Love Matters is an international multimedia platform that encourages young people to discuss love, sex and relationships. Launched first in India, Love Matters focuses on regions where discussions about sexual and reproductive health is censored or taboo, and their content is available in English, Hindi, Arabic, Spanish and Mandarin Chinese. Their aim is to offer young people a space to learn and ask questions they can’t ask elsewhere.
“There are a lot of myths and misconceptions based on religious or cultural perceptions that make it very difficult to speak openly about love, sex and relationships,” Stephanie Hasse, coordinator of Love Matters Africa, told Index.
The idea was first piloted in India in 2011. Love Matters India has now had more than 12 million visits and they have over 700,000 followers on their Facebook page.
“Talking about sex and anything related to sex continues to be a taboo in India,” said Vitikha Yadav, coordinator at Love Matters India. “People continue to live in shame and silence with respect to sexual health issues.”
Last year Love Matters India launched a campaign called BearNoMore targeting intimate partner violence among young unmarried couples. The campaign was run online, through their website and social media channels, and offline through film screenings in three villages of Rajasthan, each attended by over 1000 people.
“The response was amazing,” said Yadav. “We reached about two million people in two months.”
“That really encouraged discussions about intimate partner violence. It was a different kind of campaign, had huge engagement and was something that was not looked at by any organisation before, so it was hugely empowering for us as well.”
Love Matters Arabic covers the Middle East and north African region, with a specific focus on Egypt. To mark their first anniversary, the group held a stand-up comedy event in Cairo on love, sex and relationships. “We created a new space to talk about this sensitive subject in public,” Michele Ernsting, head of the Love Matters Global Project, explained to Index.
“Love Matters Arabic is actually the only dedicated platform in the Arabic language that discusses sexual health and sexual health of young people, in their own language. That’s why it’s unique,” Abir Serras, coordinator of Love Matters Arabic told Index.
Love Matters Africa launched the Love Matters Music Awards: the first music awards in Kenya dedicated to providing young people the chance to produce songs on themes related to pleasure and sexuality.
“In the region that Love Matters Africa works in, topics around love, sex and relationships aren’t easily discussable,” said Hasse.
“Young people often don’t have the information they need when it comes to making choices about their sex lives. That has to do with the fact that sexual health education is missing at schools, or it’s focused on abstinence only,” she said.
“Last year in May we ran a special campaign for International Day Against Homophobia and Transphobia, trying to make the topic more discussable.”
Across all their platforms, Love Matters now has over 100 million page views. “We now have persuasive data to show how to improve the effectiveness of sexual health education by directly addressing the uncensored needs of young people,” said Ernsting.
“It has been wonderful to see Love Matters to scale up to all these countries and in really challenging settings where the need of this work is immense,” Vitikha Yadav said of the impact that Love Matters has had on young people. “We are hoping to reach out to many more millions in the country and many more across the world.”
GreatFire was set up in 2011 by three anonymous individuals to counter the “Great Firewall of China”, the systematic blocking by the Chinese government of any website deemed controversial, including any that touch on news, human rights, democracy or religion.
“We know them as a mix of folks within China and outside of China who have a mix of activism and technological expertise,” said Dan Meredith of the Open Tech Fund, one of GreatFire’s financial backers.
“Their motivations are not regime change, but purely wanting to see progress for the Chinese people, and see more reforms happen in the Chinese government. They’re passion driven, but they also have this insider knowledge about how to circumvent some of these really sophisticated things that are happening in China,” he told Index.
“GreatFire is quite a mysterious organisation,” Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia told Index. “It’s, roughly speaking, five people, maybe it’s not quite five, maybe its more,” he said. “But it really is just a small group of people who have come together to do something important.”
The team started out collecting data about which sites were blocked in China, and now monitors over thousands of sites, domains and Google searches. “They have a network of computers in and outside of China, testing for whether websites that are generally available to the public here in the UK or the US or any other country that has unrestricted access to the whole internet, are available within China,” Meredith explains. Their site also shows how much of the time it has been blocked, and offers an explanation as to how.
GreatFire are also the makers of FreeWeibo, which was a shortlisted in 2015’s Index Awards and acts as a mirror to Weibo, the popular, but heavily censored, Chinese social network. As well as this they also run FreeBooks, allowing people in China read censored books.
“GreatFire are one of the organisations that are really fighting hard against censorship in China,” said Wales.
But last year GreatFire’s work went from being an annoyance to the Chinese authorities, to being something they couldn’t ignore, Meredith explained.
Using an idea called collateral freedom, GreatFire made blocked sites accessible to millions in China and around the world. The collateral freedom idea works by pinning banned websites to those of big corporations (such as Amazon, Microsoft or GitHub) which, in order to compete in the global marketplace, China cannot block. When organisations normally blocked in China – like the BBC or Reuters – use, for example, amazon.com as a host their sites can remain visible in China.
In February 2015, GreatFire used this technology to release an Android app, allowing anyone in China, or in other countries where the web is censored, to access these otherwise censored sites. Everything they do is open source, so their work can be replicated by others.
However, it was GreatFire’s work with Reporters Without Borders, Meredith says, that finally caused the Chinese government to retaliate.
“We know is that they are incredibly frustrated by this collateral freedom idea,” he said. “But what happened last year when Reporters Without Borders started employing this is…there became a very big press strategy, so what ended up being a thing that was quietly annoying the Chinese became a very public thing that was annoying the Chinese.”
The project was launched on World Press Freedom Day in March 2015, and used collateral freedom to unblock websites around the world, making previously censored sites available in Russia, Iran, Vietnam, Cuba and Saudi Arabia. The unblocked websites included Reuters Chinese, BBC on China and German broadcaster Deutsche Welle.
The response from the Chinese government, which became known as the “Great Cannon”, was a critical test for the idea of collateral freedom, says Meredith.
“They took all the Chinese traffic that was trying to come in, and put a mirror on it – so this is one billion people, a third of the internet – and instead of directing that to an internal website, they redirected all that traffic to GitHub, to Amazon, to Microsoft,” said Meredith. By directing this traffic to all the sites used by collateral freedom, the Chinese government were testing those service providers.
“It was just enough to raise all the flags and create a very public storm which created a further media event that said ‘China is blocking Amazon or blocking GitHub’ – at which point they stopped.”
The point of this, Meredith explains, is that the economic cost of blocking the big providers, this time, outweighed the Chinese government’s desire to censor the web. So if in the future, during a major election for example, the government might be tempted to block these sites. GreatFire showed the Chinese government, and the world, what it would cost.
“What it shows is possible is something GreatFire can really lay claim to. They showed that China could do this, would try to do it, that those companies could weather that storm, and that the balance is still there where millions of people are able to get online because of collateral freedom.”
Watching the surreal videos of the police takeover of Turkish newspaper Zaman last week — inside the building police officers played cards behind the newspaper’s reception desk and devoured plates of baklava in the cafeteria as journalists looked on — I was reminded of the events of the past eight years that so definitively transformed Turkey’s media scene.
The change happened so gradually over the years that many missed the transformation. But journalism in Turkey has turned into a scene of feuds and long-held hostilities. The job description of a Turkish journalist now includes the ability to help lock up journalists from the opposite political camp.
Over the past eight years, a spate of legal cases have altered Turkey’s media environment beyond return. The most recent of these was the 2014 Selam Tevhid case, in which prosecutors intended to jail Turkey’s pro-government journalists who were accused of being foreign spies and aiding terrorist organisations.
But it was the OdaTV case of 2011 that had the greatest impact on journalism. The outcome silenced the popular and populist voice of secular nationalists and spread fear and paranoia to all media workers.
Earlier, in September 2008, after selling off his secular-nationalist broadcaster KanalTurk, Turkish journalist Tuncay Özkan was detained by Turkish police in relation to the Ergenekon investigation. He was detained in the Silivri Penitentiary, Europe’s largest penal facility where he would await the outcome of his trial for more than two years. One of Özkan‘s friends, Mustafa Balbay, the Ankara correspondent of Cumhuriyetnewspaper, was also imprisoned in the same trial.
To many observers, Özkan’s and Balbay’s ideas were old fashioned, parochial and too nationalistic, views that somehow defined the way they were treated in the public sphere. There was little international reaction when Özkan’s KanalTurk‘s staunchly secularist and republican editorial line was changed overnight. The same broadcaster now defended polar opposite views.
After five years in detention, Özkan was sentenced in April 2013 to life imprisonment for being part of Ergenekon, a “ultra-secularist organisation that plotted a coup”. Balbay was luckier: he received 34 years and 8 months. Again, there was little world reaction to this surreal turn of events, but, in Turkey, many progressive voices applauded the verdicts, seeing them as part of what they ominously called the country’s “normalisation”.
Throughout 2008, Turkey’s media sphere changed enormously through these trials that made the criminalisation of Turkey’s media part of the journalistic occupation. More than a dozen journalists were detained in the OdaTV trials, accused of being members of the “media arm” of the terrorist organisation Ergenekon, named after Turks’ founding myth. There were so many arrests that the prison’s sports hall needed to be transformed into a courtroom to accommodate all the defendants.
Many of Turkey’s progressives bought into the idea that what was happening was a good thing. Once “ultra-secularist coup plotters” would be placed behind bars, Turkey would finally achieve its long-awaited “liberal consensus”. Those who opposed the arrests were branded reactionaries who should have known better.
According to the newspapers, Turkey was cleaning its bowels: there were lone dissenting voices but the general reaction to the prison verdicts was that all the bad, radical people were finally getting what they had long deserved.
The normalisation discourse was built on the idea that Turkey needed a “liberal consensus” where the extreme elements of politics and the media needed to leave the public sphere to moderates of all political persuasions. Thanks to this, Turkey would be able to become “a model democracy” in the Middle East.
As the trials continued, and more than 40 Kurdish journalists were imprisoned because of their alleged ties to terrorist groups, Turkey was represented as its most liberal self in the international scene — what made it democratic, the argument ran, was the trials themselves. In fact, Turkey was being its most illiberal self, having the highest number of journalists in prison at the time. In 2012, just a year before the anti-government Gezi Park protests, the country was being held up as a paradigm. A Reporters Without Borders report from that year, read: “With a total of 72 media personnel currently detained, of whom at least 42 journalists and four media assistants are being held in connection with their media work, Turkey is now the world’s biggest prison for journalists – a sad paradox for a country that portrays itself a regional democratic model.”
Worryingly, the Ergenekon and OdaTV trials moulded a new type of journalist who took pleasure in the jailing of his colleagues. After journalist and IPI World Press Freedom Hero Nedim Sener and his colleague Ahmet Sik were detained in 2011, they were conveniently added to the list of coup plotters. When journalist and editor Soner Yalcin was arrested in February 2011 along with other OdaTv journalists, this was seen as a blow to Turkish nationalism, rather than journalism. In the fight with nationalism, the locking up of nationalist journalists was seen as a necessary evil.
By 2011, the process that had begun in 2008 reached new heights, when the character assassination of journalists became commonplace in the Turkish press. It was now acceptable to publish transcripts of phone conversations between journalists who might have been plotting a coup.
A more troubling development was the rise of a new genre: more and more journalists devoted all their work to making incriminating accusations against their colleagues. The success of a journalist’s work was now defined by the outcome of trials he had supported with his columns: if he managed to get his colleagues convicted through defaming their character, he was promoted.
No political group was able to resist the attraction of this new, adrenaline-ridden form of journalism and, most alarmingly, readers who followed those developments, started taking joy in this spectacle, a development that would surely fascinate Michel Foucault. Journalism became meta: newspaper front pages tallied which journalists were locked up and which were freed. There was fresh material every other month: the political identities of imprisoned journalists changed but the end result was the same.
It is now clear how Turkey’s fake “liberal consensus” failed spectacularly. However unpalatable progressives found them, Turkey’s secularist-nationalists, socialists and communists defended their right to exist in a society where they constitute a historical phenomenon alongside Turkey’s conservatives. Their imprisonment in the name of normalisation was unacceptable and immoral.
Instead of a liberal consensus, what Turkey needs is a proper dissensus: the coexistence of these different political camps.
Turkey Uncensored is an Index on Censorship project to publish a series of articles from censored Turkish writers, artists and translators.
Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden attempted to explain mass surveillance through a conversation around dick pics during an interview with John Oliver on Last Week Tonight, a satirical current affairs show aired by American network HBO.
“Even if you sent it to somebody within the United States, your wholly domestic communication between you and your wife can go from New York to London and back and get caught up in the database,” Snowden said in the interview, conducted in his temporary residence in Russia after the United States cancelled his passport for leaking details about NSA domestic spying in June 2013.
The elimination of complicated terminology in the discussion has allowed us to understand that although emails sent between Gmail accounts are encrypted and unidentifiable to outsiders as they move from Google’s data centres in the US and across the world, in reality the racy pictures embedded in these emails can actually be stored in several data centres worldwide as a way to provide backups in case one centre fails.
These encryption techniques have been around since 1991, when hacker Philip Zimmermann uploaded a free encryption program called Pretty Good Privacy – better known today as PGP – to the internet. Using a form of cryptography developed in the 1970s known as public-key cryptography, users are given a public key that can be shared which encrypts messages that are sent to them, and another one they keep private to decrypt messages they receive.
As public-key cryptography was generally reserved for military and government use prior to the release of PGP, the availability of these advanced encryption algorithms to the general public was a significant step in the realm of free expression at the time. But while web-based communication has become part of daily life, the average citizen is only beginning to grapple with the idea of mass surveillance let alone the tools associated with it.
Should individuals accept the surveillance environment, allowing – for example – government officials to obtain personal photographs shared between two consenting adults through a corporate service, as raised by Snowden?
To what extent is it possible to escape everyday surveillance amidst these developments and how would this affect our communications? And even if technological advancement brings us newer tools providing stronger privacy protection, where should governments draw a line in monitoring what we share with friends and family?
