Devu Chodankar, a 31 year-old resident of Goa, could land himself in jail after posting comments critical of India's newest Prime Minister Narendra Modi on Facebook. The case highlights a trend towards curbing online free expression in the country following Modi's widely-celebrated victory.
In this week's #IMWeekly: Australia announces a controversial surveillance bill, Iraqi netizens find a way around internet blockages, and Russia targets extremism on Twitter.
Recent social media censorship in Pakistan has sparked renewed attention to the country's blasphemy laws and how they're applied online.
Six members of the Ethiopian blogging collective Zone Nine have been imprisoned for 63 days.
A new report from the Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto takes a look at Internet monitoring in Iraq. Since violence led by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) broke out in the country several weeks ago, the government has responded by cutting Internet access, first by blocking websites including Twitter and Facebook and then, on June 15, issuing orders for a total Internet shutdown in five of the nation's 19 provinces. The Citizen Lab tests the filtering methods, finding that blockage lines up with the Ministry of Communications' decree, but does not block sites affiliated with ISIS.
Anonymous has been vocal about its plans to disrupt the World Cup, pledging to target sponsors and the Brazilian government during the tournament. The group has stated that the massive audience provides a useful stage to protest the expense of the World Cup games—estimated at $14 billion—in a country where many citizens still lack access to basic services.
In this week's #IMWeekly: Twitter frees up "blasphemous" tweets in Pakistan, an Internet shutdown in Iraq, and one of the largest DDoS attacks ever in Hong Kong.
Between Friday, June 13, and Wednesday, June 18, Hong Kong suffered two DDoS attacks aimed at pro-democracy sites. The targets—one, the site of civil society group “Occupy Central with Love and Peace”, the other newspaper Apple Daily—both seek to advocate for universal suffrage in Hong Kong.
Alexander Sodiqov, a Tajik-born PhD candidate in Political Science at the University of Toronto, was recently detained by Tajikistan's State Committee for National Security (GKNB) when he traveled to Khorog, a remote town in a politically unstable region of the country. Sodiqov, the former Central Asia Editor for Global Voices, was in Khorog to conduct fieldwork for a project on the role of international actors, states, and civil society in Central Asian conflict management.
Iraq’s Ministry of Communication issued orders Sunday for a total Internet shutdown in five of the country’s western and central provinces, where violence from a Sunni insurgency led by the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) is particularly intense.
This comes two days after access to Twitter, Facebook, and Youtube as well as communication platforms like Skype, Whatsapp, and Viber was cut across the nation.