Since political unrest erupted in Eastern Ukraine, Crimea has found itself in the middle of an "information war" between Ukraine and Russia. It's a battle that has seen both countries tighten laws surrounding Internet access, use, and expression under the guise of quelling extremist sentiment. In late July, tension heightened when plans for an undersea fiber optic cable stretching from Russia to the newly-annexed Crimea were realized.
In this week's #IMWeekly: Russia's "bloggers law" takes effect, Azerbaijan cracks down on human rights activists, a San Francisco lawyer abuses YouTube's reporting function to get a video taken offline, and a blogger is fired from a language school for writing about homophones.
Russia is continuing a recent crackdown on online communications, passing a series of new laws and amendments that target web platforms and their users.
In this week's #IMWeekly: One-fifth of websites are blocked in the United Kingdom, the NSA is ruled within bounds, and Iraq flips around its filtering protocol to better target ISIS.
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.
Internet Monitor is delighted to announce the publication of “Blogs as an Alternative Public Sphere: The Role of Blogs, Mainstream Media, and TV in Russia’s Media Ecology,” the third in a series of special reports that focus on key events and new developments in Internet controls and online activity.
In this week's #IMWeekly: 30-month sentence for Vietnamese blogger Quan, Iranian president Rouhani chats online with Twitter founder Jack Dorsey, and more.
In this week's IM Weekly: new legislation in Vietnam bans bloggers from discussing mainstream media, Wikipedia will enable native HTTPS for all its projects, and more.
This week in #imweekly: UK anti-porn filters causes several controversies, Russia threatens to block taboo language online, Australia considers educating citizens in geolocation circumvention, web developers claim the U.S. is requiring master encryption keys and a Texas man is charged with operating a Bitcoin Ponzi scheme.