Tag archive: censorship

The Iranian government has reportedly begun blocking access to the Internet. A post on Hacker News explains that since yesterday, it’s been difficult to impossible to get online. “Since Thursday Iranian government has shutted [sic] down the HTTPS protocol which has caused almost all Google services (Gmail, and Google.com itself) to become inaccessible,” Sara70 writes. “Almost all websites that rely on Google APIs (like Wolphram Alpha) won’t… Read More

The Brazilian government has requested an injunction against Twitter that would block Twitter users from alerting drivers about sobriety checkpoints, road blocks, and speed traps. The Brazilian government views tweets about police and traffic enforcement operations as undermining efforts to improve road safety and reduce traffic accidents—and the tweets also help out car thieves and folks who are transporting illegal goods by enabling them to… Read More

Responding to strong government pressure to remove content offensive to Indian politicians and religious groups, Google India has removed an unspecified number of sites and images from Google services in the country (reportedly including Blogger and YouTube) in response to an ongoing court case. The action follows weeks of pressure by the Indian government against nearly two dozen Internet companies, including Google, Yahoo, Microsoft, and… Read More

Google has quietly added county-specific URLs to Blogger blogs, in an effort to more effectively address take-down notices from local governments. The change allows Google to censor specific blogs in a single country, rather than worldwide, where rules surrounding pornographic, religious, or political content differ from other parts of the world. The addition of country-code top level domains (ccTLDs) to Blogger follows Twitter's… Read More

An increasing number of Twitter users are planning to boycott Twitter tomorrow, January 28, in protest of its newly-announced policy that it will censor individual tweets in certain countries that require it to do so. At first glance, this reaction is completely understandable. Censorship is, after all, a bad thing. Free speech should be protected, fought for. Just because a totalitarian regime restricts certain speech doesn't mean… Read More

Today Twitter announced it will be censoring information based on global codes of conduct. “As we continue to grow internationally, we will enter countries that have different ideas about the contours of freedom of expression,” the company wrote on its blog. “Some differ so much from our ideas that we will not be able to exist there. Others are similar but, for historical or cultural reasons, restrict certain types of content, such as France or… Read More

We’ve all undoubtedly suffered a bit due to the Wikipedia blackout today. The site has censored itself to give the Internet a test of what the consequences of SOPA/PIPA regulations could look like. And while it’s inarguably effective and has created something of a rally cry among devoted Web users, some take issue with the tactic—specifically, Wikipedia editors. “I think the Wikipedia blackout protest was a really bad idea,” editor Charles… Read More

Trying to carve out a space on the Internet is becoming difficult. A visual image of the Web is like globe with its seams literally bursting from the onslaught of content we’re producing. Retweets and reposts and likes and +1s are all virtually pushing against the surface and generously spilling over. So social platform creation comes with its pros and cons. On the plus side, you will always find a user base – even if it’s a (relatively) small… Read More

We’re all for showing anti-SOPA/PIPA sentiment. This proposed legislation would dismantle the Internet as we know it and freedom of expression would take a serious hit. All that said, we also know how important Wikipedia is to the Web user’s everyday existence, and a full 24 hours without might be more than you can handle. After reaching this point, first take a minute to think about how SOPA and PIPA could cause Internet censorship like this… Read More

The China Internet Network Information Center—China's state-run Internet registry—reports (Chinese PDF) that the number of Web users in China increased by 12 percent in 2011, reaching a total of 513 million users in December 2011. As a point of comparison, that means China has 67 percent more Web users than the entire U.S. population: five Chinese citizens access the Web for every three Americans—regardless of whether… Read More

The Internet has been rumbling and mobilizing in response to SOPA. One of the latest acts of protest against the Stop Online Piracy Act is a planned blackout by social website reddit on January 18. Reddit admins announced the plan in a blog post on Tuesday. The post acknowledged the activism by redditors in the fight against “powerful forces trying to censor the Internet.” However, the admins explained that it was time for the next stage of the… Read More

Speaking at the Freedom Online conference at The Hague, European Commissioner Neelie Kroes called for the European Union to develop and distribute technology to help bloggers and others living under oppressive regimes to communicate safely—and anonymously—with the rest of the world. Kroes outlined a four-part strategy that included not only developing technology to aid in communication, but also teaching activists how to use it, developing… Read More

Regulating the Internet is turning out to be much more difficult than the federal government anticipated. The E-PARASITE legislation, a bill proposed by Congress that was formerly known as the Senate-backed PROTECT IP Act, has been making the rounds and will attempt to punish copyright infringement–as well as toy with its definitions to a harrowing degree. As one law blog put it, “It’s as though George Lucas came out with the director’s… Read More

The four largest Internet service providers in the UK will soon allow customers to block all pornography, or to purposefully choose to see the sexually explicit material, reports the Guardian. The controversial move is part of the government's attempts to cut down on Internet pornography. UK Prime Minister David Cameron will announce the new guidelines during meetings with the Mother's Union, which has launched a mission earlier… Read More

It's no secret that China's government is very wary of the Internet. In recent memory, the government's tactics to deal with that unease have shifted from censoring information and news to trying to get a handle on social networks. Early this morning, China's state news agency gave the newest sign that Chinese social networks are under fire by imploring various networks to stop the “cancer” of online rumors. This… Read More