Known as the Twitter of China, Sina Weibo is also infamous in the West for the number of high profile users who have had tweets censored, including Kai-fu Lee. The former head of Google China, who was once booted off Sina and Tencent Weibo for three days, recently made a graph of how often his microblogging posts have been censored. Computer scientists Jed Crandall and Dan Wallach conducted a… → Read More
Former Google China head, Kaifu Lee, has been tracking how many times his Weibo posts on Tencent and Sina have been censored and deleted, and has helpfully made a graph of the past 8 months. The outspoken investor has had his tweets deleted most often in the recent weeks because he was discussing the story on the 13,000 dead pigs found in a Shanghai river, as well as a session in the Chinese… → Read More
More journalists are now the target of cyber attacks, said the Committee to Protect Journalists. CPJ deputy director Robert Mahoney said cyber attacks on individuals and news organizations have increased notably over the past few years and that the practice serves as easy and inexpensive censorship. In a press conference with reporters, Mahoney cited the recent attacks on The New York Times and… → Read More
Google has quietly disabled a feature that notified users of its search service in China when a keyword had been censored by the Chinese government’s internet controls, according to censorship monitoring blog GreatFire.org. The blog reports that the change was made sometime between December 5 and December 8 2012, with no official statement from Google to announce or explain its removal. → Read More
Twitter has used country-by-country blocking powers for the first time to restrict access to a neo-Nazi Twitter account in Germany at the request of local authorities. The move was spotted by the FT, which also flagged up two tweets from Twitter’s general counsel, Alex Macgillivray confirming both the request to close the account and the fact that Twitter had acted on the request → Read More
Editor’s note: Eva Galperin is the International Freedom of Expression Coordinator for the Electronic Frontier Foundation. Follow her on Twitter: @evacide.
On Wednesday, YouTube announced that it had blocked access to a video showing clips from “The Innocence of the Muslims,” an anti-Islamic film that depicts prophet Mohammed as a philanderer who approves of child abuse, after the film… → Read More
Public airwaves may be one step closer to becoming an indecent wasteland of swearing, nudity, and violence—a victory for First Amendment-lovers everywhere. Yesterday, the Supreme Court unanimously threw out fines against Fox and ABC for airing brief expletives and nudity, arguing that the FCC’s rule against “fleeting” indecency was too vague. The narrow decision won’t change the content of… → Read More
For the last two years, Google has been releasing data about requests to remove content and hand over user data from government agencies around the world. Late last night, the company released the latest set of this data, which covers the second half of 2011. In it, Google notes that it received 187 content removal requests from U.S. government agencies, asking for the removal of 6,192 items… → Read More
The Ethiopian government, Al Jazeera reports, has criminalized the use of Skype and other VoIP services like Google Talk. Using VoIP services is now punishable by up to 15 years in prison. This law actually passed last month, but mostly went unnoticed outside of the country. Ethiopian authorities argue that they imposed these bans because of “national security concerns” and to protect the state’s… → Read More
Yesterday’s announcement that Twitter would be selectively censoring tweets based on country was not well-received. But part of that announcement was the assurance that the process would at least be transparent. A spoonful of sugar helps the medicine go down.
They also mentioned that they were working with Chilling Effects to make notices and orders sent to Twitter publicly available. At the… → Read More
Twitter has announced in a blog post a glorious new ability: “the ability to reactively withhold content from users in a specific country — while keeping it available in the rest of the world.” At last!
There are two ways of looking at this new “ability,” one optimistic and one pessimistic. One is that Twitter is now more able to effectively tailor itself to the needs of certain countries. → Read More
Another year, another attack on the Internet. Lately, though, it’s not a loose collective of individual hackers sitting in dark rooms trying to wreak havoc. This time, stronger forces and vested interests are stepping into the game.
In a matter of a few weeks, the world’s most powerful democracy and the world’s largest democracy engaged in their own specific battles over the future of how… → Read More
An anonymous blogger known only as S.H. has been posting detailed daily descriptions of the robot-based disaster response effort at Fukushima. The blog included technical details and personal anecdotes, but nothing sensitive to national security. In early July, however, the blog was discontinued and later deleted altogether. The videos S.H. had uploaded to YouTube were made private. The origin of… → Read More
Another day, another example of RIM having to buckle to governmental pressure in order to stay in business. It has emerged that RIM has agreed to filter pornographic content on Indonesian BlackBerrys as a direct result of a government request. While this isn’t the first time that RIM has had to accommodate various government requests, it does represent the first time that RIM has greed to filter… → Read More
Fighting international cyber-terrorism isn’t easy, but it’s a mission on which we can all agree, right? Not so fast.
Russia has been pushing a proposal in The United Nations agency for information technology, which describes the greatest cyber-threat not as hacking or stealing but as using the Internet to spread ideas that might undermine a country. Russia wants any such use of the Internet… → Read More
When I read this headline, I thought there must have been some mistake. I mean, as we all know, StarCraft is the life-blood of South Korea. How can Blizzard release a gimped version of the game over there? 1up calls it “heavily edited,” and perhaps “censored” is as much an overstatement as “heavily edited” is an understatement. The game was given a provisional AO rating over there, and now… → Read More
Man, what’s up with Australia? I think we’ve touched on the country’s plan to block all sorts of unwanted content from reaching the country’s computers, but now Google and Yahoo have officially come out against it. Surely Google knows a thing or two about battling state-sponsored Internet censorship. → Read More
Rest easy, friends, since the World of Warcraft-in-China saga has come to an end. Yes, the game is now up and running once again. Unfortunately, I guess, there’s a bit of censorship to contend with. → Read More
Chinese police are now holding umbrellas up on Tiananmen Square to prevent folks from shooting video or taking photos of the square during this, shall we say, delicate 20th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989.
Chinese Twitterers are trying to break through the censorship by coding their reports of protests. Chinese censors are called “river crabs” and the even is called “ATM” or… → Read More
Yesterday’s revelation that China blocks access to YouTube should not have come as any surprise, but did you know that other countries censor the Internet in their own special ways? (Happy families are all alike!) For example, did you know that India’s Computer Emergency Response Team’s has the power to block Web sites wily nilly? Ostensibly it was set up to help eliminate terrorist-realted sites… → Read More
Australia looks to be moving ahead with its plan to censor Internet content on a country-wide level, and will test its array of filters later this month. To refresh your memory, the Australian government wants to block access to illegal material on the Internet, be it genuinely awful material like child pornography or something more controversial like terrorist Web sites. (Who’s a… → Read More
Australia looks set to join China as a state-mandated Internet censor. The measure is primarily aimed at combating online child pornography, but an open-ended statement from the government’s communications minister sounds ominous: …we are talking about mandatory blocking, where possible, of illegal material. “Where possible”? That seems pretty capricious. The government must have… → Read More
So much for the new, friendly China. Apparently the “Great Firewall of China” has been replaced, following a brief interval during the Olympics when internet restrictions were eased. Now the bricks are being re-laid, and with fewer gaps to boot: they are now requiring internet cafes to photograph all customers. Not quite to the extent suggested by my inflammatory photoshop job up… → Read More
TOM, Skype’s local partner in China, was censoring and tracking Skype chats, flagging conversations that could have been embarassing to the ruling junta. Originally, TOM filtered by keyword and threw out objectionable material – a good comprimise – but now it seems TOM was also storing and reporting bad messages to certain Communist Parties. Not so good. They also discovered that… → Read More
Silent Hill: Homecoming, which is only getting so-so reviews (which stinks because it’s my favorite game series; Silent Hill 2? Now there’s proper narrative in a video game), is effectively banned in Australia because of its over-the-top violence. But what, exactly, is the reason why the game won’t be coming out down under? How about this: drilling into and severing body parts. → Read More
Shameful. After MyFox Fox News Chicago ran a little piece questioning why a violent game is being advertised on city buses, the head of the Chicago Transit Authority had the ads removed. There are so many things wrong with this, from ignorance on parade to the violation of free speech as a public authority arbitrarily decides what gets to be advertised and what doesn’t. Earlier they decided… → Read More
Headed out to China for the Olympics? Don’t forget your “I’m being watched by the State Police” T-shirt. Blogger Hu Jia posted this video of him and his wife under house arrest, showing the world how ham-handed — and frighteningly dangerous — a centralized, fearful authority can be. We have a lot of fun over here but it’s folks like these who remind us… → Read More
[photopress:attcensorship.jpg,full,center] Who’s ready for some ISP-level Internet filtering, all in the name of protecting copyright? After all, copyright is what makes us a civilized, just people. Without it we’d be still be living in caves. At CES, representatives from NBC, Microsoft and AT&T said that the time is about the right time to start seriously considering blocking, or… → Read More
The British Committee to Ban Everything has once again rejected Rockstar’s Manuhunt 2, saying that the recently re-submitted edited version is still too “unremitting[ly] bleak” and callous. Too Manhunt-y, in other words. The censor board originally banned the game in June, forcing Rockstar to rework the game. And it did (the game was granted an “M” rating here a few… → Read More
Austin, TX
Seattle, WA
San Diego, CA
Menlo Park, CA
San Francisco, CA
Berlin, Germany
