Sami Ben Gharbia, head of Global Voices Advocacy, talks about his struggles against censorship in Tunisia and beyond and the importance of world action on fighting internet filtering. I met Sami during the recent Global Voices summit in Budapest and found him to be a warm and sympathetic person. The movement needs more people like…
Showing all posts tagged censorship
The web won’t set us free
My following article was published by the Washington Post online on September 26: During China’s milk powder crisis, with tens of thousands of babies affected by the contaminated goods, the country’s blogosphere railed against corrupt officials. One outraged blogger wrote: “What are the people in the Government doing? They just want mistresses, they want cash,…
New ways to make news matter
My following article is published today by the Melbourne Age: During the bruising Democratic Party tussle with Hillary Clinton in April, a citizen journalist recorded Obama saying that he understood why working-class voters in decrepit industrial towns were “bitter” and clung to “guns or religion”. Despite being a paid-up Obama supporter, writer Mayhill Fowler worked…
It’s all about the kids
You think internet censorship is just something that happens in authoritarian regimes? Think again (welcome to the potential Australian future.)
A challenge to our dictators
Famed Saudi Arabian blogger Fouad Al Farhan – who features in my book, The Blogging Revolution, and with whom I spent time in 2007 before his brief stint in prison – offers a challenge to authoritarian states: If they did not want us to dream and speak and express our ideas and aspirations in dialogues…
Censorship is good business
What are the reasons that Google’s YouTube removes videos from the video-sharing service?
Shame about that censorship side
The behemoth grows: In just 10 years, it has spawned a verb, revolutionised the media and made billionaires of its founders. Now Google has broken into the definitive list of the 10 most valuable global brands. What would the Chinese think, suffering under Google-assited web filtering?
How much power should Google have over the web?
Influential enough to ban certain kinds of advertising?
Our democracy isn’t the cure-all
Prominent UK blogger Norman Geras, both pro Iraq war and Tony Blair, is a little confused about the non-Western world. He wrote the following a few days ago (in relation to my book The Blogging Revolution): If there’s a half-baked notion out there somewhere about the West’s comparative disadvantage relative to some other places, you…
SBS Radio Arabic on blogging
I was interviewed last week on SBS Radio Arabic program about The Blogging Revolution and the ways in which the Middle East in particular is shifting radically due to the internet.