News

In the latest series of crackdowns on internet freedom, cyberspace authorities in China have ordered internet providers to shut down 60 of the popular celebrity gossip social media accounts.

After the recent terrorist hits on the UK, Prime Minister Theresa May called for more powerful security measures to be taken for the sake of "national security". However, when she talked about improving the security, she did not mean a stronger filtration process regarding immigration or even shutting down known extremist locations.

Online censorship and online surveillance has been gradually increasing in Venezuela. Especially that Venezuela is in a state of emergency due to the anti-government protests that have been ongoing for the past 2 months. These protests caused the death of more than 50 people

China has launched a new controversial cyber security law that took effect yesterday, Thursday May 31st, 2017. This law comes in an attempt to bolster China's internet sovereignty to protect national security as well as public interest;i.e: personal information. The law would also combat cyber crimes.

On Monday, the municipal Chongqing government in China posted a troubling regulation on its website which states that anyone who tries to bypass the Great Firewall of China using a VPN will be subject to legal punishment by law.

On May 24th, the Egyptian government ordered ISP's to block 21 news websites including Huffington Post Arabic, Mada Masr and most of the news websites that are remotely opposed to the government of Egypt or represent non-biased journalism. This ban came in the form of a direct order from the presidency to the ISP companies.

Mobile internet services have been blocked by Indian authorities in Saharanpur, one of the districts of Uttar Pradesh in northern India after violent clashes between castes had broke out resulting in 2 deaths and more than 20 injured.

On Sunday, May 7, 2017, China pledged to further tighten its dragon grip on internet regulations by exerting more control over search engines and online news portals. This is considered to be the latest step taken by President Xi Jinping to set the communist party's foot down on internet control in China.

In a daring response against Russia's annexation of Crimea in 2014, Ukraine officially banned the internet access of the Russian social network, VK, and the Russian search engine, Yandex. This directly ordered by Ukraine's president Petro Poreshenko.

Recently we have witnessed a lot of governments restricting internet access to their citizens with illogical reasons such as political stability. Since the United Nations has declared internet access as a basic human right, banning it was considered a clear violation to human rights and someone had to take action.