Sex and the City 2 has been banned from the city in which the film is set, Abu Dhabi. A spokesperson for the National Media Council said on 19 May it had banned the film from the country because the “theme of the film does not fit with our cultural values”. The United Arab Emirates previously denied them permission to film in the country, and they also banned the first Sex in the City in 2008.
The United Arab Emirates authorities is to monito internet users in public places such as malls and cyber cafes according to a report from the newspaper Emarat al-Youm on Wednesday. People without newly-mandated national ID cards will not be allowed to use the internet in public places. The authorities justified the rule saying it was introduced to combat cyber-crime and child pornography.
United Arab Emirates’s Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (TRA) has ordered ISPs to block a Facebook page supposedly authored by Allah. The TRA has also said it will ban the unnamed author, who claimed he believes in no god but himself, from holding an internet account. The author behind the page soon has over 600,000 followers and answers questions on the site.
A recent report by the OpenNet Initiative has revealed that search terms in both Arabic and English relating to homosexuality are censored in some Middle Eastern countries. The study showed that the level of censorship on Microsoft’s Bing ranged from ‘substantial’ to ‘pervasive’ and ‘selective’ in Algeria, Syria, Jordan and United Arab Emirates. Other sexually explicit search terms were also found to be censored.