their citizens in a "domestic internet network." While Iran has blocked sites that go against the government's views in the past, this will cut citizens off the internet completely.

This time they are planning to take everyone off the grid and into their own government-controlled corral. People are not longer going to be able to use virtual private networks to bypass governmental censorship and access information freely.

The deputy communications and technology minister Ali Hakim-Javadi says the operation is already under way: "In recent days, all governmental agencies and offices... have been connected to the national information network."

Officially, every Iranian will be in this cage by March 2013 but the government has not announced yet when they will effectively shut down access to the internet.

With Syria, Egypt and Libya still resonating in their twisted brains, the government and state media are babbling all kinds of excuses to what it seems like a simple move to blindfold its citizens and control the people by having full control of the information they have access to.

The first excuse was given by the Iranian Students' News Agency, who says the blocking was caused by the infamous "Innocence of Islam" video hosted on Google's YouTube service.

The government, however, says that they are doing this because two reasons. First, the "control over the Internet should not be in the hands of one or two countries" (which of course, is pure hypocrisy, given that they are forcing citizens onto their own network).

The second reason is computer attacks by external forces. According to Communications and Technology Minister Reza Taqipour, you can't trust the internet "especially on major issues and during crises." Major issues like Google taking the name Persian Gulf out of Google Maps, or crises like the virus that attacked their nuclear plants. [Reuters]

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Iran Shuts Down Google, Will Completely Cut Citizens Off the Internet [Censorship]

In an interview with DW, Eva Galperin from the Electronic Frontier Foundation, argues that Google's 'pro-active' approach to the censorship of the controversial "Innocence of Muslims" video sets a dangerous precedent.

DW: Do you think the "Innocence of Muslims" video should be banned by Google?

Eva Galperin: I most certainly do not think that the video should be banned, either in the United States or in Egypt and in Libya were Google chose to ban it in spite of the fact that they acknowledged that it was consistent with their terms of service and they had not received any court orders.

Do you believe in free speech at any cost?

I believe in free speech within the limits of US law, which is not completely unadulterated free speech. And furthermore, I do acknowledge that Google does have to obey the law in countries where it receives a valid court order, such as countries where it has offices and is therefore under that country's jurisdiction. I do think that's one of the reasons why Google needs to be extremely circumspect about where they have their offices, because if they want to maintain their devotion to freedom of expression, they need to understand that when they move into other countries where freedom of expression is not as strongly supported, they may have to make these kinds of compromises when they receive court orders in countries like India and possibly Malaysia.

Some critics are calling for a concrete, transnational system of internet governance. Would you approve of such an idea?

Free speech, but not at any cost: Eva Galperin

Worldwide internet governance is highly problematic. Partially because of the clashes between various countries right to autonomy and their right to decide what kind of content is allowed in each country. But also because the US frequently uses these kinds of worldwide treaties or agreements in order to push through its own intellectual property agenda which can often lead to widespread censorship, which we are very concerned about, which we saw with ACTA [Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement], and also what you saw domestically in the United States their attempt to pass SOPA [Stop Online Piracy Act].

Do you think Obama's condemnation of the video can be read as an attack on free speech?

No I don't. I think that the White House has been fairly clear in its support of freedom of speech, while at the same time condemning the violence. There is nothing about condemning the violence that necessitates the censorship of this video. I think that by condemning the violence without calling for the censorship of this video, the White House is making it clear that they are putting the blame where it belongs - on the perpetrators of the violence.

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'US administration has put blame where it belongs'

The tawdry piece of work that is the Innocence of Muslims raises problems for the proponents of censorship

The friends of freedom should not make exceptions because freedom's enemies never do. Admittedly, the trailer for Innocence of Muslims (one of its many titles) makes the temptation to allow just one exception close to overwhelming. It advertises an amateur and adolescent piece of religious propaganda that depicts Muhammad as a violent and lascivious fool. Copts probably made it. As there is no great difference between Christian and Islamist extremists, why not intervene in this clash of fundamentalisms and stop one sect inciting another sect to violence?

Even before mobs attacked the US embassy in Cairo, its diplomats felt the urge to abandon basic principles. "We firmly reject the actions by those who abuse the universal right of free speech to hurt the religious beliefs of others," they said. Hillary Clinton was hardly more robust. "The United States deplores any intentional effort to denigrate the religious beliefs of others. Our commitment to religious tolerance goes back to the very beginning of our nation." It was a little too late in the day before she recalled America had other commitments going back to its founding, and muttered for all that America still does "not stop citizens from expressing their views, no matter how distasteful".

European states, with all their counter-productive restrictions on freedom of speechand yes, thank you, I include laws against Holocaust denial, denial of the Armenian genocide and all the other prohibitions of hatred that litter the statute bookswould find a way to ban the film and arrest the filmmakers. The British police would use public order and breach of peace laws. The wistful tone of the Obama administration make one suspect that it wished the US Constitution did not prevent it following suit

Innocence of Muslims is one of the hardest cases for liberals I've come across. But even this tawdry piece of work raises problems for the proponents of censorship. The first is a problem with language. Mount a critique of Islamist religious fanaticism, and it is only a matter of time before you find that defenders of religious reaction have hijacked liberal language. You are an "orientalist", they say, an "Islamophobe", "neo-colonialist" or "neocon". (The suffix "neo-" has become a synonym for "evil". The reader need only see a "neo-" to know that no good will follow.)

'Offences against Islam'

The joke of it is that defenders of censorship represent "orientalism" at its most patronising. They see the world's Muslims as an undifferentiated and infantile mass. The smallest provocationa cartoon in a Jutland newspaper, a trailer for a nasty but obscure filmis enough to turn them into a raging mass of bearded men who bellow curses as they fire their Kalashnikovs. They take no account of those in Libya, Egypt and Iran who want nothing to do with clerical violence. As seriously, they do not understand that "offences against Islam" are manufactured by extremists, who must keep their supporters in a state of violent rage or see their power wane.

The murder of US diplomats was not carried out spontaneously, but by a jihadist militia that wanted to kill Americans on the 9/11 anniversary. In Egypt, the controversy over the Coptic film was created by Al-Nas, a Salafi channel dedicated to promoting militant Islam. These crises are political events, in other words. Their promoters must create the poisonous atmosphere in which they thrive. Does anyone doubt that if the Muhammad film had never been made, they would not have found another target for their fury? Has everyone forgotten that their targets have included men and women liberals have a duty to defend? The same people who scream today, applauded the murder of Salman Tasser for protesting against the execution of Pakistani "blasphemers" who "insulted" Islam. They hoped for the murder of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, because she tried to stand up for the right of immigrant women to resist religious oppression in Europe.

Then of course there is the case of The Satanic Verses. Salman Rushdie has chosen this week to publish his autobiography. I would have said that the timing was perfect from his publisher's point of view, except that so many other weeks would have revealed how the violence caused by Ayatollah Khomeini's attempt to suppress The Satanic Verses in 1989 and murder all those associated with it never passed. Readers who were around at the time will remember that a desperate Rushdie tried to appease his persecutors by issuing an abject apology. He learned that there are forces you cannot appease, when the Islamists laughed and carried on with the terror campaign. It is a lesson we would do well to remember.

To bring the story up to date we now have before us the example of the UK's Channel 4's documentary on the origins of Islam. It was everything that the Muhammad trailer was not. Tom Holland presented a thoughtful and balanced film on the arguments among historians about whether the armies that exploded out of Arabia to conquer the Persian empire and much of the Byzantine empire were Muslim, or whether Islam came later. His documentary was public service television at its most scrupulous. I speak from experience when I say that he has no hatred of religion. The last time I met him was at a debate where he argued for and I argued against a motion that religion was a force for good in the world.

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Nothing, however vile, justifies censorship

There is no censorship in Ukraine. Ukraine has an open society.

The economy of Ukraine is stable and will continue to be so as long as this administration is in power or until the end of time, whichever comes first.

There is absolutely no corruption at the highest echelon of Ukrainian government. The existence of high-level corruption is a myth.

If you believe those statements to be true, I have hectares of prime farmland in the Chornobyl dead zone to sell you. In the administrations Orwellian-speak, black is white and white is chartreuse.

In fact, the official pronouncements often make the famous Twilight Zone seem as normal as Sunday morning pancakes and kefir. The truth is out there, perhaps hidden in a far-off black hole, but there. The sad thing is that at times the administration seems so earnest in its feel-good proclamations that one would think they actually believe it themselves.

It reminds me of some Ukrainian advertising contests, where the agency that bought first place convinces itself it won first place. Otherwise, why would they have been handed the gold-plated statuette?

I think this whole very translucent spin game is a remnant of the Soviet era. I was once in a meeting with the late Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko in Moscow in which he earnestly proclaimed interest in a nuclear arms limitation treaty (SALT II). He was passionate about it.

Four months later, the USSR invaded Afghanistan, thereby ensuring that the treaty, negotiated by several administrations, would not even be brought up in the U.S. Senate.

What sparked this discourse was the silent protest at the World Newspaper Congress in Kyiv recently where some 16 editors and journalists held signs reading: Stop Censorship and Media Oligarchs Serve the Authorities during President Viktor Yanukovychs address.

The irony is that as the president boasted about Ukraines open society and asserted that it was free of censorship, his security guards were trying to take away the protest signs, knocking around a couple of journalists in the process.

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Back Story: Orwellian-speak

Photo moderators for Facebook and other popular websites are contracted out, some of those negotiations even crossing international boundaries, according to article in The Daily Beast.

The Daily Beast launched an investigation on Facebook censorship after the popular social media website banned The New Yorkers page for containing a cartoon of a naked man and woman where the womans breasts were represented as two black dots.

Eventually, Facebook lifted the ban, calling it a mistake.

On first thought, the words Facebook moderators sound appealing. The site is so popular, so some form of regulation needs to be in place. Remember when users were exposed to image after image of women breastfeeding? People do not want to see that.

That being said, things are going to get tricky when Facebook employs a staff of moderators who hail from several different countries.

Those moderators are going to have varying codes of ethics, which will only lead to a confusing array of guidelines about whats permissible to post and whats not. In fact, moderators from the same country even could have different definitions of whats appropriate.

Finally, its understandable that The New Yorker faux pas occurred. The moderators have to sit there, sifting through photo after photo after photo, most of them probably tasteful. Then something slightly questionable such as The New Yorker cartoon pops up, and the moderators see reason to label it inappropriate. Also, the moderators probably didnt even realize the image was from The New Yorker. After clicking through so many photos, theyre probably not paying much attention to where those photos are coming from.

Looking forward, it will be interesting to see if Facebook comes up with any new tools to identify what content is and isnt appropriate. However, it seems unlikely that the company will ever be able to eradicate every inappropriate post on its site.

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EDIT: Facebook Censorship

The venerable New Yorker is the latest casualty in Facebook's senseless war on boobs. The Facebook page for the New Yorker's cartoon department was temporarily disabled after they posted the cartoon above featuring a topless lady, according to a blog post by New Yorker cartoon editor Bob Mankoff.

After the ban, the cartoon was even redrawn by its author, Mick Stevens, to feature a clothed couple, though "the gain in clothes caused too great a loss in humor," Mankoff writes.

Mankoff believes Facebook temporarily axed the New Yorker's cartoon page because the cartoon broke content guidelines that prohibit "naked 'private parts' including female nipple bulges and naked butt cracks." (We obtained and published Facebook's detailed content guidelines earlier this year.) This would make sense. The social network mercilessly hunts down and censors pictures of bare breasts like Iranian computer scientists going after Stuxnet, even when they appear in the innocuous context of breastfeeding.

However, Facebook has voiced acceptance of artistic representations of breasts. Last year an art school got banned for posting a nude sketch. After a public outcry Facebook admitted they made a mistake and said they had an "unwritten policy that allows drawings or sculptures of nudes." So why did The New Yorker's cartoon department get heat for posting a minimalist cartoon featuring breasts? Who knows. Maybe one of the poorly-paid Third World moderators who help police Facebook just didn't get it.

[Cartoon via The New Yorker]

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The New Yorker Got Temporarily Banned From Facebook for Posting Cartoon Boobs [Censorship]