{"id":560,"date":"2013-07-08T13:30:49","date_gmt":"2013-07-08T17:30:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.law.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/?p=560"},"modified":"2013-11-04T15:24:37","modified_gmt":"2013-11-04T19:24:37","slug":"imweekly-july-8-2013","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/2013\/07\/08\/imweekly-july-8-2013\/","title":{"rendered":"#imweekly: July 8, 2013"},"content":{"rendered":"

Egypt<\/strong>
\nAs of July 3, President Mohamed Morsi is out of office, but much of the Western world is still not sure about what happened in Egypt and why<\/a>. Was it a coup d’\u00e9tat or not? Wikipedia is calling it the \u201c2013 Egyptian coup d’\u00e9tat,\u201d but whether the term fits is being contested. Foreign Policy<\/em> blogger Marya Hannun breaks down the Wikipedia edit war<\/a> surrounding Morsi\u2019s ousting. So-called wiki-wars<\/a> over acceptable phraseology and editing have been waged before.\u00a0 Relatedly: viewing events in Egypt from a social media perspective<\/a> offers valuable insight into how social media and networking sites, namely YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter, factor into current political discourse and social change. For example, the opposition group, Tamarod<\/a>, enlisted a range of media platforms to shape its campaign and gather more than 20 million signatures<\/a> leading up to demonstration calling for Morsi\u2019s removal.<\/p>\n

Saudi Arabia<\/strong>
\nThe Kingdom of Saudi Arabia is being criticized<\/a> for harsh sentences recently handed down for seven cyber activists arrested<\/a> in 2011 for Facebook posts. The men were accused of joining and using Facebook with the intention of starting protests. Political gatherings and public protests are prohibited in Saudi Arabia. The men were charged with crimes including illegal information gathering and \u201cbreaking allegiance with the king.\u201d Abd al-Hamid al-Amer received 10 years in jail, the longest sentence. Other defendants—Ali Ali al-Hadlaq, Hussein Mohammed al-Bathir, Mostafa Hussein al-Mujahad, Mohammed Abd a-Hadi al-Khalifa, Hussein Yasin al-Sulayman, and Saleh Ali al-Shaya—received lesser sentences. The men also lost the right to travel freely within and outside the kingdom (rights that men are usually given freely in Saudi Arabia), and restrictions were placed on their future freedom of expression, including bans on public speaking and writing. <\/p>\n

China<\/strong>
\nOn July 1, the Chinese government instituted an online petitioning system<\/a> intended to update its centuries-old petitioning custom. The website is intended to enable citizens to post petitions and air grievances concerning issues such as forced evictions, pollution, or corruption. However, as soon as the site was launched, it crashed. The response was great enough—beyond government expectations and the website\u2019s capacity—to result in a shutdown that sparked excited debate<\/a> about the cause. Some Weibo users suggested the crash was an act of censorship. WeiboSuite<\/a>, a platform created by students at Hong Kong University interested in Internet censorship, reports the government has been monitoring and removing citizens\u2019 posts from the petition site. The official government response is that it underestimated response rates and the website was simply overwhelmed.<\/p>\n

Pakistan<\/strong>
\nA Lahore High Court has rejected an interim order<\/a> to restore YouTube services across the country. Bytes for All<\/a>, an NGO dedicated to ICTs for development, democracy, and social justice, filed the petition several months ago. In September 2012, the Pakistan People\u2019s Party government banned the video-sharing site in response to widespread public outrage about the dissemination of a film deemed blasphemous for taking offensive positions against the Prophet. YouTube was banned after its parent company, Google, denied official requests to take down the film. Pakistan\u2019s religious communities and members of the information technology sector remain deep in debate as to how the county will regulate the Internet so as to uphold Islamic values as well as citizen\u2019s rights. Saad Rassol, a lawyer from Lahore, explains in a post for Pakistan Today,<\/a> \u201cIt is not simply a question of whether YouTube should be unblocked because it serves an academic or social purpose. It is a question of whether we preserve individual freedoms, and discourse, even at the cost of being offended by the words of the speaker, from time to time. Or will we descend into becoming a society where subjective morality and religious sensitivities become a sword to silence tongues and stamp out all debate.\u201d<\/p>\n

#IMweekly is a weekly round-up of news about Internet content controls and activity around the world. To subscribe via RSS, click here.<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In this week’s #IMweekly: a Wikipedia edit war over Egypt’s coup d’\u00e9tat, sentences for Saudi Arabian Facebook users accused of inciting protests, a new government petitioning platform in China, and more. Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5508,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[3687,359,2230,83924,2114,30080,2242],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-560","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-censorship","category-china","category-egypt","category-im-weekly","category-pakistan","category-protests","category-saudi-arabia"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4L9BV-92","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5508"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=560"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1110,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/560\/revisions\/1110"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=560"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=560"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/archive.blogs.harvard.edu\/internetmonitor\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=560"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}