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Do censorship and repression kill content on the Web?

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Do censorship and repression kill content on the Web?
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What happen to websites and blogs after they get blocked? Do arrested and threatened bloggers and digital activists stop their online activities once they face a governmental threat?
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Transkript: Englisch(automatisch erzeugt)
Hello, everybody. Thank you for being here. It's about to be thin. Okay. So, my name is Sami Mogherbija. I'm from Tunisia, and I am a political refugee in the Netherlands. I am also Global Voices Advocacy Director. I don't know if you know about Global Voices and our project defending online free speech online.
So, I will talk about the effect of censorship on the content online. We already know what censorship is doing to internet users. It's obviously that they cannot access blogged websites and blogs, etc.
But we don't know how bloggers and webmasters who have seen their blog or website blogged, how they are dealing with that censorship. How they are making and finding workarounds to create our website and to make their content available.
So, I will go through the kind of censorship that is available, and we've seen like five major scenarios of censorship. The first one is censorship, and censorship is also multi-layers. You have keyword filtering, you have DNS blocking, you have URL blocking, and you have also hacking and video attack.
So, when a website is providing a decision content and this content is available online, even if the website is being blocked through IRS's feeds, through aggregators,
internet users can still access the content which supposedly is being blocked. So, the government like Tunisia, China, Iran, and others are really involved in hacking websites, deleting them, or carrying out videos attack.
The deep pocket inspection is meant to monitor all kinds of content online. And I will go through the case of Tunisia, how the Tunisian government is monitoring, emailing, and is removing every kind of political content and replacing that inside the email with spam about how to enlarge your penis or how to use Viagra, etc.
And the other kind of censorship is the self-censorship by creating an atmosphere of fear, by arresting bloggers. That kind of arrest and threat has a big impact on other bloggers who do not blog about politics, who do not criticize the statuco or the regime.
They fear that a lot of them stop blocking. And the other one, the most dangerous one, is the direct arrest and jailing and sentencing of bloggers. And I will go through how we as Global Voices Advocacy, we are tracking the threat of online free speech.
So, this is our last project which called Threatened Voices. And it is also a crowdsourcing project in a way that it enabled anyone to submit to us a report about bloggers, online writer, digital activists who have been arrested, jailed, or threatened, and sometimes killed because of their online activity.
So, it's a project to map the hotspot in the world about places where internet users, bloggers, and digital activists have been arrested or threatened because of their online activity.
And the map is combined with a timeline, which is very interactive, so you can navigate the map and navigate the timeline. You can go to the past and see where, when exactly bloggers have been arrested and why. And if you go to a country profile, let's say Iran, on the sidebar and on the navigation menu you have a list of all countries that we are indexing.
And if you click on the Iran country profile, you will find a list of all bloggers that we know. I'm sure that we are not indexing and covering all bloggers that have been arrested,
but we are trying and doing our best to put all those cases online and help NGOs and traditional human rights organizations find the accurate information and help activists advocate to free and release those bloggers and online activists. And you can see the list and you can see also the timeline that gives you, like, the spike that you see in Iran, the red spike.
That is the number of the bloggers that have been arrested in Iran during the last post-election process. So by providing this kind of data visualization, we'll be enabling advocacy and
human rights defenders to understand when, where exactly bloggers have been arrested and why. And by doing so, we are giving advice actually to activists to be really careful during major events, during elections.
They need to be really anonymous and they need to avoid any kind of keeping some traces like IP addresses or name or geolocation. Like when they are using Twitter, they need to disable geolocation in order to not to give a chance to government to identify them and arrest them.
The other thing on the sidebar, you can see that submitted report, so anyone can click on that and send us information about a blogger. So once we review the blogger and we check all the facts and we go through the internet to check all the information, basically we go to Reporters on Frontier, Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International, and
also all the information that Global Voices, a huge team of bloggers, translators, and editors who are providing information globally. So we publish that online if we are sure that the case is really true and the facts are true, we publish that.
We provide the link to the blogger. We provide the date of his arrest and if he is released, also the date of his release. And if available, we provide the link to the blog or the website that is advocating for his release. So on the sidebar, you can see the campaign website. By clicking on that badge, we'll go to Freehudar website.
In this example, I'm talking about Hussein Derakhshan, the blog father of the Iranian blogsphere, the one who translated the tools and made the Iranian blogsphere so powerful, he is now in jail. So that's an example simply to raise awareness now about his case.
And then we are also providing some data visualization and some graphs to help people, especially journalists and human rights advocates, to understand when exactly bloggers have been arrested, what countries are really repressive against bloggers and digital activists in the world, and we provide the top 10 countries in the world who are really suppressive against bloggers.
And we see here like China, Iran, Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria, et cetera, are among the top 10 countries who are cracking down on free speech, especially by arresting and threatening bloggers. And we also provide graphs to understand if the bloggers, how many bloggers are released, how many
bloggers are still in jail, how many bloggers are threatened, and how many bloggers are really deceased. And we have in our database three cases of bloggers who have been deceased. One of them was killed in jail during torture, and the two others have been passed away. They are both Tunisian.
And if you navigate to a country page, you will see also the same graphs that give you insight when bloggers, when in which period of the years bloggers get arrested. And in Tunisia, this is an example of Tunisia. We've seen in 2009 two bloggers have been arrested during the election in Tunisia.
But unfortunately, the media, the big media, the mainstream media only focus Iran and China and are very high, very sexy, actually, in the human rights field. But they never talk about what's happening in Tunisia or in Mauritania, where bloggers also have been arrested during election.
So, and playing with the data, we can really find out a lot of amazing stuff. We can discover that the Arab world is the most repressive region in the world toward bloggers. So, like here, 41% of the bloggers that we are indexing on our website are from the Arab world.
And if we add Iran to the Arab world, and we are talking now about the Middle East in general, we see that 55% of the bloggers worldwide who have been threatened are from the Middle East. So, we can play with the data in all ways. And this is a funny way that our friends from Global Voice, as a blogger and as
a teacher, have compared the years that Ben Ali or Assad or Mubarak have stayed in power and the number of bloggers who have been arrested there. And it's funny to see and to discover that the number of the years for
presidents in power is almost equal to the number of bloggers that have been arrested. So, it's a funny way to play with the data. And we are about to release the API of this database to enable all kinds of websites, especially journalists and human rights advocates to display the data and connect with our database and make it visible on their website as well.
So, now we go back to the censorship and repression. Are they really against the content? Are they killing the content online? What happens when the blogger gets arrested? What happens to his blog?
And here I provide two examples. The first one is from Saudi Arabia. A blogger called Fuad Al Farhan who got arrested because of his support first to the reformist movement in Saudi Arabia. And especially because of one, his most recent post, before his arrest was about ten
personality in Saudi Arabia that he does not like and he does not want to meet. And among those ten personality was the prince of Saudi Arabia and a minister. So, after that post, Fuad Al Farhan got arrested. So, that's a screenshot of his blog I got from the archive.org because the blog, as you can see on the right side, is unavailable.
The second screenshot is from a website of Iranian blogger, human rights activist and feminist who was arrested because of her online activity. And if you visit her blog now, you will see that screenshot on the right side. This is only two examples and you can see dozens and dozens.
If you navigate Threatened Voices and you click on the link to the blogs of those arrested and threatened voices, you will discover that I can't give any percentage of how many blogs are dead. But I can assure you that dozens and dozens of bloggers do not blog anymore because of the repression that they faced.
This is a map, a network of the digital activists in Tunisia. The map was done by my friend from the Netherlands, Fikal Johnson, studying the digital activism in the Arab world.
And it draws the kind of network that exists in that country, in the cyberspace of that country. And we can see the clusters and which websites and blogs are the most important in that map. So, like here in the middle, there is a big dot, the white one, the web.org,
which is providing all kinds of links to all the other clusters of the digital cyberspace in Tunisia. And I should also point out that all those dots are blocked in Tunisia. All the websites and blogs that are talking about politics and that are critical to the government are blocked.
But if we add the filter of dead websites, we see all the black dots that you see on the map are blogs and websites that do not exist anymore. So, this kind of effect is censorship is having on the cyberspace in
Tunisia. And as I said, we cannot prove that censorship is really killing content. We need to make a comparison, another study to see if the websites and blogs who are not blocked and censored are also really dead. So, we need to go deeper in this study. And the digital methods initiative from the University of Amsterdam are trying to provide a
tool that will help us crawl and understand, let's say, 200 links and analyze them and find out if those blogs and websites are dead. And by dead, I mean that they are not updated anymore, that the DNS does not exist
anymore, that the website is being hacked by a spammer and used to provide a link, et cetera. And I will go through a few examples to let you see how this phenomenon is having a huge impact on free speech online.
So, from the examples of the map of the digital activism in Tunisia that I displayed, 34% are dead websites. And these are an example of the Tunisian website, the screenshot is from the archive.org as well.
And now, if you go to the link of that website, you will find out that it's becoming a Chinese website. I don't know how a Tunisian website which is providing content in Arabic and French and in English is becoming a Chinese website.
I really don't know how this kind of stuff is happening. This is another example from a major human rights NGO in Tunisia. And if you visit his link now, you will see a website providing a sponsored link and buying and selling stuff.
This is another example from another human rights NGO in Tunisia as well. This is a screenshot from the archive.org and now if you visit that link, you will see that the DNS is reserved, but there is no content on that website.
This is another kind of killing content online. Tunisia, China and Iran are using deep packet inspection. Unfortunately, the software and the tools that they are using to do that keyword filtering are provided by Western companies.
We've heard about Simons and Nokia in Iran, but we never heard about smart filter, secure computing, McAfee in Tunisia, in Saudi Arabia, in Sudan, in the United Arab Emirates, etc. And as I said, Iran and China are very sexy and hype issues, but other parts of the world are really not raised as repressive to the human rights.
So if you Google, if users Google and try to search for a word like Tunisian censorship, they will find those images, but there are few websites like Nowet.org, Tunisianews.net and Global Voices are filtered.
All the images that are being hosted on those websites are not to see on Google, on Yahoo, on Bing and all the other search engines. This is another example of the deep packet inspection.
This is a newsletter that is being sent daily by the popular Tunisianews website. If you can see, the first screenshot is of an email that you can read outside of Tunisia,
but if you are inside of Tunisia, you will see the other email, an email which is talking about how to enlarge your penis. So what the Tunisian government is doing is filtering all the emails that are going through the network in Tunisia and once they find something which is politically engaged or critical, they remove that content and replace it with spam, actually.
So this is another kind of killing content through email, not on the web. So, in general, the consequences of censorship, how do they affect online free speech,
and especially how do they affect bloggers and webmasters? So, first, the short term is the bloggers gain some visibility. They became popular, but not all of them. I mean the most popular bloggers have media coverage, but if you are an unknown blogger,
if you are from countries that are marginalized in the mainstream media, no one will talk about you. A few websites like Global Voices and other initiatives will talk about your case and try to raise awareness, but in general, big media, Washington Post, CNN, The New York Times, even here in Germany or in France,
Le Monde, Le Figaro, they won't talk about that. It's not interesting, it's not sexy. This information doesn't sell. So, but on the long term, bloggers will find themselves alone. They need to deal with that censorship. What to do next? And the most important goal of censoring a blogger or dissident writer online
is to isolate him from his readership, from his natural environment. So, once your blog is blocked, you will lose your readership first. And then you will lose the conversation. No one will comment on your blog because they cannot access it from that country.
Well, if your fellow friends or bloggers are living abroad, they can still access that blog and go on with the conversation, but the main readership, your main audience, the target group that is the goal of your blogging activity cannot access anymore your blog.
So, actually, the conversation is dead. The content is dead if your blog and website is being blocked. And then there is a shift from blogging to protesting. I mean, once you get blocked, you will protest censorship. If you are focusing on social justice, if you are blogging about environment,
if you are blogging about human rights abuse, you won't talk about those issues anymore. You will focus on censorship on your free speech and will try to get it back. So, bloggers will lose their editorial freedom and the government will impose another editorial line which is protesting censorship, which is not effective because your blog is not anymore accessible
from within your country. And we've seen that a lot of bloggers are becoming activists once they get arrested. And there is a theory coined by our colleague and friend, Ethan Zuckerman, co-founder of Global Voices, which is the cute cat theory, which means that bloggers and internet users cannot access websites for fun.
They cannot go to Flickr to see a picture of a cute cat. They cannot access YouTube to see a funny movie and laugh about that content. If they cannot do that anymore, a tiny percentage of those internet users will become politically active against the government.
Which is funny, actually, but it is very bad because you are changing the nature of the internet behavior from a free and normal behavior to a political behavior. And then bloggers, once their blog or website gets blocked, they doubt about the meaning of blogging.
If you lose your readership, if no one will come to your blog or website to publish a comment, so while you are writing, actually, with your audience, you start doubting about blogging.
Few bloggers stop blogging. Few others will practice self-censorship. They will create another blog and they will avoid talking about any kind of political or sensitive issues. And now we will go to the scenario, the technical scenario that are there available for bloggers and webmasters to deal with censorship.
So, creating once your domain name is blogged or the link to your blogspot blog or WordPress blog or LiveJournal is blogged, the easiest way and the simplest solution is to create another blog, which is very, very easy.
I mean, you can go to blogspot or to WordPress and in five minutes you set up a new blog, but you will lose the page ranking of your old blog. You will lose all the incoming links from search engines, from major blogs,
maybe from mainstream media that are linking to your blocked blog. You will lose them, and then you can migrate to another blog. I mean, if you are blogging on blogspot and your blog got blocked, it's very easy to migrate to WordPress because WordPress has that capacity to import your XML file from blogspot to WordPress.
But if you are using SPIP, the French CMS platform, if you are using TypePad, if you are using any kind of local publishing software, you cannot any more import that content
from that platform to another platform, and, if you can, you need some technical knowledge. So this kind of technique is not accessible for anyone. It is only accessible for people who have some technical skill. Redirecting to another domain name, which is also very easy.
I mean, if they block your domain name, let's say myblog.com, you can create another domain name, you can buy it, mysecondblog.com, and then, with a simple tweaking of the DNS or another file on your FTP server, you can redirect the old link to the new link.
So this is easy, but also this is technically difficult for people who do not have any kind of technical knowledge, and also it's impossible for people who do not have a hosting server. If you are blogging on blogspot, you can do that, because blogspot offers you the possibility
to edit the template of your blog, and you can put JavaScript on the header of the template that will redirect automatically all visitors and all links from search engines, et cetera, to the new blog. But if you are blogging on the popular wordpress.com, you cannot do that,
because wordpress.com does not offer this kind of editing option inside the platform. Setting up a mirror blog. A lot of blogs get blocked, and then they create another blog, and they mirror the content of the blog to the other blog, which is very easy to do,
but only for people who have advanced technical knowledge as well. It's not affordable for all bloggers. I think maybe only 5 or 10% of the bloggers can do this, but the rest cannot deal with this kind of mirroring techniques. And there is another way of becoming an exiled blogger, and we've seen it in Saudi Arabia,
we've seen it in Egypt, we've seen it in Tunisia, we've seen it in all those countries engaged in internet censorship, that once the blogger got blocked, he started publishing his article on another blog. So his friend, his fellow bloggers, will host his content. But this is temporarily, you won't give completely your blog to another blogger.
It's very personal blog, it's your blog. So this kind of solution is only for a short period of time. And the other way is relying on major websites. A lot of bloggers, once their blog got blocked, they start publishing their content on Facebook.
They start publishing their photo or their video on YouTube, on Flickr, and they start tweeting. But that is also very limited because there is a kind of censorship
with targeting specific pages on Facebook. Bahrain is doing this, Tunisia is doing this. I think China and other places are doing the same. So if you are politically very active on Facebook, it is very easy for the government to block your page. The other is self-censorship.
You won't talk about any kind of political issue. And the other is stop blogging. And we've seen that a lot of bloggers, once they get blocked, they stop blogging at all. But there is the micro-pipeline as unblockable system.
If you publish your stuff, but also this kind of technique is only available for people who have some technical knowledge, who are following the trends of the web. So if you send an email to Posteres, Posteres will automatically publish that content and will send it automatically as well to YouTube and Facebook and Twitter, etc.
which is very automated and easy. And you will make the censor crazy because he cannot understand anymore from where you are publishing and where you are publishing. So a lot of activists in Tunisia and other countries are using this technique and they are making this kind of mouse and cat and mouse game with the government.
Okay, you block my blog, I will publish on Posteres and Posteres will publish automatically my content to 10 other platforms, which is a very, very funny way. But again, this kind of technique does not work against keyword filtering. I mean, if you are using, let's say, democracy, and Tunisia is filtering that word,
even if you publish the same content on 10 other websites, the same content will still be blocked and inaccessible in Tunisia. So that's why I say this technique is very useful, but it's also not working all the time and everywhere.
This is an example of cross-posting through WordPress, to Twitter, to Facebook and to other platforms used by the Nowell.org. This is also another technique used by Nowell.org on Google Earth and Google YouTube.
By publishing your video on YouTube and by geotagging those videos on YouTube, by giving a place, a location to those videos, by doing that, actually you are cross-publishing the same content on Google Earth and Google Maps. So if you go to the palace of the president's finale in Tunisia,
if you navigate and fly to that place on Google Earth, you will notice that the palace, the presidential palace, is surrounded by a lot of videos that are talking about human rights abuse in Tunisia. But those icons are visible, but once you click on them, you cannot watch the video because YouTube is blocked in Tunisia,
and Dailymotion, and Vat.tv. So they are using this kind of cross-posting from a website, which is YouTube, to another application of Google, which is Google Earth. They are trying to attract the attention of Tunisia. They know that they cannot watch the video,
but they will be curious to know what is there, and they will try to use a proxy and they will access YouTube by using Tor, or using Siphone, or any kind of circumvention software. This is also another kind of sponsoring links as unblockable dissemination of content.
They are using AdSense. They buy some keywords from Google AdSense, and then they put some political content there. So, Ben Ali is the folk, which means in Arabic, enough is enough, Ben Ali. If you Google SMSE, which was the World Summit on Information and Society in Tunisia in 2005,
the first result will be the online demonstration against President Ben Ali. So it's a funny way to play with the sensor in Tunisia. Okay, you block the Yezi.org website. We still can publish that information on a pro-governmental website like Tunisibdo and other websites using the technique of Google AdSense and AdWords.
So I think I don't have time anymore, so if you have any questions, I'll be happy to answer that. Thank you.
I'm sorry we don't have any time for questions anymore. Thank you very much. You're welcome.