April, 2010

Stories from April, 2010

Egypt: Using Online Media & Digital Devices to Release Detainees

  21 April 2010

Earlier this month, the April 6 Youth Movement staged a protest in front of the Egyptian Peoples Assembly calling for more political freedoms and an end to Egypt's restrictive “emergency law”, which might be renewed this year, and might be enforced as well by a new “Counter-Terrorism law” which is expected to be extremely repressive. The Egyptian security forces responded to the protesting citizens with a brutal violence, making a score of arrests and convictions.

Guide: SEO Tips for Advocacy Bloggers

  19 April 2010

Global Voices Advocacy is pleased to release its third Advocacy 2.0 Guides: SEO Tips for Advocacy Bloggers: How to Apply Search Engine Optimization to Grow Your Readership and Influence More People. The guide has been written by my friend and colleague, The Sudanese Thinker, a Global Voices author, an internet marketing and online business consultant, with an initial focus on SEO, and on managed 7-figure online properties.

President Chávez and his “Communicational Guerrilla”

  16 April 2010

On last sunday, Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez launched the program named “Communicational Thunder”, and seventy-five young students between ages 13 and 17, were sworn in his "Communicational Guerrilla", wearing khaki jackets and red bandanas tied around their necks. They had been trained to "fight against imperialist messages", either on social networks online, on walls and pamphlets or "through direct intervention".

Bahrain Bans BlackBerry Chat Groups

  12 April 2010

Bahrain recently banned the use of BlackBerry chat groups citing concerns over the “chaos and confusion” that would result from sharing and distributing local news through these groups, according to Abdullah Yateem, the Culture and Information Ministry assistant undersecretary for press and publication. With this move Bahrain set a precedent...

Facebook Deactivations

  8 April 2010

This post originally appeared on Jillian C. York's blog. Over the course of the past week, I've gotten reports from a number of people whose personal Facebook pages have been removed or deleted from the Facebook platform. At first, it was a male friend in Morocco. Then a female, Moroccan...

Taiwan: Police ask for Plurkers’ IPs

  8 April 2010

Plurk is the most popular micro-blogging platform in Taiwan. Recently, in March 29 2010, one of its founder Alvin Woon posted a plurk, saying that he had been receiving letter from police asking for the IP information of some of the plurkers’ accounts. However, the police did not present any...

HADOPI, ACTA, Digital Economy Bill: From Human Rights to Economic Rights

  5 April 2010

There is increasing debate and discussion about regulatory moves in the internet sphere that have direct implications for the kind of society we want to live in and the rights we can expect to have: freedom of speech balanced against rights to privacy; centralized data gathering and storage by governments...

Tunisia: WAT.TV, the 3rd video-sharing website to be blocked!

  2 April 2010

Few days ago, the Tunisian regime has blocked access to WAT.TV, a social networking and media-sharing website, which is believed to be the 3rd video broadcaster on the Internet in France. This is also the third video-sharing website to be blocked in The country. First they blocked Dailymotion on September...

Lebanon: First Threatened Voice

  2 April 2010

Lebanon has been known and envied in the MENA region for its free cyberspace. Well not any more since March has marked Lebanon's first cyber censhorship incident. Layal Al Khatib has more details in this post.

Censorship Without Borders: A Moroccan Blogger's Experience

  1 April 2010

Naoufel Chaara is a talented Moroccan blogger. His website [Ar] has been recently nominated for the Deutsche Welle's 2010 BOBs international award in the Best Arabic Blog category. Naoufel's usually caustic views on people and power in his country and the Arab world, often pack a strong punch with his...