censorship

By Sabeen Mahmud.After lifting the nationwide Facebook ban on May 31, the Lahore High Court directed authorities to devise methods to permanently block “blasphemous content” on the internet in Pakistan. “We believe that this order will be misused by the government to block citizens access to online activism and curb voices against corruption and corrupt practices by the government functio...

Pakistanis woke up on Thursday 20 May to find sites like Facebook and YouTube blocked after a government crackdown on “blasphemous” websites. “We consider this ban unnecessary, based on wrongful accusations against civil liberties and it will further instigate hatred among international Muslim and non-Muslim communities,” APC member Bytes For All tells APCNews. In an update, we are told...

The proliferation of sexual content on the internet and the considerable size of the pornography market online is a concern to lots of different groups. However while the online adult sex industry accounts for 12% of web pages, the internet has also been used to express and explore a range of sexual experiences, relationships and content that cannot be considered “harmful”. This kind conten...

A poster promoting a new book called "Access Controlled" was removed by the IGF's organisers who claimed a sentence in the poster violated UN policy. The sentence in question reads "The first generation of Internet controls consisted largely of building firewalls at key Internet gateways; China's famous "Great Firewall of China" is one of the first national Internet filtering systems."

It is obvious that the discourse around content regulation has shifted mostly towards the protection of children from harmful content and child pornography on the internet. Any references to gender-related concerns were dropped, including even problematic conceptions that women and children need the paternalistic protection of the state or international bodies from harmful content. One can spec...