Can Wikipedia function as a tool for preserving cultural heritage? In a bid to boost patriotic morale, the creators of Armenia’s recent “One Armenian, One Article” campaign are encouraging every Armenian to author an article on Armenian Wikipedia.
Calls for corporate monitoring of social media – on the grounds that some netizens may be inciting emotional, physical, or terroristic violence – have resurfaced among Ronan Farrow, critics of the #twitterpurge campaign, and #IAmJada advocates. Some journalists and media freedom activists fear that these pleas for corporate responsibility edge eerily close to censorship.
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.
In this week's #IMWeekly: Brunei's netizens are finding their way around Sharia Law's free speech restrictions, a Cambodia-based blogger gets a heavy fine on dubious defamation charges, and Iraq starts filtering sites critical of the central government.
Last August, a French woman named Caroline Doudet went out to eat in the chic French Riviera town of Cap-Ferret. She had a bad time: the waitstaff was rude, they forgot to bring her her drink, the food wasn’t very good. Then she wrote about it on her blog, and that is when the trouble started.
In this week's #IMWeekly: A French blogger is dealt a hefty fine for a restaurant review, Vietnam games Facebook to lock activists out of their accounts, and nine journalists are charged with terrorism in Ethiopia.
Moroccan rapper El Haqed, who has inspired Moroccan youth with his impassioned and urgent YouTube pleas for social justice reform, is once again under fire by Moroccan authorities. This is the third time he has been arrested since 2011 on charges his supporters claim are bogus. Many suspect that it is his provocative music, critical of the country's stagnant political climate after the supposed reforms of 2011's Moroccan Spring, that makes him an easy target.
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: Jordan blocks 7iber and eight other websites, Myanmar cracks down on Facebook, and more details of the USA's far-reaching surveillance tactics emerge.