Articles about Free Speech

Former NSA contractor cum whistle-blower Edward Snowden is now officially on Twitter. Since blowing the lid on the surveillance activities of the NSA and sparking on-going global debate about privacy, Snowden has been a vocal campaigner for freedom of speech, privacy, and surveillance awareness.

Within hours of joining, Snowden -- who managed to bag the @snowden handle -- had amassed over half a million followers, and the flow shows no signs of abating. After a few hours, Snowden has posted just 7 tweets; but more interestingly he is only following one account.

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Russia has placed a complete ban on Wikipedia because of an article about cannabis. The country's Federal Service for the Supervision of Communications, Information Technology and Mass Media (Roskomnadzor) took exception to an article about charas -- a cannabis product popular in India.

The Russian Federal Drug Control Service deemed the article illegal because it included information about how the drug is made. Wikipedia's policy of not removing individual articles could mean that Russia's censors have no alternative but to block the site in its entirety.

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Reddit has been nothing short of chaos recently. Users left, staff left, and lots and lots of people got very, very upset. Following on from recent subreddit shutdowns and restrictions, today the site announces that it is bowing to pressure from certain quarters and closing down a number of racist subreddits.

Having culled harassment sections of the site, the latest victims of Reddit's ban hammer are the subreddits /r/CoonTown, /r/WatchNiggersDie, /r/bestofcoontown, /r/koontown, /r/CoonTownMods, /r/CoonTownMeta. The bans come as the site updates its content policy meaning that the six racist subreddits are now in violation of Reddit rules -- and the new rules don't seem to be going down well.

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It's been a tumultuous time at Reddit recently. The self-styled (albeit slightly sarcastically) Front Page of the Internet raised the ire of some users several months ago when it started to impose stronger restrictions on the type of content that could be posted. It started with restrictions on certain types of explicit content, followed by the killing off of harassment, hate, and abuse subreddits.

After the site fired AMA (Ask Me Anything) coordinator Victoria Taylor, there was an uprising. Moderators were unhappy, users were unhappy, and CEO Ellen Pao ended up resigning. As users left in their droves, finding solace in alternatives such as Voat, the site scrabbled to defend itself both to users, employees, admins, and volunteers. Today in an Ask Me Anything session, Reddit co-founder Steve 'spez' Huffman introduced a swathe of new restrictions on what users are allowed to say. In public, at least.

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Need a social network to connect with friends and likeminded individuals? Take your pick; there are dozens to choose from. Facebook remains by far the most popular and, as it is used by real people, it is filled with everything that makes up life -- the good and the bad. In response, a group of Evangelical Christians in Brazil set up Facegloria with the aim of becoming "morally and technically better than Facebook".

Actually the real aim of the site is to promote Christianity -- to the extent that rather than a Like button, there is an Amen button. Think "godbook", if you will. Of course there are restrictions -- religion isn’t meant to be fun, you know. On the list of banned content is violence and pornography, swearing (there are literally hundreds of banned words), anything that violates "biblical principles", and depicting or referring to homosexual activity.

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Just a few days ago the Electronic Frontier Foundation published its annual Who Has Your Back report looking at how various technology companies treated customer privacy. The report makes for interesting reading, but it also raises some questions. One question that has cropped up several times is "how the hell did Facebook get a rating of 4 out of 5!?"

As well as rating Mark Zuckerberg's social network in terms of its privacy policies and how it responds to government data request, the EFF also probes the hidden censorship that appears to be going on. There have been numerous examples of blatant censorship from Facebook -- including blocking certain pages in Turkey -- and while this is worrying (particularly when the social network's founder is looking to connect the world to the web with Internet.org) what is perhaps more concerning is the censorship we don't know about. The silent censorship that's going on the in the background.

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A couple of weeks ago Reddit announced that it was closing down a number of subreddits with harassing subject matter. This came a few month months after a decision to ban content that included images or videos of non-consensual sex. In protest, groups of users switched allegiances and moved to the Reddit clone site Voat.co -- which prides itself on not censoring any content.

Voat.co has been around for a little while, but the site saw its membership swell as former Reddit users jumped ship. Over the last couple of weeks, the "censorship-free community platform" has battled DDoS attacks and was dealt another blow yesterday when its German hosting provider cancelled its contract. The reason given was that the server was being used to host content that is "politically incorrect". But this does not mean that the site is dead.

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In 2012 a controversial video went viral on YouTube that angered Muslims across the Middle East, sparking riots and leading to several deaths. The Innocence of Muslims is a 74 minute piece of junk (that I watched), which shows the prophet Muhammad as a fool, a fraud, insane, and a sexual deviant. Unsurprisingly it was blocked in numerous countries, including Libya, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Russia. Iran, Pakistan, and Afghanistan, even went so far as to ban YouTube entirely.

Despite mounting pressure, including from the White House, Google refused to remove the film from YouTube, because it didn’t violate its policies. However, The Innocence of Muslims fell victim to a specious copyright claim, and ended up being removed anyway.

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Photo-sharing site Instagram has updated its community guidelines to make it clear what sort of images are acceptable. If you were hoping to use your account to supply your followers with a stream of pornography pics, you're out of luck, sadly. Nudity is -- for the most part -- out (we don’t allow nudity on Instagram), including "close-ups of fully nude buttocks"; distant shot of butts are, seemingly OK, as are close-ups of partially clothed cheeks.

Whether we're talking about Twitter, Facebook, Instagram or any of the other countless social networks out there, users frequently fall foul of acceptable content guidelines. Images of nudity and violence are frequently complained about and Instagram's latest guidelines now make it abundantly clear what’s OK and what's not.

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Children's access to the internet can be a very emotive issue, particularly when subjects like pornography crop up. In the UK, the General Election is just around the corner and the current ruling party, the right wing Conservatives, are pledging to introduce legislation that enforces age restrictions on access to hardcore pornography sites.

The legislation would be dependent on the party retaining power after the May election, but Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, Sajid Javid says the Conservatives "will age restrict online porn" offering "safety for children and peace of mind for parents". There are just two problems. Firstly, it is completely unworkable, and secondly it is not the government's place to restrict access to the internet using legislation.

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Too much content is uploaded to YouTube for Google to be able to effectively police users' videos. This is what the search giant said in response to calls for more to be done to counter terrorism-related content on the video network.

Online censorship versus the right to freedom of speech is a battle that has waged online for some time now. Some parts of the world are more prone to censorship than others, and it's an argument that bubbles up from time to time. The debate usually centers around the moral rights and wrongs of censoring content, but the issue of practicality occasionally rears its head as well.

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In the UK, policies that restrict the flow of information across the Internet are generally met with outcry and consternation for contradicting our fundamental right of free speech, but for many individuals widespread Internet censorship is the norm.

However, online censorship is much more pervasive than one might initially think, with Ethiopia, Russia and even the UK currently listed as Enemies of the Internet by the French non-governmental group Reporters without Borders (RWB).

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12 people died in an attack on satirical French magazine, Charlie Hebdo on Wednesday. At time of writing, the situation in France is still unfolding, and technology companies have been quick to show their sympathy for the victims whilst voicing support for freedom of speech.

Google has donated €250,000 (around $300,000) to the targeted Charlie Hebdo title, which is expected to increase its print run more than tenfold for the next issue. The #JeSuisCharlie hashtag has spread across the internet like wildfire as people around the world offer support on Twitter, Facebook and other websites.

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A new report from Freedom House, a watchdog dedicated to promoting the cause of freedom across the globe, has been published with some interesting observations on how free various nations are in terms of their internet access.

The Freedom on the Net 2014 report, spotted by Mashable, involved evaluating some 65 countries, and the bad news is that over half of them, 36 to be precise, actually dipped in their levels of online freedom between May 2013 and 2014.

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A week ago I wrote about my feelings of ennui towards the iPhone 6, asserting that there was just nothing to get excited about. Some people agreed, but many didn't -- it was to be expected really. What was particularly interesting was not just the discussion that started here in the comments on BetaNews but also that the article spread further afield. It was picked up by Macworld whose resident columnist The Macalope, er, disagreed with what I had to say. You'll notice that I've provided a link to the Macworld article which, despite quoting 46 percent of my post, The Macalope failed to do initially.

If you take the time to read the Macworld article you'd be forgiven for thinking that I was hurt at having my work pulled apart. Not a bit of it. No, I'm not concerned about being criticized. I've been writing for approaching 15 years now, and I know I'm going to piss people off from time to time. That's not to say that this is necessarily my intention -- in addition to news, I like to share my opinion and there will, of course, be some collateral damage that follows. Despite The Macalope's suggestions to the contrary, this was not designed to be a "link-baity" piece. Like Joe Wilcox, I've written about the importance of writing for the reader rather than writing for Google, and this is an ideology I firmly subscribe to.

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