Censorship and Freedom of Expression

Last week, the Committee to Protect Journalists ranked Eritrea "the most censored country in the world." That unsurprising conclusion is only the latest dubious distinction for Eritrea, a state that often seems frozen in an authoritarian limbo in the midst of a region characterized by profound changes.  The much-heralded 2018 peace deal with Ethiopia removed the Eritrean government’s primary rationale for its vice-like grip on power and disregard for the civil and political rights of its people, but it did not in fact lead to the opening of political space. In June, over a hundred prominent African intellectuals wrote to President Isaias Afwerki, expressing concern about political prisoners and the steady stream of young asylum-seekers desperate to escape the constraints of life in the Eritrea that Isaias has created. In response, the Ministry of Information questioned their motives, declared them uninformed, and noted that policy formulation and implementation is the responsibility of “the government and the people of Eritrea alone.”  But Eritreans are not free to express themselves on these issues, and the government’s claim to legitimately represent the will of the people rests on its own self-regard and delusion. President Isaias and those who continue to enable him are right about some things. Eritrea’s history is a painful one, and they should not dismantle the machinery of repression that is so pervasive in Eritrea because of pressure from outsiders. They should dismantle it because Eritreans deserve better. A ruling elite so consumed by the past should be aware that history, including very recent African history, is replete with liberators who became oppressors. It is difficult to see the appeal in emulating their examples.  The status quo doesn’t just condemn Eritreans to languish under stifling state control, and it doesn’t just irrevocably tarnish Isaias’s legacy. It threatens the integrity and future of Eritrea itself. By denying citizens the right to freely debate their aspirations for Eritrea’s future, by refusing to implement the constitution to provide a frame for future decision-making, by conflating dissent with treason, the current government renders the state more and more brittle, and closes off avenues for peaceful, progressive political development. The autocratic paralysis at the top may achieve what so many years of international treachery and indifference could not—it may irreparably weaken the resilience of one of the world’s most resilient nations. 

Recently, Ugandan civil society organizations warned about the likelihood of increasing political violence leading up to the country’s 2021 general elections. Disturbing incidents of opposition figures like Bobi Wine being arrested and beaten, journalists being punished for covering those who challenge the state, and people associated with the new political opposition, like Michael Kalinda, being abducted, tortured, and even killed certainly support the case for sounding the alarm.  Uganda is not doomed; it’s an impressive country in many respects and countless Ugandans are interested in working together to build a peaceful, more democratic, and prosperous future. But over the course of Museveni’s 33-year governing tenure, clientelism and intolerance for political challenges that resist co-option have become prominent features of the state. Realistic plans for the future have to grapple with the possibility that instability will grow, and that the end of 75-year-old President Museveni’s tenure, however it comes, will be a catalyst for violent competition as entrenched interests resist change. It is not at all clear that the United States is prepared for the possibility of a Ugandan unraveling. As the largest troop contributing country to the African Union Mission in Somalia, or AMISOM, Uganda has been a critically important partner in combating al-Shabab and supporting the fragile government in Mogadishu. Uganda also currently hosts over a million refugees, more than any other African state. If Uganda is destabilized, the potential for contagion in an already volatile region is substantial, particularly for neighbors like South Sudan, Rwanda, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. One hopes a range of contingencies are being thought out, and that energetic diplomacy is working to tip the scales towards peaceful, positive outcomes for Uganda and the region. The worst thing the United States could do would be to assume the status quo will persist.

There has been a string of arrests of media personalities and suspensions of media outlets in Nigeria. Recently, some of the arrests have been related to support for a protest tagged “Days of Rage” and #RevolutionNow, against what supporters consider a failure of governance, but the harassment of media in Nigeria is nothing new.  In January 2019, Nigerian Security Services raided multiple offices across the country of the Daily Trust, one of Nigeria’s largest circulation newspapers, apparently angry at its published reports about upcoming army operations against Boko Haram. President Buhari quickly ordered the military to leave the newspaper’s offices, raising questions at who exactly had ordered the raids. In April, an activist known as IG Wala was sentenced to seven years in jail for organizing a peaceful demonstration and for making “unsubstantiated allegations” against a public official, the chairman of the National Hajj Commission. He is in the process of appealing the ruling. He had been denied bail, which he requested on health grounds until his appeal could be heard. He was then transferred to a remote prison. In June, DAAR Communications, owner of African Independent Television and RayPower FM radio, had its license suspended indefinitely, allegedly for failure to pay licensing fees and for the presence of hate speech and suspect information from social media in its programming. The following day a Federal High Court judge ordered the reopening of the networks. The owner of DAAR communications had accused the director general of the National Broadcasting Commission of editorial interference and political bias.  On August 2, Abubakar Dadiyata Idris, was apparently kidnapped. Family and friends are saying that he has been arrested by the SSS. Known as Dadiyata, he was a fierce critic of Governor Umar Ganduje of Kano state. The next day, the SSS arrested Omoyele Sowore, editor of Sahara Reporters, ostensibly for supporting the #RevolutionNow Lagos demonstration. He was also the presidential candidate for African Action Congress in the 2019 elections. His support for the demonstration was, according to the police, grounds for arresting him for advocating violence. There is a national and international campaign by some human rights advocates for his release. Allegations against those arrested appear to be a mixture of the mundane, such as the failure to pay licensing fees, and various forms of incitement or criticism of government officials. It is worth noting that in at least some cases, courts have reversed arrests and suspensions. The specifics of each case are obscure, at least for someone based outside of Nigeria. But people in authority are clearly nervous. The country is facing serious challenges ranging from Boko Haram to Middle Belt conflict over water and land use that falls along ethnic and religious lines. Amid these crises, social media in Nigeria, as elsewhere, can be irresponsible. Governor El-Rufai of Kaduna state has made explicit reference to the role of “fake news” to the Rwandan genocide. Nevertheless, what appears to be an acceleration of media arrests and intimidation must be cause for concern. 

Violence attributed to online hate speech has increased worldwide. Societies confronting the trend must deal with questions of free speech and censorship on widely used tech platforms.

At the end of May, new rules were introduced, to take effect on June 11, that would have severely limited the press’s access to the National Assembly. According to the Nigerian Guild of Editors, the rules are “primitive, undemocratic, and blatantly anti-press and anti-people.” Under the new rules, to cover the National Assembly, a media outlet would be required to have a daily circulation of forty thousand copies or five thousand daily views online. Among other requirements, journalists must also show two years of experience in covering the National Assembly, and be members of the journalists’ union. Commentators had suggested that if the rules had gone into effect, the beneficiaries would be government-owned media because they are larger in readership and are more likely to meet other requirements.  There is speculation that the clerk of the National Assembly, Alhaji Mohammed Sani-Omolori, was behind the new rules. Sani-Omolori is by profession a lawyer and a member of the Royal Family of the Ohinoyi of Ebiraland. He was allegedly angry at media reporting of his six-hour grilling by the Economic and Financial Crimes Commission (EFCC), published in mid-May. The EFCC had also seized his passport, and was apparently investigating the way the presiding officers of the National Assembly were elected. That the rules came shortly after the story went public could indicate a connection. Happily, the proposed rules seem to have been withdrawn, however coverage of the swearing-in of members of the National Assembly will still be unusually restricted. Journalists still face an uphill battle. According to Freedom House’s press freedom reports, press freedom has been at the lower end of the “partly free” category since 2002, when Freedom House issued its first grade of Nigeria.  Retaliation against and intimidation of journalists are not uncommon. In Port Harcourt, it has been reported that a journalist was beaten by members of the Special Anti-Robbery Squad for reporting on their alleged beatings of civilians. At the beginning of 2019, members of the military raided the offices of one of Nigeria’s largest circulation newspapers, apparently following coverage of setbacks in the fight against Boko Haram and the Islamic State in West Africa. It was not clear if the raid was ordered by President Muhammadu Buhari, though he did order the security services to vacate the various offices they had occupied.

In its controversial copyright overhaul, the EU struggles to balance intellectual property protection with the free use of the internet. 

This week: Social media platforms race to remove video of Christchurch terror attack; EU levies third antitrust fine against Google; Russia rolls out new censorship laws; and top aluminum company hit by ransomware attack. 

Increasing collateral damage is an effective way of fighting censorship and expanding internet freedom. If we want to keep it that way, we ought to know its limitations

In the run-up to last year’s presidential and parliamentary elections in Zimbabwe, hope was palpable in Harare. Civil society activists, journalists, and business leaders marveled at how political space had opened up in the wake of the coup that ousted longtime President Robert Mugabe. It was as if an entire country had opened up the windows to let in fresh air. Citizens reveled in their ability to speak freely, and voiced their hopes that unconstitutional laws that had legitimized repression and restrictions on political and civic engagement would be repealed, so that the freedoms they were enjoying didn’t feel contingent on the whims of authorities. Today, President Emmerson Mnangagwa’s government is indeed taking action to address those laws, including the notorious Public Order and Security Act (POSA) and Access to Information and Protection of Privacy Act. These are welcome, long-sought reforms—and they are among the steps necessary for building the confidence that will unlock sanctions relief. However, these victories for Zimbabwe are ringing hollow because they occur against an alarming backdrop of state-sponsored violence and intimidation. In January, the state’s brutal response to popular protests killed seventeen and injured scores more. Within just the last week, two opposition members of parliament, Charlton Hwende and Joana Mamombe, have been arrested and charged with treason. Authorities arrested prominent civic leaders, including Pastor Evan Mawarire and Rashid Mahiya, on similar charges. For Zimbabweans, the windows have slammed shut again. Whereas last year citizens experienced freedom without the legal framework to protect it, now it appears that Zimbabwe will be characterized by repression regardless of the law, helped along by a deeply compromised judiciary. The legal landscape may shift, but fear remains the constant organizing principle for Zimbabwe’s government.

Leading global figures have released a new "Declaration of Principles for Freedom, Prosperity, and Peace." Call it Atlantic Charter 2.0. 

Valentin Weber is a DPhil candidate in cybersecurity and a research affiliate with the Centre for Technology and Global Affairs at the University of Oxford. He is also an Open Technology Fund (OTF) Senior Fellow in Information Controls at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society, Harvard University. You can follow him @weberv_ Censorship in China is often described as a cat and mouse game. As soon as netizens come up with a term to express their frustrations or call for collective action the term will be censored. So was the letter n, which netizens used to refer to Xi Jinping being in office the n-th amount of time, or qiou, a neologism which means dirt-poor and ugly, and refers to being an underdog in a society that praises consumerism and status symbols. The censorship game has been going back and forth for years and the government seems to have retained the upper hand in it. In an influential report dubbed Collateral Freedom, the Open Internet Tools Project found that Chinese censors are most aggressive when censorship incurs low economic damage and less willing to act when the perceived economic damage is greater. This principle was exploited by the censorship-circumvention technique of domain fronting, in which a technical quirk of websites hosted on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud platform (and similar services by Google) was used to trick the censorship infrastructure into allowing blocked traffic. These circumvention-enabling sites were resistant to blocking, as banning one AWS-hosted webpage would result in other websites hosted on the Amazon cloud being similarly blocked. Recently, citing a variety of cybersecurity and legal hazards created by domain fronting, both Amazon and Google disabled domain fronting, removing a widely-used approach for users to bypass censorship. However, despite the recent setback in domain fronting, what if there were other ways of ensuring high levels of collateral damage when blocking services? What if there were terms that are incredibly hard to censor, because the potential economic damage would be too great? The concept is the following: take an economically important term, such as Mate 20X, ZTE or even Lenovo’s advertising slogan Let the World Connect (让世界一起联想). Lenovo – Let the World Connect may indicate that the company connects the world, but it may also be a call for collective action. Tencent’s slogan Connecting People for a Greater Future (连接你我共生未来) may just as well indicate that people ought to go out and organize themselves in order to create a greater future. A similar technique was adopted in Brazil’s 2013 protests, where protesters took Johnnie Walker’s slogan The giant has awoken to the streets. Those words build on national pride and are inherently emotional, since advertising builds on emotions to increase customer consumption. A powerful advertising slogan that induces people to buy products, can just as well be used to organize collective action and bring people to the streets. While major companies do the branding and distribution of the slogans, citizens can engage in a subvertising effort (a combination of subversion and advertising used by the AdBusters organization, for instance). Luckily all slogans will already be not only present in online fora, but also in the streets through the sheer presence of company advertising posters and material. While a company can just come up with another advertising slogan, in case it is appropriated by protesters, it is harder to change a company’s name that can be rebranded to serve calls for collective action. Lenovo (联想) means to associate, or connect cognitively in Chinese. Similarly, Huawei’s first character (华) refers to China or Chinese and the second character (为) to action or achievement. There are some limitations to this proposition. Firstly, this is not a censorship circumvention approach – it will not provide citizens with access to foreign websites that are shielded by the Great Firewall. Websites will still be inaccessible. Secondly, citizens who intend to rebrand words or slogans will have to sway public perception that Connecting People for a Greater Future applies to social movements and not only to the technological possibilities of a phone. Given that the letter n was rebranded successfully from a simple letter into a one with a politically charged connotation, however, then Tencent slogans can gain a new meaning as well. The crucial difference being that censoring the letter n (in isolation) was acceptable to censors, censoring Connecting People for a Greater Future will be costlier. Even if individual slogans are banned at some point, it will have caused some economic costs associated with the blocking, as well as advanced dissemination of calls for collective action. Thirdly, taking brands or advertising slogans as vehicles for political movement may encounter another challenge. It may drown in an overflow of similar information. What happens when you google Google? Nothing exciting. It is hard to find any targeted information on the company. It must be just as difficult to find anything political on Connecting People for a Greater Future when one searches it on Baidu. Therefore, the proliferation of these meanings will have to rely on people communicating with each other on RenRen or Weibo. In this way, the slogans and words will be shared just as the letter n or qiou were on a person to person basis. Thereby collective-action-information can flow, regardless of the vast amounts of similar information online. This approach can reintroduce the collateral effects of censorship as applied to social messaging, which has already proven to be effective in reducing censorship. By deliberately designing communication strategies to exploit collateral effects, the cat is unable to distinguish between the mouse and its own tail, and will choose not to bite either. 

After protesters used social media apps to topple dictators during the Arab Spring, governments in Africa are adopting a new tactic to curtail their influence: taxing social media usage.

On January 6, the Nigerian security services raided the offices of one of Nigeria’s largest circulation newspapers, apparently angry at its published reports about upcoming army operations against a Boko Haram faction, the Islamic State West Africa (ISWA). According to a statement released on Sunday by Manni Dan-Ali, the CEO and editor-in-chief of Daily Trust, and a subsequent statement from the military released on Monday, Nigerian security services entered the main Abuja office of Media Trust Limited, the paper’s publisher, and its regional offices in Maiduguri, Lagos, and Kaduna.  The security services took into custody Maiduguri bureau chief, Uthman Abubakar, and several journalists. Abubakar and at least some of the journalists have since been released, but the security services have retained the mobile phones and computers they confiscated during the raid. The military was also reportedly seeking information on the whereabouts of other journalists involved in the publication of the January 6 story as well as a prior publication from December 31 that reported on the initial ISWA capture of towns in the north. The January 6 story reported a massive military operation that seeks to retake towns in the northeast that had recently been seized by ISWA militants, a Boko Haram faction affiliated with the Islamic State. The military accused journalists at the paper of “divulging military plans,” and said that it “would not tolerate [a] situation where a publication would consistently side with terrorists and undermine our national institutions.” The statement also stressed that the military had “no intention of muzzling the press.” The military eventually vacated the premises of the newspaper’s offices on Sunday night following a directive from President Muhammadu Buhari. In a tweet announcing the directive, Garba Shehu, the president’s spokesperson, said, “issues between the military and the newspaper as they affect the coverage of the war in the Northeast will be resolved through dialogue.”  There has been an upsurge in Boko Haram activity in northeast Nigeria. As recently as January 8, Nigerian media reported that Boko Haram had killed three, including an Islamic cleric, and that hundreds are feeling from multiple attacks.  President Buhari campaigned in 2015 on a platform of restoring Nigerian security and destroying Boko Haram. Boko Haram’s continued vitality is an liability as President Buhari seeks reelection in February. Nevertheless, the Daily Trust has the largest circulation in Northern Nigeria and it is one of the leading newspapers in the country. The president would see the political negatives in the army moving against a respected newspaper, and he ordered the withdrawal from its premises. For its part, the army is frustrated by its failure to destroy Boko Haram, and there is anger at the press coverage it receives. The military's claim that it had no intention of “muzzling the press,” made in response to the Daily Trust raid and arrests, lacks credibility. It is unclear who, exactly, ordered the security services to move against the newspaper. The president’s quick move to end the occupation of the newspaper’s facilities raises the question of whether the military was moving without the prior consent of the Buhari administration. This would not be the first time such questions were raised.

This week: Germany's political establishment is hit by data leak; Iran bans Instagram; internet shutdown in the DRC; the U.S. Congress opens federal data sets to AI companies. 

2018 was a brutal year, in many ways, for civil society activists, rights advocates, and democratic politicians throughout Southeast Asia. Cambodia’s government transformed from an autocratic regime where there was still some (minimal) space for opposition parties into a fully one-party regime. Thailand’s junta continued to repress the population, attempting to control the run-up to elections in February 2019 that the junta hopes will result in a victory for pro-military parties and their allies. The Myanmar government continued to stonewall a real investigation into the alleged crimes against humanity in Rakhine State, despite significant international pressure to allow an investigation. Meanwhile, in the Philippines, President Rodrigo Duterte appears to have moved on from using extrajudicial killings in his war on drugs to preparing to utilize extrajudicial killings in other ways. Last month, Duterte raised the idea of creating a new death squad to fight against communist rebels in the Philippines, for instance. And even in Indonesia, one of the freest states in the region, the Jokowi government has given off worrying signs of increasingly authoritarian tendencies. Jokowi has politicized top law enforcement posts, overseen criminal investigations of opponents, and shown other worrying signs, according to an analysis of his growing authoritarianism published in New Mandala by Tom Power, a PhD candidate at Australian National University. (Malaysia is a rare bright spot for rights and democracy in Southeast Asia this year—in fact one of the few global bright spots for democracy in 2018.) Perhaps nowhere has the increasing crackdown on rights and freedoms in Southeast Asia been more visible than in the area of press freedom. Of the journalists featured on Time magazine’s series of covers of people of the year, three are from Southeast Asia. Two of those featured are Wa Lone and Kyaw Soe Oo, journalists for Reuters who have been jailed in Myanmar, essentially for investigative reporting into aspects of a massacre against the Rohingya. (They are officially charged with breaking the Official Secrets Act.) The two men have already been in jail for a year—despite their trial being decried as a sham by rights organizations and prominent rights advocates—and they face in total seven-year prison sentences. Suu Kyi has defended their jailing, and the two reporters’ time in prison is emblematic of Myanmar’s worsening climate for independent journalism, even under Suu Kyi’s government. As the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) has noted, three other Myanmar journalists were arrested in October, and overall the Official Secrets Act, defamation charges, and physical threats are chilling the climate for reporting in the country. The climate for press freedom is poor in Cambodia, Laos, Thailand, and Vietnam as well. For example, in Cambodia, one of the leading print outlets, the Cambodia Daily, closed in 2017, reportedly under pressure from the Hun Sen government. Another leading independent outlet, the Phnom Penh Post, was sold to a new owner in 2018, amid worries that the new management would curb critical and investigative reporting. Many Phnom Penh Post staff members quit. Meanwhile, in Vietnam the government continued to aggressively shut down independent bloggers and writers, and Thailand’s junta has continued to harshly repress reporters and editors, such as reportedly pushing for the sacking of the top editor of the Bangkok Post, a leading Thailand newspaper, for his critical coverage of the military regime. Maria Ressa, the head of Rappler, one of the Philippines’ toughest and most groundbreaking news sites, is probably the best-known case of press freedom under attack in Southeast Asia. Before becoming the CEO of Rappler, Ressa had amassed a broad range of experience, including working for two decades for CNN, for whom she covered everything from the rise of Islamist terror networks in Southeast Asia to the post-Marcos era in the Philippines. She has received a wide range of awards for her work, including an Emmy nomination and an Overseas Press Club award. Like many authoritarian-leaning populists, Duterte aggressively demonizes the media, and Rappler in particular seems to infuriate him, with its hard-hitting, deep-digging style. The Duterte administration seems determined to put Rappler out of business. In early 2018, the Philippine SEC announced that it was revoking Rappler’s license. The media organization fought, and continued operating, but it was then accused of libel by the Philippine national bureau of investigation, and then was hit with tax evasion charges by the Philippine tax agency. Ressa herself also was charged with tax evasion, only a few days after she got a press freedom award from CPJ. She and the media outlet deny the charges, and noted how quickly the Philippine government had moved to file charges, seemingly without considering all motions and evidence. The case is now proceeding—but the climate for press freedom in the Philippines, which long combined tough investigative reporting with one of the most dangerous environments for journalists in the world, looks like it will only get grimmer in 2019.