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.
Russian President Vladimir Putin spoke on Monday at the annual Russian Internet Governance Forum, portraying himself as a champion of Internet freedom and called on the world to unite in a crackdown on “cybercrime” and “illegal content.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin signed a pair of Internet censorship bills on Sunday, equipping his government with powerful new tools to control online speech.
China’s state-run Global Times on Tuesday defended a massive crackdown on social media users and triumphantly claimed the world is beginning to see things China’s way when it comes to speech controls on the Internet.
“The globe is becoming chaotic and worldwide analysts are looking for reasons. Most agree one of the reasons is in the U.S.,” China’s state-run Global Times declared on Thursday, citing left-wing assaults on female members of the Trump administration as evidence for this conclusion.
Tanzania’s new suite of Internet regulations includes a $930 annual fee for anyone who runs a blog, coupled with extensive registration paperwork that includes a bizarre amount of financial information about the applicant, comparable to the business plan that would be submitted to secure a commercial loan from a bank.
“Reining in social media appears to be the trend of governments,” China’s state-run Global Times declared happily in a Sunday editorial. It is not wrong.
China’s response to criticism about its overbearing speech codes, government control of industry, and increasingly aggressive foreign policy came in an editorial by the state-run Xinhua news service on Monday: You’re welcome, world!
More details about the American employee of Marriott International who lost his job for violating China’s authoritarian speech codes are coming to light.
The British government has funded the development of an online “extremism” filter which technology firms could be legally compelled to use, the Home Secretary has revealed.
A modest demonstration for Internet freedom was held in Moscow on Sunday, pushing back against a crackdown on free speech in advance of the next presidential election.
Vietnam’s government claims that Google’s parent company Alphabet will help censor “toxic content” in the country, according to a statement.
Rep. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) discussed the possible elimination of the FCC’s 2016 broadband privacy rules on Tuesday’s Breitbart News Daily with SiriusXM host Alex Marlow.
On Monday, China’s Parliament passed a cyber-security law that has foreign businesses and human-rights activists nervous, as it will place even more restrictions on China’s already tightly controlled Internet when its practices are implemented next June. Many of these restrictions apply extra security measures against non-Chinese interests.
A recent poll in Texas shows that 45 percent of likely voters say they have a “favorable” opinion of Senator Ted Cruz. Those numbers are up 10 percent after his speech at the GOP convention where he told Republicans to “vote your conscience.”
The new authoritarian masters of the Internet wasted no time exploiting President Obama’s handoff of American control.
A few months ago, China’s mildly iconoclastic Consensus Media Group began worrying about Beijing’s authoritarian crackdown on “liberal voices in mainland publications.” Since that time, one of the group’s magazines has ceased publication, management has been reshuffled at another, and the popular “Consensus Net” website has suddenly gone dark.
On Thursday’s edition of Breitbart News Daily on SiriusXM, former U.N. Ambassador John Bolton criticized Republicans for failing to effectively oppose an Obama policy that has devastating long-term consequences: the surrender of American control over Internet registration.
President Barack Obama’s drive to hand off control of Internet domains to a foreign multi-national operation will give some very unpleasant regimes equal say over the future of online speech and commerce.
Center for Security Policy president and founder Frank Gaffney joined Breitbart News Daily with SiriusXM host Alex Marlow on Tuesday to offer his thoughts on the first presidential debate and a vitally important topic that was not addressed, the impending surrender of U.S. control of Internet registration.
President Barack Obama is determined to give away control of the Internet within two months — one of the worst blunders in the history of national security, economic policy, and the fight for liberty generally.
The Intercept raises alarms about a provision slipped into the Senate’s annual intelligence authorization bill that would “give the FBI the ability to demand individuals’ email data and possibly web-surfing history from their service providers without a warrant and in complete secrecy.”
Pakistan launched one of its most ambitious censorship initiatives in memory at the beginning of 2016, with a Supreme Court order to “take remedial steps to quantify the nefarious phenomenon of obscenity and pornography that has an imminent role to corrupt and vitiate the youth of Pakistan.” It’s apparently not going well.
