Will Bahrain's censorship efforts run into the "cute cat theory"?

Posted By Evgeny Morozov Thursday, April 2, 2009 - 8:32 PM

In January, I wrote a column for Newsweek International, arguing that the Chinese are using the "pornography" excuse -- a goverment-sanctioned effort to crack down on online vulgarity -- to shut down several sites offering highly critical opinions on political and social issues in modern China (the most prominent of them was an edgy Chinese group blog, bullog.cn).

Now, other countries are getting the hang of China's tricks. News site Menassat reports on a recent "anti-porn" campaign in Bahrain being used to target a wide spectrum of groups, including those working on human rights issues. Even more disturbingly, the campaign has now spread to social media sites like Facebook. Here's a snippet from the article, but you should really go read it in full:

The activist added that this development has led to much frustration among Bahrainis.
“You should note that the outcry is amongst all citizens, even average business owners who rely on the web. There are some web services, like galleries, that are blocked despite being entirely unrelated to proxies or porn or local politics. We demand that a full investigation is put in place on how and why all these sites are blocked and not only those that are either porn-related or relevant to the authorities,” the activist told MENASSAT.
The activist agreed with the claims made by BCHR that the censorship campaign has expanded to social media sites, saying that authorities have been blocking Facebook links since the beginning of March.
“We can't even share articles on our Facebook profiles, which is something I do all the time,” said the activist.

The most interesting bit is the frustration felt by ordinary users who never wanted to access political content in the first place. As Ethan Zuckerman keeps arguing, such actions by the governments usually backfire, pushing regular users -- who need Flickr and Facebook to share pictures of cats and family vacations -- to learn how to use censor-evading tools like Tor and Psiphon that help to go around government censorship (Ethan even coined a name for this phenomenon -- the CuteCat Theory). It would be interesting to test if the use of proxies and tools like TOR would go up as a result of this campaign.

EXPLORE:MIDDLE EAST, HUMAN RIGHTS

Pornography is back on the Chinese Internet

Posted By Evgeny Morozov Saturday, March 28, 2009 - 9:56 PM

My earlier hunch that China's crackdown on vulgar online content is not going to be long-lasting and would primarily be used to muzzle political speech, leaving pornography unscathed, wasn't wrong after all. The Epoch Times reports that some of the pornographic sites that had been blocked in the January campaign are now back online -- some of them with new, more vulgar pictures:

Mr. Liu Yiming, member of the Independent Chinese Pen Center, is very familiar with website operations. He told RFA that ****.com, which was reported by the Xinhu News as being shut down, had been reopened while carrying many pornographic pictures.
Mr. Liu said, “I’ve discovered that many porn sites have been reopened after being shut down. This shows that the authorities’ claim of eradicating and managing low and vulgar websites was just an excuse. Their basic goal was to crackdown on those websites that dare to speak the truth. The Niubo Web site could not be reopened after being shut down. Even after changing its web address and switching to an overseas proxy server, it was still blocked by authorities, and Mainland Chinese are not able to have direct access unless they are able to use a proxy server. A lot of websites contain pornographic materials which cannot possibly escape the eyes of cyber police, and yet they do not block these websites. What matters the most to them is sensitive, political content.”

COMMENTS (0)