Government Control
Media Censorship: Media Freedom Worsens in China
Tightened press controls followed official concerns about ‘Jasmine’ uprisings. China has fallen once again in world press freedom rankings, following a year marked by crackdowns around the world, the Paris-based press monitor Reporters Without Borders (RSF) said in an annual report. “Control of news and information continued to tempt governments and to be a question [...]
China’s Top Official in Tibet Orders New Media Clampdown
China’s top leader in Tibet is urging local authorities to clamp down on Internet and mobile phone use in the region, as Beijing prepares to open its annual National People’s Congress and Tibetans honor those who have died protesting Chinese rule. The state-run Tibet Daily quotes regional Communist Party chief Chen Quanguo as saying that [...]
Somali Journalist Killing Is Latest in Violent Trend
A Mogadishu radio-station director has became the third Somali journalist killed in as many months. The death underscores the constant threat against journalists working in the war-torn country. Abukar Hassan Mohamoud is the latest journalist to be killed in the bullet-ridden Somali capital, Mogadishu. Witnesses say unidentified gunmen assassinated the Somaliweyn radio station director late [...]
Media Censorship: Vietnam Journalist Held For ‘Graft’
Vietnamese authorities have arrested a journalist who wrote a series of exposes on corruption for allegedly bribing a traffic cop, according to a state media report. The official Thanh Nien newspaper said Hoang Khuong, 37, whose real name is Nguyen Van Khuong and who writes for the Tuoi Tre newspaper, was detained on Monday. He [...]
Censorship: 2011 in Review – Internet Freedom in the Wake of the Arab Spring
| By Jillian C. York | Sourced from EFF.org (Creative Commons License) | As the year draws to a close, EFF is looking back at the major trends influencing digital rights in 2011 and discussing where we are in the fight for a free expression, innovation, fair use, and privacy. For several years, discussions about global Internet [...]
Political Censorship: China Faces Ongoing Tension in Restive Xinjiang
Members of the Uyghur ethnic minority walk past a Muslim mosque near the Erduoqiao neighborhood in Urumqi in northwestern China’s Xinjiang Uygur Autonomous Region. China’s far northwestern Xinjiang region is settled primarily by the Muslim Uighurs who have long chafed under Chinese rule. In recent years, there have been episodes of violence between locals and [...]
Censorship in America: ‘Word on Street’ Impacted Language in 2011
Global grassroots movements coin new words, phrases. Occupy Wall Street protesters at Three World Financial Center in New York. While 2011 is over, some of the words that came to define the past year are still very much with us, and may be for years to come. Occupy Grant Barrett, vice president of the American [...]
Tunisia: Censorship and Freedom of Speech in the Year That Was
| Written by Afef Abrougui | Sourced from Global Voices (Creative Commons) | Former Tunisian President Zeine El Abidine Ben Ali was an enemy to freedom of speech. With its heavy tactics, his regime attempted to silence all dissidents. The Tunisian Internet Agency (known as the ATI from its French acronym) spent significant resources on [...]
Media Censorship: Unrest Spreads In Southern China
Residents protest a power plant they say is polluting their village in China’s Guangdong province. Thousands of angry residents surrounded government buildings and blocked roads in the southern Chinese province of Guangdong on Tuesday in protest at a coal-fired power plant they say is polluting the environment, officials and protesters said. Police clashed with large [...]
Internet Censorship: Chinese Netizens Jailed for Wedding Video
Chinese authorities move quickly to discourage ‘negative’ postings online. Two men who posted a video of columns of police they said were a guard of honor at a wedding party in the central province of Hunan have been sentenced to five days’ administrative detention for using the Internet to spread rumors and “disturb public order.” [...]
Internet Censorship: Lamar Smith Still Thinks It’s Just Google That Opposes SOPA / PIPA
| By Mike Masnick | Sourced from TechDirt| It’s really quite stunning to watch Lamar Smith pull out really out-dated talking points as he gets more and more desperate to defend SOPA, as he discovers that all the vaunted “support” that the US Chamber of Commerce promised him there was for the bill melts away. [...]
