Tag archive: Tunisia

Social media really did play an instrumental role in the wave of “Arab Spring” revolutions that swept across parts of the Middle East and Northern Africa earlier this year, a new study has found.  Researchers at the University of Washington sifted through more than 3 million tweets, countless hours of YouTube videos and gigabytes of blogs to find out whether the Internet, and social media services like Twitter and Facebook really… Read More

As evidenced by the Facebook Revolutions and ensuing Middle East turmoil, the Internet is a powerful tool and one capable of change. Of course, its eliminating citizen use of the Web under oppressive regimes has also yielded consequences. Perhaps inspired by these effects, the UN has declared the Internet a human right. A recent report titled “Report of the Special Rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and… Read More

Tunisia might be a fledgling democracy after President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali stepped down in January following mass demonstrations and riots, but the country is still trying to find a balance between the power of modern technology and traditional values. According to Tunisian media, a court has ordered the Tunisian Internet Agency to block access too all sites with pornographic and adult content, following a lawsuit that argued the sites… Read More

Google on Thursday launched the domains google.iq and google.tn provide regional, pertinent search results for the countries of Iraq and Tunisia respectively. Google had previously routed searches from Iraq and Tunisia through other countries. Now, an Iraqi searching for, say, a shoe store is more likely to find one that's closer to his or her location. The two new additions mean that Google now has 184 local domains worldwide, with 15 of… Read More

Shadowy “hacktivist” group Anonymous retaliated against the governments of Egypt and Yemen this week in a show of support for antigovernment protesters in those Middle Eastern countries. According to a report in The New York Times, about 500 Anonymous hackers managed to shut down the websites of Egypt's Ministry of Information, as well as that of embattled President Hosni Mubarak's National Democratic Party. The website… Read More

Anonymous members aren’t going down without a fight. Five suspected members of the hacktivist group were arrested in London yesterday (and released on bail this morning) and still they fight on: The group announced that the arrests in the UK are a “declaration of war” and advised authorities to consider themselves warned. They labeled the arrests as “exactly like arresting somebody for attending a peaceful demonstration in their hometown.” The… Read More

As Egyptians continuing protesting their political regime, the country’s government is consequentially stripping away access to social media websites. Earlier this morning, Twitter confirmed via its site that the country had blocked it, and Facebook has seen outages, as well as censorship of content relating to the presidential and prime minister’s demanded resignations. The protests in the country began as a call to end the decades-long… Read More

Myanmar – the country formerly known as Burma – has been judged the most restrictive country for bloggers, according to a new report from the Committee to Protect Journalists. The junta ruling Myanmar blocked all Internet access for a while during uprisings in 2007. Coming second on the list is Iran, where blogger Omid Mir Sayafi died in Tehran's Evin jail. He’d allegedly insulted the country’s leader,… Read More

China, North Korea, Burma…they’re places where protest has been crushed. But yesterday people demonstrated against Net censorship in virtual locations from those countries.  Organized by the group Reporters Without Borders, the first Online Free Expression Day invited people to create avatars and take part in demonstrations in virtuallocations where protest would not be allowed in the real world.   In a statement RWB said,… Read More

A year-long study by the OpenNet Initiative, detailed at a conference in Oxford, England, examined the practices of 41 countries to learn about online government surveillance and censorship. The results? Where five years ago only a handful of states were filtering Internet content, the study found 25 of the countries it examined were engaged in state-mandated filtering and censorship of online content, and the filtering is becoming more… Read More

With all the recent bruhaha in the U.S. about corporate employees being disciplined or pink-slipped over personal blog entries which reveal trade secrets or say unflattering things about their employers, it's easy to forget that, in many parts of the world, the consequences of posting unpopular or unsanctioned material online can be much higher. To that end, Reporters Without Borders (Reporters sans Frontières, known by its… Read More