A little more than a year ago, I wrote with concern about the risk that a single EU court within single EU member state would become the censor for the world. That fear has now become reality. In a ruling Thursday, the Austrian Supreme Court ordered, pursuant to local defamation rules, that Facebook remove a post insulting a former Green Party leader, keep equivalent posts off its site, and do so on a global scale.
No Facebook, Twitter or WhatsApp.
That’s becoming more and more common in some African countries, where governments have periodically shut down the internet or blocked social media platforms.
Just 10 days after introducing a ban on TikTok, the Pakistani authorities said on Monday that they were reversing the decision after receiving assurance from the Chinese-owned social media platform that it would moderate content according to local laws.
[news release] Governments around the world have used the COVID-19 pandemic as cover to expand online surveillance and data collection, censor critical speech, and build new technological systems of social control, according to Freedom on the Net 2020, the latest edition of the annual country-by-country assessment of internet freedom, released today by Freedom House.
Pakistan has become the latest country to ban TikTok, the Chinese-owned social media platform, in a move that government critics said stemmed as much from politics as from allegations of immoral content.
When a team of 20 police officers demanded to search journalist Oktay Candemir’s flat earlier this month, he feared the worst: members of the Turkish media who are critical of the government are often arrested on spurious terrorism charges, and he has been in trouble several times before.
Facebook is planning legal action against the government of Thailand for ordering the social media platform to partially shut down access to a group critical of the Thai monarchy, the company said on Tuesday.
Authorities in Belarus have blocked more than 50 news media websites reporting on how the country has been shaken by two weeks of protests demanding that President Alexander Lukashenko resign after 26 years in power.
Fears about the global internet ecosystem intensified this week with Trump’s executive orders banning the popular video app TikTok and Chinese social network WeChat, following a US government directive to prohibit the use of other “untrusted” applications and services from China.
As he fights for his political survival, Alexander Lukashenko has taken a big gamble by cutting off the internet across most of Belarus.