· April, 2011

Stories about Harassment from April, 2011

Spam Bots Flooding Twitter to Drown Info About #Syria Protests [Updated]

  18 April 2011

After recent protests demanding freedom and democracy in Syria and the regime's brutal crackdown started, information warfare has been taking place on twitter. This post attempts to analyze the proliferation of twitter spams bots especially designed to flood the #Syria hash tag on twitter in order to make information about the events harder to find, and stop the conversation about them.

Over the Firewall and into the Fire

  14 April 2011

The Freedom House report Leaping over the Firewall is a new report designed to help users understand, evaluate and select a tool or series of tools for security, privacy and most importantly, for circumventing Internet censorship. As a long time developer with The Tor Project and as a member of the circumvention community, I feel that it is important to set the record straight about a number of issues. My motivation for writing this response is to inform readers of the serious concerns that many people, myself included, have about the recent Freedom House report. I am always pleased to see more analysis of censorship circumvention and Internet security tools, but I have concerns about this report’s methodologies and resulting conclusions. The report in its current form could be dangerous to the users it aims to help.

Middle East Feels Threatened by Bloggers

  11 April 2011

Such has been the role of bloggers and citizen journalists in fueling the region's season of fury against dictatorship, they are being seen as a threat to status quo. Now a campaign of arrest, intimidation and harassment is being launched against them. In Bahrain, cyber activists and bloggers are facing...

China: A Typical Online Political Harassment

  9 April 2011

Not only do Chinese dissidents and human rights activists face political prosecution from the government, they are also subjected to daily harassment from the so-called 50 cent party. Tsering Woser (@degewa) is a Tibetan poet and writer in China. She has been very outspoken in criticizing Chinese government policy on...

About our Harassment coverage

Stories about netizens who have been harassed, online or off, in connection with their online speech or other civic activities on the web.