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.
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