Internet freedom

Brazilian “anti-fake news crusader” Alexandre de Moraes has opened an inquiry into Elon Musk and Twitter for defying censorship orders.

The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) reported on Wednesday that India is the world leader in shutting down Internet access, coming in ahead of heavyweight access-blockers like Iran, Libya, and Sudan with 84 regional shutdowns in 2022.

French President Emmanuel Macron demanded that Elon Musk abides by European Union restrictions on speech on Twitter in a meeting on Friday.

Andrew Tate has seen his account reinstated on Twitter following Elon Musk’s takeover of the Silicon Valley tech giant.

The Chinese Communist government sternly warned Olympic athletes not to engage in any unauthorized political speech but Chinese state media roundly applauded an American athlete for gushing over the “incredible” accommodations she found in Beijing.

Chinese dictator Xi Jinping on Tuesday warned artists to create only “healthy” art that extols the virtues of “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” or else “the people will not accept it” – a not-very-veiled warning that Xi’s totalitarian government will punish artists who challenge the Chinese Communist ideology.

Nigerian Minister of State for Labor and Employment Festus Keyamo said on Monday that Twitter has agreed to all of the conditions for reinstatement laid out when President Muhammadu Buhari banned the social media platform in June.

Brendan Carr said the U.S. can provide Internet access to Cuba and circumvent the digital blockade imposed on the one-party island state.

The government of Hong Kong on Wednesday objected to U.S. media reports that several large tech companies are threatening to pull out of Hong Kong over new laws that would criminalize “doxxing,” the malicious exposure of private data, and hold platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Google liable for allowing the activity.

London-based Hong Kong pro-democracy activist Nathan Law said on Thursday that Hong Kong police asked his website hosting company, Wix.com of Tel Aviv, to shut down his 2021 Hong Kong Charter website because it allegedly violated China’s tyrannical national security law and Wix complied with the request.

Facebook revealed Thursday that it blocked all posts containing the hashtag #ResignModi in India for several hours Wednesday.

An “emergency ordinance” against “wholly or partly false” news content related to the coronavirus pandemic went into effect in Malaysia on Friday, prompting criticism from opposition politicians and international free speech activists. Violators of the ordinance face heavy fines and up to six years in prison.

The government of Russia on Tuesday continued its campaign to force foreign social media companies to comply with censorship demands by filing lawsuits against Google, Facebook, and Twitter for refusing to delete posts that encouraged young people to join protests against the incarceration of opposition leader Alexei Navalny.

The South China Morning Post (SCMP) cited Chinese court documents on Thursday to tell the story of Zhang Wenfang, a resident of Hubei province thrown in prison for six months last April because she wrote social media posts that included coronavirus information the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) wished to suppress.

Internet service provider Hong Kong Broadband Network (HKBN) confirmed Thursday that it blocked access to a pro-democracy news website called HKChronicles under orders from the city’s Beijing-controlled government.

Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi insisted Monday that China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), an international infrastructure program criticized as debt-fueled imperialism by the U.S. government, is doing better than ever after the coronavirus pandemic.

Open Media, a Russian Internet freedom news portal, reported on Tuesday that Moscow is preparing to implement a “social credit” system similar to the one used in China.

The University of Michigan (U-M) released a gloomy report about growing Internet censorship on Tuesday, warning that even countries with high liberty ratings from human rights advocates like Freedom House are censoring Internet content with increasingly heavy hands.

The Cyberspace Administration of China (CAC), the chief online censorship agency of the authoritarian Communist regime, announced on Monday that it will begin a “rectification” of mobile Internet browsers to crack down on the “chaos” of uncensored online information currently available to Chinese users.

Freedom House published the 2020 edition of its annual “Freedom on the Net” report on Wednesday. The report grimly concluded that Internet freedom around the world has diminished in the “digital shadow” of the Wuhan coronavirus pandemic, accelerating the steady erosion of online freedom Freedom House has chronicled over the past ten years.

A web browser called Tuber that allowed Chinese users to bypass their oppressive government’s “Great Firewall” to access banned foreign services like YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Google suddenly vanished from the app stores over the weekend.

The Pakistan Telecommunications Authority (PTA) on Friday blocked the controversial Chinese video streaming app TikTok because it allegedly failed to filter “immoral and indecent” content — Prime Minister Imran Khan was reportedly involved in the decision.

The U.S Agency for Global Media (USAGM) has revived the Office of Internet Freedom (OIF), which helps dissidents evade state firewalls and other forms of government censorship of the net in foreign countries.

One day after prompting an international backlash by proposing to regulate social media videos as if they were full-blown documentaries and theatrical productions, the government of Malaysia completely abandoned the idea.

Malaysia’s political opposition on Thursday accused the government of trying to stifle dissent by extending licensing regulations for film and television productions written in 1981 to cover social media posts. 

The Chinese Foreign Ministry objected on Friday to Facebook’s policy that state-controlled media organizations will now be labeled as such. Authoritarian regimes such as China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea invariably have state-run media, which they would prefer unwitting readers to see as credible independent news organizations.

A report published by the University of Toronto’s Citizen Lab on Tuesday charged the Chinese government with heavily censoring news and discussion of the coronavirus outbreak beginning at the end of December. The report noted that China’s broad censorship practices could “restrict vital communication related to disease information and prevention.”

The Cyberspace Administration of China on Sunday imposed even tighter controls on the heavily regulated Chinese Internet, cracking down hard on those who “spread rumors,” “harm the national honor and interests,” or post “inappropriate commentary on natural disasters and major accidents.”

Chinese doctor Zeng Guang, chief epidemiologist at the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CCDC), praised eight Wuhan residents for giving an early warning about the dangers of the coronavirus outbreak in their city, even though they were arrested in early January for “spreading rumors” about the disease.

Iranian opposition leaders said on Monday that protests against the regime are ongoing, with helpful assistance from U.S. initiatives to provide hardware and software that allows Iranians to bypass Internet censorship from their repressive government.

In addition to some Iranian journalists quitting their jobs in anger because the regime lied about shooting down Ukrainian International Airlines Flight PS752, Iranian celebrities are speaking out against their tyrannical rulers, while the common people persist in acts of defiance such as refusing to tread on American flags and holding banned funeral services for airplane victims.

Washington-based nonprofit Freedom House on Tuesday released the latest in a string of increasingly glum annual reports about Internet freedom.

The Sri Lankan cabinet on Wednesday approved harsh new laws against “fake news,” specifying five-year prison terms and fines of up to one million rupees (about $5700.)

China’s immense Internet censorship apparatus goes on red alert every June to stifle discussion of the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre. The censors have been especially busy this year, the 30th anniversary of the atrocity China desperately wishes to erase from history.

The Chinese Communist Party has been preparing for the 30th anniversary of Tiananmen Square throughout 2019. It has scrubbed mentions of the massacre from social media and launched a campaign of silence that has evidently enlisted Western social media companies.

Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a new law on Wednesday that paves the way for Russia to isolate its Internet from the rest of the world. The so-called “sovereign Internet” law is billed as a means of making the Russian Internet more “independent,” but independence will be in short supply as Putin’s authoritarian government tightens its grip on cyberspace.