Chinese censors have been working overtime on social network Weibo after users noticed that the new headquarters of state propaganda sheet the People’s Daily News (see pic) looked, er, a bit phallic.

According to the South China Morning Morning Post, Weibo searches for “People’s Daily” and “building” appear to show that the terms have been blocked.

“It seems the People’s Daily is going to rise up, there’s hope for the Chinese dream,” quipped one Weibo user.

Padraig Reidy is senior writer for Index on Censorship. @mePadraigReidy

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Ma Jian is a former winner of an Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Award. His latest novel, The Dark Road, is out now.

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With more than four billion people yet to come online around the world, basic connectivity is an obvious and necessary prerequisite for digital access. But handing out one laptop per child and selling low-cost smartphones does not solve the quality problem, and can in fact worsen it.

Repressive governments and opportunistic companies sometimes exploit their citizens’ and customers’ ignorance and apathy towards personal privacy and data protection in the name of national security and financial gain. Countries like Iran and China’s biggest web companies are obvious offenders, but western democracies and Silicon Valley startups are far from perfect.

Doling out laptops and ethernet cables without also spreading the internet’s core values of freedom and openness can inadvertently harm newly connected users and the wider web.

NGOs with good intentions sometimes make this mistake. More troubling are companies with financial incentives to lay cables and sell hardware in new markets. Africa is one of the least connected territories, making it, from a corporate perspective, a digital desert ripe for cybercolonialism. Despite being framed as aid, a $20 billion pledge from China to Africa last year was primarily about business. Chinese companies with troubling track records on digital rights and freedoms are also competing to lend their security and surveillance expertise to African governments, a serious cause for concern on the quality side of access.

Frank La Rue, the UN’s special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of the right to freedom of opinion and expression, has described internet access as a right and acknowledged both the quantity and quality components inherent and critical to the enjoyment of this right. Other digital thought leaders, like Google’s chief internet evangelist Vint Cerf, has described the internet as an enabler of human rights but not a right in and of itself. Both perspectives hold weight, but we must not forget that the internet can also be used as a disabler of human rights.

Rather than a panacea, the internet can be poison when used to monitor, suppress and prosecute online speech and offline action.

Cyberutopians who think smartphones will set us free have been proven wrong time and time again. On the flip side, this does not mean that cyberdystopians who fear governments will exploit our dependence on technology and digital communications to neutralise dissent are necessarily correct. Increasing the quantity of internet connections without minding the quality of those connections forged can potentially bring greater harm than good for digital access, but such harm is not inevitable. Companies and NGOs working to spread access should ensure that the benefits they bring outweigh potential dangers they create or expose and should ensure that quantity is balanced by quality at the corporate and government levels. Only when this balance is achieved can global digital access truly be advanced.

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Although some denied the reports, the merge was announced during the 2013 session of China’s parliament, with the motion passed in March.

Zhang Jin, deputy editor at  technology publisher Popular Science Press, told state news agency Xinhua:  

Over the last 30 years of the opening up and reform period, both GAPP and SARFT have developed tremendously, but with this development of industry and flourishing of culture, many new problems have risen, for example the lockdown of departments, and individual management by each media type of themselves, and approval [for content] department by department.

GAPP and SARFT didn’t want, under any under circumstances, to deal with each other. GAPP only paid attention to newspapers and print media and not broadcast media, and SARFT doesn’t get the support of the print media, making the merging of industries difficult.

The new body replacing SARFT and GAPP — unofficially translated as the General Administration of Press and Publication, Radio, Film and Television — will be responsible for regulating and overseeing print media, radio, film, television, as well as the internet. It will also handle rights and contents.

SARFT is the body that censors films — recently facing controversy for cutting science fiction film Cloud Atlas by 40 minutes. GAPP also came under fire earlier this year for overseeing the censoring of newspaper Southern Weekly New Year’s editorial. The Guangdong provincial propaganda chief rewrote the paper’s heading and editorial without consulting editorial staff, forcing the reform-orientated paper to run a piece toeing the official Party line.

While both SARFT and GAPP monitored the internet, the specifics of their responsibilities were never clear — but now new and uniform regulations have been revealed.

The China Press and Publishing Journal reported that there will be three new rules for internet use under the new body: use of news reports from abroad on websites will be forbidden without permission; editorial staff must not use the Internet for illegal content; and the microblog accounts of news media must be supervised, and an account holder appointed.

Whether the merge will create or lessen the chaos surrounding content control still remains to be seen.

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A few days after China’s most famous dissident artist Ai Weiwei was released from jail in June 2011, writer Barnaby Martin called his old mobile phone number. Unexpectedly, Ai answered call. Through subsequent meetings and conversations Martin recorded a full and unparalleled account of Ai Weiwei’s incarceration, from his airport detention to final release.

#aiww: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei is a new play by Howard Brenton, based on Barnaby Martin’s novel and directed by James Macdonald, showing now at the Hampstead Theatre. Index on Censorship is taking part in the worldwide live web streaming of the play, from 1930GMT on Friday 19 April.

This elegant performance centres on communication and miscommunication. In a series of baffling scenes the artist tries and fails to convey his version of events to a steady stream of guards, interrogators and officials who do not want to know. Challenged about his blog, Ai replies, “It’s the net, it’s freedom, why can I not say what I want? I’m human.”

He might as well be inhabiting a different world. In rare moments when we watch prisoner and guards communicating, for instance about how to cook Beijing noodles, it feels like Ai Weiwei might have won. His belief in the basic human need to think, believe and act freely has permeated even the Party’s most brain-washed foot soldiers.

These moments don’t last long, however. Although he was never beaten, Ai emerged from 81 days of imprisonment and psychological torture a different man.

This production serves as a reminder that arguments for national security and “harmony” will always be used in authoritarian regimes to limit freedom and condemn artists as “hooligans” and “conmen”, guilty of subverting state power. But all that Ai Weiwei claims to have been doing was depicting “humanity”, “nakedness” and “life”.

Index is glad to support Hampstead Theatre’s live streaming of #aiww: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei. You can watch it live from 19:30GMT on Friday 19 April

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The news of Mohammed Afzal Guru’s death in a New Delhi prison on 9 February ignited fierce objection and protests in three areas of India administered Kashmir, surrounding claims the men accused had not been given a fair trial.  The Kashmiri man was from a village close to Watergam, and had been convicted of helping to plot an attack on the Indian parliament in 2001 that left 14 people dead. Police said an inquiry has been launched into Mushtaq’s shooting.

Chinese authorities said Elton John dedicating his Beijing concert to Ai Weiwei was “disrespectful”

China has tightened its restrictions on foreign singers performing in the country after Elton John dedicated his Beijing concert to Ai Weiwei in November. Chinese police questioned John after his Beijing performance last year, which he had dedicated “to the spirit and talent of Ai Weiwei”. Authorities then allegedly asked John to sign a statement saying that he had been inspired by Ai’s artistic achievements exclusively, rather than for his efforts to defend free speech. John was permitted to go ahead with his Guangzhou show in early December, but an editorial letter in the state-run Global Times said that the singer was “disrespectful” to include political sentiment in his performance, adding that authorities would think more carefully before inviting foreign artists to perform in future. Culture minister Cai Wu is now allegedly requesting degree certificates from international performers since John’s appearance, only allowing them entry into the country if they can prove they have been university-educated. Classical musicians have reportedly been required to submit proof of degrees when performing in the country since the start of the year.

A Hong Kong activist has been sentenced to nine months in prison on 7 February after burning a Chinese flag. Koo Sze-yiu was also discovered to have burned a Hong Kong flag, during two separate demonstrations against the government. In June 2012, Koo burned a Chinese flag outside the Liaison Office of the Central People’s Government, in protest against the staged suicide of Chinese activist Li Wangyang, and on 1 January he was seen waving a Chinese and Hong kong flag with holes in both. He was charged with four counts of flag desecration. The maximum punishment for flag desecration is three years in prison and a fine of 50,000 HK dollars (approximately £4,000). Shortly after his arrest, a Chinese netizen was arrested for posting a picture of a defaced flag on to a social networking site.

A UK journalist is fighting a court application submitted by the police requiring him to hand over video footage of the English Defence League (EDL), it was reported today (11 February). Jason Parkinson has refused to hand over his footage, saying that journalists are “not evidence gatherers for the police”. He fought a similar case in 2011, where police attempted to seize his footage of the Dale Farm eviction of travellers in Essex. Greater Manchester police applied for a production order hearing on 18 February to view all published and unpublished footage obtained during an EDL and counter protest march by Unite Against Fascism in Bolton 20 March 2010. The National Union of Journalists intends to contest the application. Parkinson said that handing over the evidence “could overturn the incredibly important victory for press freedom” that was achieved during the Dale Farm eviction.

In Bangalore, India an artist was forced to remove his pantings from an art gallery on 5 February because they depicted Hindu deities in the nude. Anirudh Sainath Krishnamani was told by police that they received a complaint from a member of Hindu nationalist political group the Bharatiya Janata Party, claiming the paintings ”hurt the sentiments of society”. Police threatened to shut down Krishnamani’s exhibition at Chitrakala Parishath gallery if he refused to remove the offending pieces, which police said were a potential law and order threat and could cause protests or an attack. The paintings removed included a picture of a nude goddess Kali as well as Shiva and Sati hugging each other. MN Krishnamani, Anirudh’s father and a senior supreme court advocate will contest the decision.

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Autocratic, authoritarian and totalitarian states take it upon themselves to actively stifle freedom of expression. These states can look very different – “socialist” North Korea may seem very different to “theocratic” Iran, but even with vastly differing cultures and political landscapes, we can draw similarities between the methods used by these regimes to suffocate and in some cases entirely suppress free speech.

The three main methods authoritarian states use to curtail free speech are: the chill through direct intimidation; the chill through repressive laws and the chill online — using the internet to curtail free speech.

Direct intimidation

Ai Weiwei

Threats, imprisonment, torture and even murder are used to curtail free speech, particularly that of regime critics and activists. This is particularly common in the most authoritarian countries such as China or Iran. The murder of journalists and political activists in authoritarian states remains frequent and the arrest and beating of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei changed the country’s political landscape by showing that no one, however famous or influential, was beyond the state’s reach.

States that inhibit freedom of expression often curtail a spectrum of co-dependent human rights: freedom of association (UNDHR Article 17), the right to privacy (UNDHR Article 12), even the right to life (UNDHR Article 3) and freedom from torture (UNDHR Article 5). And because these rights are co-dependent, the most active members of civil society place themselves in direct danger of reprisal: journalists attempting to document human rights violations are targeted by the state as they attempt to stop such information being diseminiated. Azeri journalist Idrak Abbasov, an Index on Censorship award winner, was beaten earlier this year by security guards for writing about the government of Azerbaijan’s demolition of private housing. States generally don’t attempt to hide these attacks, knowing that the fear they arouse in civil society is useful in dissuading others from challenging its power.

In autocratic states —  those that at least attempt the veneer of democratic respectability — repressive laws are at the forefront of the state’s attempt to silence dissent. In Apartheid South Africa, the hated Publications Act banned any work “harmful to the relations between any sections of the inhabitants of the Republic”, which the authorities defended as an attempt to stop racial violence (like similar race hate legislation elsewhere). Every member of the ‘committee of experts’ on the censoring Appeal Board was white and part of the regime and the legislation was used to silence dissenting voices calling for change. Russia, which as a Council of Europe member must implement rulings by the European Court of Human Rights, has recently passed a series of strikingly repressive laws including legislation making protesting extremely difficult, a new law to restrict NGOs accepting foreign donations and the re-introduction of criminal defamation.

Using the law to silence opposition

The most effective repressive laws mirror edicts also on the statute books of more democratic states. Russia can justify its position on criminal libel by noting that this legislation is still on statute in France and Italy.

Repressive laws in authoritarian states act to shut down the space for dissenting opinions: focusing on limiting independent media, the right to freedom of association (by banning certain NGOs) and the right to protest and organise. Restrictions on the free media may include laws that enforce the registration of newspapers; draconian libel laws, the offence of lese majeste, and laws that prevent whistleblowing or harm to “national interests”.

Legal impositions on free speech typically use a politicised judiciary to act as the censor within a restrictive legal framework that may also include tough laws on public order, hate crime, anti-terror legislation, blasphemy and the protection of public morality. These laws are often used against those deemed to pose the greatest threat to the stability of the regime – with the broader legal framework making it hard for opposition media to succeed commercially, or for civil society to operate legally.

Online censorship

Autocratic states are highly alert to the challenge they face online in the wake of the Arab Spring. Online freedom is increasingly under fire through server-side ISP blocking of particular websites, or even the use of national firewalls to create a highly sanitised state intranet. This prevents the spread of politically sensitive information from external sources.

In Belarus, the opposition news website Charter97 has been subjected to systematic DDOS attacks in an attempt to close the site down. These attacks often force the website’s webhost to pull the site as it causes their servers to fail. In many ways, this method is simply a continuation of the physical assaults and raids on newsrooms practiced by the regime against opposition journalists.

The internet is often seen as a force for good in these states, but it can be used against activists. State surveillance online has expanded dramatically in recent years, in part as the cost of equipment has fallen. Index has raised concerns over the export of surveillance equipment by Western firms, a failure of corporate responsibility that has allowed authoritarian states to exponentially increase their knowledge of the activities of civil society. As we are discovering, technology such as the integration of GPS into smartphones can be used in authoritarian states to track dissidents and monitor their movements to a single metre. The anonymity of the internet whilst generally useful as a tool for protecting the privacy of human rights activists, can also cloak the actions of states.

By understanding the methods of repression, democracies can act to prevent complicity.

Mike Harris is Head of Advocacy at Index on Censorship

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2012 has been a very challenging year for press freedom in Taiwan. The challenge comes not from a repressive government — Taiwan is a young democracy in contrast with its mainland brother China on the other side of the Taiwan Strait — but from business tycoons who aim to control the media market.

On 27 November, Hong Kong entrepreneur Jimmy Lai, the owner of Next Media, Taiwan’s most popular and independent media group, announced that he would sell his print and television operation to a consortium for 600 million US dollars.

The buyers include William Wang, the chairman of Formosa Plastic Group, a notorious target for Taiwan’s environmental activists, and Jeffrey Koo Junior, sentenced to nine years in jail by Taipei District Court for a financial scam in 2010. But the most controversial buyer in this pending deal is Tsai Eng-meng, whose Want Want China Times Group already controls major print media operations, television stations as well as cable systems in Taiwan.

The deal still requires approval from Taiwan’s Investment Commission of the Ministry of the Economic Affairs, Fair Trade Commission, National Communications Commission, and Financial Supervisory Commission. If it is approved, the media monopoly resulting from the buyout will be a disaster for the free flow of information and freedom of press in Taiwan.

Even prior to this deal, Tsai — one of Taiwan’s richest men, according to Forbes — caused a great wave of opposition when he planned to buy cable television services owned by China Network Systems earlier this year. Tsai’s acquisition of China Network Systems triggered fear of a media monopoly, and tens of thousands of students, journalists, academics and social activists took to the Taipai streets last September to protest the approval of the acquisition. If Tsai successfully acquires now a 32 per cent share of the Next Media’s daily newspaper and magazine businesses, together with the two newspapers and several magazines he already controls, his media kingdom will expand to dominate almost 50 per cent of Taiwan’s print market.

September 2012, March held against Want Want China Times acquisition plans – Taiwan (Craig Ferguson | Demotix)

Those who support the deal say that Taiwan’s media is a free sector and, even if Want Want China Times Group controls 50 per cent of the market, Taiwanese readers still have other choices of unfiltered information.

However, the media sector is unique. Media, as gatekeepers, have the power to filter or even distort information, and decide what their audiences or readers should know or not. Opinions expressed via media outlets influence people’s thinking and judgments, and impact social and political decision-making. Therefore, it is sensible to demand that government regulators take the public interest seriously, and pay particular attention to the potential problem of captive audience in the Next Media merger case.

A big concern is the possibility of self-censorship. All of the buyers in the Next Media deal are pro-China defenders, and they have big investment stakes in the Chinese market.

During a event held for the Formosa Plastic Group’s employees, journalists asked William Wang about the takeover. He candidly responded that he believed China’s government would appreciate their acquisition of Next Media’s Taiwan operations.

When seniors editors at Apple Daily — part of Next Media — asked in a joint conference with the future new owners of the group whether they would censor content in order to avoid irritating China, Koo and Wang said they would respect journalists’ professional judgment. But Tsai warned them: “You two shareholders [referring to Koo and Wang] should give it a second thought, because you’re going to do business in China. It’s hard to say what will happen. If something happens to you, don’t blame me for not warning you.” [The quote comes a report of the event published by United Daily News, in Chinese].

Tsai is also notorious for denying the Tiananmen massacre in an interview with Washington Post’s Andrew Higgins earlier this year.

One of the golden principles of freedom of the press is independence. It is therefore important to protect journalists from any interference. If what journalists deliver to the public is filtered or distorted by personal interest of media owners, the public can never get to know the facts, which is the basis for democratic dialogue and decision-making. Tsai’s warning has sent out a clear message that legitimises the worries shared by different sectors of Taiwan society.

Currently the Next Media buyout has met with fierce opposition from people who care about the future of free speech and democracy of Taiwan, including expat Taiwanese all around the world. Students, journalists, academics and social activists have launched a series of protests against the deal and called for Taiwan government agencies that oversee the media industry and market competition to look into the merger carefully. More protests are being planned.

It is still too early to predict whether Taiwan’s government will act to protect freedom of speech and the public interest. But it is not too late to demand that regulators listen to the public’s appeal and reconsider a decision pivotal to the future of a free press in Taiwan’s democracy.

Ching-Yi Liu is a Fellow at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society, Harvard Law School (2012-13 Fulbright Senior Scholar), and Professor of Law at the National Taiwan University. Weiping Li is a contributor at Global Voices Advocacy

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The more we live our lives online, the greater the temptation for governments and private companies to spy on us. Padraig Reidy highlights the dark side of our increasing dependence on digital communications

While the internet offers opportunities for mass communication and social interaction unprecedented in human history, the chances for governments to monitor and control how we communicate are also ample

The simplest way to control usage is to block sites. This is widespread practice, in democracies this technique is often used to block child pornography.  However, more authoritarian regimes will block sites carrying sensitive political content, and increasingly, sites will be blocked to prevent religiously “offensive” material from being viewed. YouTube remains inaccessible in Pakistan, having been blocked in September after it failed to remove the controversial anti-Islam film, The Innocence of Muslims. In Turkey, the site was blocked in its entirety between 2007 and 2010 to prevent the viewing of “sensitive material”. The Russian government recently pushed through a bill that will allow websites classified as “extremist” (often a catch-all term in Russia) to be blacklisted without judicial oversight. The amendments, reportedly in place to “protect minors from all ‘dangerous content’”, will take effect on 1 November.

The Great Firewall of China

Perhaps the most infamous example of web policing is the complex system broadly known as the Great Firewall of China. China will not only block sites, but also search terms (such as “Tiananmen”). But the Chinese model goes far beyond algorithms blocking an established set of forbidden terms. Thousands are employed to monitor social media, immediately pouncing on sensitive terms and stories which could expose the governing class to scorn or ridicule. When a (true) rumour of a party official’s relation crashing a Ferrari sports car spread on the web, the term “Ferrari” was banned from searches on Weibo, China’s internal equivalent of Twitter. Many more are employed to intervene in message boards and discussion groups, monitoring threads and steering any displaying signs of dissent back to a more pro-regime view.

China’s cartoon police officers, Jingjing and Chacha, who appear when users attempt to visit censored sites

China has even gone so far as to introduce cartoon police officers which appear on web portals, reminding users of internet laws.

The national intranet is the ultimate web blocking tool. The Islamic Republic of Iran claims to be building a “halal internet” which would limit content to topics and terms deemed acceptable by the regime in Tehran. Meanwhile, users in cybercafés are obliged to provide ID before logging on to a computer, thereby making it easier for authorities to later track the online activities of individuals. In Belarus, commercial websites are forced to register domestically, with a .by domain name. This not only restricts commerce, but severely impairs the functioning of the “world” wide web.

Data retention & preservation

But it is not only authoritarian regimes that police the web. In the UK, the government is currently attempting to push through the Communications Data Bill, which would oblige internet service providers (ISPs) to hold information on users web and email usage for 12 months. ISPs would then have to hand over information to government agencies on request, highlighting the huge potential for the surveillance that is a by-product of our increasing dependence on digital communications.

This dependence can provide governments with apparently easy solutions to dissent. In Cuba, for example, online connections are deliberately kept slow, making communication with the outside world, even via proxies, frustrating.  At the height of the protests against Hosni Mubarak in Egypt in 2011, authorities even tried turning off the internet entirely, costing the country millions, but only temporarily hindering the progress of the uprising that eventually toppled the president.

Living our lives in public

Our increasing tendency to live our lives online, particularly via social networks, provides easy ways for authorities to pursue people. In the wake of the Iranian “green revolution” in 2009, many who had used Twitter to mobilise and share information were rounded up by the authorities. In the democratic world, the UK has seen prosecutions for public order and “menacing communications” after postings on Facebook and Twitter. Several young people were arrested for incitement after posting about the riots of 2011 on Facebook, and Prime Minister David Cameron even suggested shutting down social networks during the disturbances.

Much of what causes governments to seek to control the web are old, familiar themes: dissent, blasphemy etc. Some, such as the controversies over copyright and online “trolling”, have emerged because of the technology. But whatever the issue — new or traditional — the web is now the battleground in the 21st century fight against censorship.

Padraig Reidy is News Editor at Index on Censorship

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