13 Jun 13 | Digital Freedom, Europe and Central Asia
Pussy Riot – videos of their “Punk Prayer” protest are blocked by Russian authorities
April saw a bizarre variety of sites blocked by the Russian authorities or internet service providers – among them Pussy Riot videos, Wikipedia, the Yandex search engine, Blogger blogs, sites promoting bribery and corruption, sites of land developers and the humorous anti-encyclopaedia Absurdopedia (the Russian version of Uncyclopedia). Even the parody website Gospoisk (gossearch.ru) was blocked. The site is a fake search engine, ostensibly created with government support: when a visitor types a query in the search box, he or she is asked to enter his first and last name, patronymic, passport details, address and the reason for the request. Compiled by Andrei Soldatov
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12 Jun 13 | Europe and Central Asia
Belarus’s dictator Alexander Lukashenko will be able to count on some “like-minded” friends when it comes to a vote on his human rights record at the UN this week. Andrei Aliaksandrau reports
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07 Jun 13 | Middle East and North Africa
With the 14 June presidential election approaching, Iran’s leaders are moving to prevent the outburst of protest that followed the disputed 2009 poll by tightening access to the web and silencing “negative” news. Raha Zahedpour reports
Iran’s state television this week held the second of three presidential debates. Unlike the 2009 debates, no one-on-one debating was allowed. In these debates, resembling game shows, candidates have less than five minutes to talk about their policies on different issues, and other candidates were chosen at random to question the speaker. Candidates were then left with very limited time to conclude after the end of questions.
The eight qualified candidates could not escape Iran’s strict censorship during their campaigns. Iranian state TV censored reformist candidate Mohammad Reza Aref’s speech in a programme broadcast for the Iranian diaspora on 26 May. The recording was halted and not resumed.
In another programme on the domestic Channel One, conservative candidate Mohsen Rezaei was censored for talking about how unemployment devastated a family who lost their children in the war, and were led to suicidal thoughts as a result of pressures from the economic crisis and inflation.
State television censored documentaries made by the campaigns of each candidate — including Saeed Jalili, Ayatollah Khamenei’s favoured candidate — showing that even a favourite could not escape the sharp blades of censorship.
Iran carefully vetted the candidates in this year’s race: Hashemi Rafsanjani and Rahim Mashaei were disqualified from the upcoming presidential election by Iran’s Guardian Council. Hashemi Rafsanjani, 78, was dropped from the race for being too old. Mashaei was disqualified because he promotes nationalism and nationalist Islam — despite being a part of hard-liners faction.
Even before the election’s candidates were announced, Iran’s ruling elite moved to slow internet connections, blocked access to Gmail accounts, and clamped down on circumvention tools. All over the country, Iranians are struggling to access social media, or even check their email.
Authorities have also tightened up web censorship — censoring even influential political figures close to the government. A blog belonging to one of Rafsanji’s advisors was blocked recently. The move raised eyebrows, because Hashemi Rafsanji is key revolutionary figure, a former president, a former head of Parliament and the current chairman of the Expediency Discernment Council of Iran.
Iran also shut down sites aligned to presidential hopeful Efandiar Rahim Mashaei.
Meanwhile, Ahmadi Moghadam, the chief commander of Police, said that the authorities would not allow any distractions around the election. Following the announcement, jailed journalists and bloggers who were released after being imprisoned and sentenced after the 2009 uprising were arrested once more. Former presidential candidates Mir Hossein Mousavi and Mehdi Karroubi are still under house arrest.
Iran’s press has also faced enormous challenges in reporting on the election. The ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance invited journalists to a seminar about what could be reported. Officials emphasised that “negative news” should not be published. Subsequently, some papers received official notices for their content. The websites of reformist newspapers Mardom Saalaary and Bahar were blocked, even though print editions of the newspapers continued to be distributed
In light of restrictions, rights organisations have cast doubt on the election’s freedom. In a 24 May statement Human Rights Watch asked, “How can Iran hold free elections when opposition leaders are behind bars and people can’t speak freely?”
Raha Zahedpour is a journalist and researcher living in London. She writes under a pseudonym
04 Jun 13 | Asia and Pacific, China
On the 24th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square protests — when Chinese security forces carried out a violent crackdown on protesters occupying the legendary square in Beijing’s centre killing hundreds — Index on Censorship calls on the Chinese government to honour its constitutional commitment to free speech and to allow free access to information about the events. Sara Yasin writes
China has been working hard to crush attempts to commemorate the anniversary — both on and offline. Dozens of police officers have blocked the gates to the Wanan cemetery where victims of the massacres are buried, visited annually by the Tiananmen Mothers.
China has declared today “Internet maintenance day” — where the authorities darken sites in the name of “maintenance.” In previous years, China’s day of online maintenance has included shutting down blogs and websites with reputations for veering from the ruling party’s line. The Chinese-language Wikipedia page containing an uncensored account of the massacre was blocked by authorities on Monday.
Users of China’s most popular microblogging site, Sina Weibo, have been blocked from typing in variants of phrases like “June 4”, “Today”, “candle”, and “in memory of.” Also included in the banned list is “big yellow duck” — a reference to a photoshopped image where tanks were replaced with rubber ducks in the iconic photograph of a lone protester standing before a row of tanks in Tiananmen Square.
The United States today called on Chinese authorities to release the full account of those two bloody days, as there is not even an official death toll. China shot back through the state-run Xinhua news agency, urging the US to “stop interfering in China’s internal affairs so as not to sabotage China-US relations.”
A reputation for censorship
China’s ruling Communist Party has also recently released a list of seven banned topics, and has been quick to curb discussion of the “dangerous Western influences” online. The political topics, which include “freedom of speech”, “civil rights”, “crony capitalism”, and “The historical errors of the Chinese Communist Party”, were banned by the country’s top propaganda officials. When East China University of Political Science and Law professor Zhang Xuezhong posted the seven “speak-nots” online, the post was quickly deleted by censors.
As Wen Yunchao wrote for Index, Chinese censorship is “mainly aimed at the control of news and discussion of current affairs. Day-to-day censorship in China falls into two categories. The government’s propaganda authorities supervise websites that are legally licensed to carry news, while those without a license are dealt with by the public security authorities and the internet police. Unlicensed websites that are considered particularly influential may also be overseen by propaganda officials.”
The Chinese state’s control of the web is a model of bad behaviour for other nations around the world, according to a New York Times report. A dirty dozen or so control what the country’s citizens read and write online.
With over 500 million web users in China, the shear size of the Chinese user base makes censorship a leaky bucket for the country. A study conducted by two American computer scientists estimated that 30 per cent of banned posts are removed within half an hour of posting, and 90 per cent within 24 hours. Suzanne Nossel, executive director of the PEN American centre, wrote in April that China’s censors are caught in “a race against new platforms and technologies.”
The country’s notoriously strict censorship machine has earned it low rankings for press freedom and freedom of expression: it ranked 173rd out of 179 in this year’s World Press Freedom Index released by Reporters Without Borders — only coming ahead of free speech all-stars Iran, Somalia, Syria, Turkmenistan, North Korea, and Eritrea. According to the report, “commercial news outlets and foreign media are still censored regularly.” The Committee to Protect Journalists has reported that China uses libel suits to silence journalists — and there are 32 jailed journalists as of December 2012.
