Monthly Archives: May 2013

#imweekly: May 29, 2013

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Cuba
The Cuban Internet has leveled up this year: in January, a long-dormant cable connection to Venezuela was activated, giving Cuba its first non-satellite connection to the global Internet. Last week, a second cable connection, this time to Jamaica, came online. The New York Times is reporting that the government is planning to open 118 new cybercafés, at which Cuban citizens will be able to go online for a fee. Until recently, Internet access in Cuba largely has been limited to access to the country’s domestic intranet or to services designed for foreigners. While the new cafés will increase availability of Internet access, the price—$4.50 per hour, in a country where salaries average around $20 per month—will likely prevent widespread use.

Google
Google is working to build wireless networks in emerging markets in an effort to provide Internet access to a billion people who currently live entirely offline, reports the Wall Street Journal. The company has already begun a pilot project in Cape Town, South Africa, transmitting wireless broadband across “white spaces” (unused channels in the broadcast TV spectrum) via three base stations located at Stellenbosch University. Future projects in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia may use similar technology, or may involve the use of masts, satellites, or “high-altitude platforms”—blimps—to transmit signals.

Russia
Russia’s most popular social network, VKontakte, was temporarily blacklisted for several hours on May 24. Russian government officials claim the blockage was a mistake, made when an employee accidentally added the entire site, rather than a single offending page, to the country’s national blacklist. The Guardian reports that the site’s founder, Pavel Durov, has come under government scrutiny in the past for refusing to shut down groups on the site that were used to organize protests during the December 2011 parliamentary elections.

#imweekly is a regular round-up of news about Internet content controls and activity around the world. To subscribe via RSS, click here.

#imweekly: May 21, 2013

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Australia
Australian Internet users are wary of the government’s newly exposed ability to block multiple websites without notice, revealed when the Australian Securities and Investment Commission accidentally filtered over 1200 sites in an attempt to shut down a single website for fraud. Among the accidentally blocked sites was that of community-based activist group Melbourne Free University, which documented its experience trying to obtain information about the shutdown in a blog post .

Iran
In advance of Iran’s upcoming presidential elections, scheduled for June 14, 2013, Internet users are experiencing slower speeds and trouble using VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) to access blocked sites. The Wall Street Journal reports that most Internet cafés in the country have had to close due to service disruptions, and that a newly created “special election cyberunit” has been established to monitor social media surrounding the presidential race. SMS service has also been affected. Thus far, Iranian authorities are denying any involvement in the disruptions.

Syria
Syria’s Internet has experienced multiple blackouts this month as the country’s internal conflict continues. On May 7, 2013, Renesys reported a complete Internet outage lasting over 19 hours; Google also noted a disruption to all of the company’s products in the country. A second outage, lasting approximately eight hours, took place on May 15. Cloudflare has a video explaining how the shutdowns took place.

#imweekly is a regular round-up of news about Internet content controls and activity around the world. To subscribe via RSS, click here.

Protests in Inner Mongolia vs. Disney theme parks: social media censorship in China

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A recent paper from Harvard University researchers Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts contains a neat “censorship magnitude” graph showing which types of social media posts are most and least likely to be taken down by Chinese censors:

“Events with Highest and Lowest Censorship Magnitude,” from How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression, by Gary King, Jennifer Pan, and Margaret E. Roberts

By downloading over 3,600,000 social media posts from nearly 1400 blogs, forums, and microblogs, then revisiting the sites later to determine what kinds of content had been manually removed, King, Pan, and Roberts were able to conclude that Chinese government censorship tends to focus more intently on posts that call for collective action and social mobilization, rather than removing all posts critical of the government:

Contrary to previous understandings, posts with negative, even vitriolic, criticism of the state, its leaders, and its policies are not more likely to be censored. Instead, we show that the censorship program is aimed at curtailing collective action by silencing comments that represent, reinforce, or spur social mobilization, regardless of content. Censorship is oriented toward attempting to forestall collective activities that are occurring now or may occur in the future—and, as such, seem to clearly expose government intent.

Read the full paper: How Censorship in China Allows Government Criticism but Silences Collective Expression