Middle East and North Africa (MENA)
ONI Blog: Pakistan Lifts Facebook Ban; Bangladesh Cracks Down
As Pakistan lifted a two-week long ban on Facebook Monday, Bangladesh began blocking the site.
Both bans followed the creation of a Facebook group promoting "Everybody Draw Mohammed Day," an event that encourages participants to submit artistic representations of the prophet...
- Posted on 01/Jun/2010; tagged in Saudi Arabia, United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Asia, Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Arrests and legal action, Obscenity, Hate speech, Social filtering, Overblocking
ONI Blog: Facebook Blocked in Pakistan Following "Draw Mohammad Day" Competition
Last month, following controversy over Comedy Central's decision not to show a depiction of the prophet Mohammad on the popular TV show South Park, Seattle-based cartoonist Molly Norris came up with the idea for "Draw Mohammad Day," to assert the right...
- Posted on 19/May/2010; tagged in United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, Asia, Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Hate speech, Political filtering, Social filtering, Overblocking
ONI Blog: Blocked or Not Blocked? Lessons from an Intriguing “Filtering” Instance
Determining whether a Web site is blocked by a state filtering regime is sometimes a complicated issue that goes beyond finding out whether the site is simply accessible or inaccessible, and requires a multi-disciplinary approach, which ONI has been uniquely employing in...
- Posted on 30/Apr/2010; tagged in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Middle East and North Africa (MENA), ONI, Political filtering
Report: Sex, Social Mores, and Keyword Filtering: Microsoft Bing in the "Arabian Countries"
To view this bulletin as a PDF, click here.
Overview
Microsoft recently added a new layer of complexity to the ongoing debate regarding the filtering and censorship practices of U.S. search engines via its own search engine, Bing. ONI testing reveals liberal...
- Posted on 04/Mar/2010; tagged in United Arab Emirates, Algeria, Jordan, Syria, Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Search result removal, Social filtering, Internet tools filtering, Voluntary filtering
ONI Blog: ONI Releases 2009 Year in Review: Filtering, Surveillance, Information Warfare
The OpenNet Initiative is proud to release its 2009 Year in Review, a look into instances of filtering, surveillance, and information warfare around the world in 2009.
The events of 2009 demonstrated a global rise in third-generation Internet controls. ...
- Posted on 03/Feb/2010; tagged in United States/Canada, Asia, Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Europe, Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Australia/New Zealand, Legislation, Non-filtering content restrictions, Obscenity, Search result removal, Human rights, Cybercrime and security, Publications, ONI, Political filtering, Social filtering, Conflict and security filtering, Internet tools filtering, Voluntary filtering, Reverse filtering, Overblocking, DNS tampering, IP blocking, Proxy blocking, Filtering tech and software
ONI Blog: More than half a billion Internet users are being filtered worldwide
The OpenNet Initiative (ONI) has been monitoring Internet filtering around the world since 2002. Currently, more than 40 countries are filtering the Internet to varying degrees, while a number of others, including Australia, Iraq, and Spain, are considering enacting filtering policies....
- Posted on 19/Jan/2010; tagged in North Korea, Iraq, Germany, Russia, Australia, United Kingdom, Asia, Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS), Europe, Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa, Australia/New Zealand, Human rights, Political filtering, Social filtering, Conflict and security filtering, Overblocking, IP blocking, Proxy blocking
ONI Blog: Jordan to Apply Press Law to Digital Content
Jordan has long stood out as a beacon in a region of heavy Internet filtering. Bordered by--among others--Syria and Saudi Arabia, two of the Middle East's worst offenders, Jordan has filtered only one Web site, arabtimes.com, for the past decade.
That...
- Posted on 15/Jan/2010; tagged in Jordan, Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Legislation, Political filtering, Social filtering
ONI Blog: Bahrain, Tunisia Filtering Individual Twitter Pages
Over the past few weeks, reports have trickled in to Herdict and via Twitter, alerting us of the filtering of individual Twitter pages in Tunisia and Bahrain (as well as, possibly, China). In Tunisia, the accounts of exiled activist Sami...
- Posted on 04/Jan/2010; tagged in Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Social filtering
ONI Blog: Algeria joins the Internet censors club
Algeria joins an increasingly expanding list of government Internet censors in the Middle East and North Africa. ONI's in-country tests conducted January 1, 2010 verified that access to the the Web site of the Algerian political movement Rachad (www.rachad.org) has been banned...
- Posted on 02/Jan/2010; tagged in Algeria, Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Political filtering
ONI Blog: UAE unblocks access to top Israeli domain ".il"
The United Arab Emirates (UAE) has unblocked access to Web sites on the Israeli country code top-level domain “.il"
ONI noticed earlier this month that .il Web sites have been accessible from the UAE, and has since been testing for filtering of...
- Posted on 20/Nov/2009; tagged in United Arab Emirates, Middle East and North Africa (MENA), Political filtering, Conflict and security filtering
