Censorship of Facebook has occurred because of the wide range of inflammatory posts present on the website; several countries have interfered with or banned access to it, including Syria, China, Iran and Bangladesh.Source: Wikipedia.Com
Censorship by country
Bangladesh
The Awami League-led government of Bangladesh announced a countrywide ban on Facebook and other social network websites. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina
proposed the establishment of an Internet monitoring committee with the
help of Bangladesh's intelligence services. Previously the government
has been blocking websites. Right wing political parties and groups have
been protesting blasphemous posts by bloggers that have resulted in 8
deaths at the time of the proposal. Blogger Ahmed Rajib Haider
was stabbed to death on 15 February 2013. National riots over country's
war crimes trials have killed 56 people between 19 January 2013 and 2
March 2013.
On 18 November 2015, the same Awami League govt banned Facebook again on the eve of the final judgement of Bangladesh Jamaat-e-Islami leader Ali Ahsan Muhammad Mujahid and Bangladesh Nationalist Party
leader Salauddin Kader Chowdhury. Both the politicians and previous
minister have been issued Sentenced of Death by the controversial War
Criminals Tribunal and the review board of the Supreme Court of
Bangladesh has finally given their judgement in favour of the previously
given judgement.
China
In China, Facebook was blocked following the July 2009 Ürümqi riots because Xinjiang independence activists were using Facebook as part of their communications network. Some Chinese users also believed that Facebook would not succeed in China after Google China's problems. The popular Renren social network (formerly Xiaonei) has many features similar to Facebook, and complies with PRC Government regulations regarding content filtering.
As of 20 August 2013, there have been reports of Facebook being partially unblocked in China. But according to the "Blocked in China" website, Facebook is still blocked.
Egypt
As Egyptians took to the streets in 2011 in an attempt to overthrow the regime of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak the government cut off access to a range of social media sites. As well as preventing protestors from using the likes of Facebook to foment unrest, many websites registered in Egypt could no longer be accessed by the outside world. Twitter, YouTube, Hotmail, Google, and a “proxy service” – which would have allowed Egyptians to get around the enforced restrictions- seemed to be blocked from inside the country.Facebook was blocked for a few days in Egypt during the 2011 Egyptian protests.
Germany
In July 2011, authorities in Germany began to discuss the prohibition of
events organized on Facebook. The decision is based on numerous cases
of overcrowding by people who were not originally invited.
In one instance, 1,600 "guests" attended the 16th birthday party for a
Hamburg girl who accidentally posted the invitation for the event as
public. After reports of overcrowding, more than a hundred police were
deployed for crowd control. A police officer was injured and eleven
participants were arrested for assault, property damage and resistance
to authorities. In another unexpectedly overcrowded event, 41 young people were arrested and at least 16 injured.
Iran
After the 2009 election in Iran, the website was banned because of fears that opposition movements were being organized on the website.
However, after four years of the blocking of Facebook website, as of
September 2013, the blocking of both Twitter and Facebook was thought to
have been lifted without notice.
Iranians lost unrestricted access to Facebook and Twitter the next day,
leaving many people wondering whether the opening was deliberate or the
result of some technical glitch.
Mauritius
The Information and Communication Technologies Authority (ICTA) of Mauritius, ordered Internet Service Providers(ISPs) of the country to ban Facebook
on immediate effect, on the 8 November 2007 because of a fake profile
page of the Prime Minister. Access to Facebook was restored on the next
day,
Morocco
On February 5, 2008, Fouad Mourtada, a citizen of Morocco, was arrested for the alleged creation of a faked Facebook profile of Prince Moulay Rachid of Morocco.North Korea
Perhaps the most secretive country in the world little is known about internet access in Kim Jong-un’s nation. Although a new 3G network is available to foreign visitors, for the majority of the population the internet is off limits. But this doesn’t seem to bother many who, not knowing any different, enjoy the limited freedoms offered to them by the country’s intranet, Kwangmyong, which appears to be mostly used to post birthday messages.
As the people are forbidden from accessing non-authorized foreign media, Facebook is banned and access is forbidden in North Korea.
Russia
On August 1, 2014, Facebook blocked "a march for the federalization of Siberia" event page by request of the Prosecutor General.
The event was planned for August 17 in Novosibirsk, a demonstration
that organizers said would take place under slogans calling for Siberia
to "stop feeding Moscow" and to "create a Siberian Republic" within
Russia.
Syria
Syria, however, dealt with the Arab Spring in a different manner. Facebook had been blocked in the country since 2007 as part of a crackdown on political activism, as the government feared Israeli infiltration of Syrian social networking sites. In an unprecedented move in 2011 President Bashar al-Assad lifted the five year ban in an apparent attempt to prevent unrest on his own soil following the discontent in Egypt and Tunisia.
During the ban Syrians were still able to access Facebook and other social networking sites using proxy servers.
Tajikistan
In November 2012, Tajikistan blocked access to Facebook in response to comments posted online, spreading “mud and slander” about President Emomalii Rahmon and various other officials.
South Africa
In South Africa
riots have occurred intermittently due to Facebook statuses of public
figures or fake profiles created by media hungry social entrepreneurs
and unknowing followers reading these posts. The government may have
looked at regulation through existing broadcast media laws for ideas how
to regulate the internet broadcasting in UTP packets. Causing SABC and
ISPs to be linked.
United Kingdom
In the United Kingdom on April 28, 2011, the day before the Wedding of Prince William and Catherine Middleton,
a number of politically motivated Facebook groups and pages were
removed or suspended from the website as part of a nationwide crackdown
on political activity. The groups and pages were mostly concerned with
opposition to government spending cuts, and many were used to organize
demonstrations in a continuation of the 2010 UK student protests. The censorship of the pages coincided with a series of pre-emptive arrests of known activists. Amongst the arrestees were a street theater group planning an effigy beheading performance in opposition to the monarchy, whose members included a 66-year-old professor of anthropology.
Cuba
Only politicians, some journalists and medical students can legally access the web from their homes. For everyone else the only way to connect to the online world legally is via internet cafes. This may not seem much to ask but when rates for an hour of unlimited access to the web cost between $6 and $10 and the average salary is around $20 getting online becomes ridiculously expensive. High costs also don’t equal fast internet as web pages can take several minutes to load: definitely not value for money for the Caribbean country.
Pakistan
Another case of posting cartoons online, another case of a government banning Facebook. This time Pakistan blocked access to the website in 2010 after a Facebook page, created to promote a global online competition to submit drawings of the prophet Muhammad, was brought to their attention. Any depiction of the prophet is proscribed under certain interpretations of Islam.
The ban was lifted two weeks later but Pakistan vowed to continue blocking individual pages that seemed to contain blasphemous content.
During a week in November 2009, Vietnamese Facebook users reported an inability to access the website following weeks of intermittent access. Reports suggested technicians had been ordered by the government to block the social networking site, with a supposedly official decree leaked on the internet (although is authenticity was never confirmed). The government denied deliberately blocking Facebook although access to the site today is still hit-and-miss in the country.
Alongside this, what can be said on social networking sites like Facebook has also become limited. Decree 72,
which came into place in September 2013, prohibits users from posting
links to news stories or other news related websites on the social media
site.
No comments:
Post a Comment