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Since winning the Freemuse Award for Music in 2010, Mahsa Vahdat has continued to use her music to fight for freedom of expression for the women of Iran. Since the Iranian revolution in 1979, female solo vocalists are permitted to perform only for female audiences; they cannot perform for men except when part of a chorus as conservative clerics say women’s voices have the power to trigger immorality and arousal.
But Vahdat learned music as a child and went on to study it at university in Tehran. She was encouraged to perform there despite the strict new rules of the Islamic Revolution. Not only does she sing but she also plays the piano and the setar, a Persian string instrument that’s a member of the lute family. Now she has taken that freedom to the Iranian diaspora and world music circles across the globe, performing at international venues where her voice is not discriminated against on the basis of her gender. She refers back to the classical Iranian poets – Rumi, Khayyam and Hafez – as well as using contemporary poetry.
Vahdat’s commitment to fight for her right to sing often meets obstacles; in 2011 she gave a concert at the residence of the Italian embassy in Tehran despite the attempts of the government security forces to stop guests from entering the building. But she has built a following around the world, especially in Norway after touring schools there and presenting a positive, musical image of Iran. In 2011 she released the album Twinklings of Hope with her sister to critical acclaim and has gone on to collaborate with other performers such as Mighty Sam McClain.
Despite the conservatism of her homeland she still teaches Persian singing in Tehran, ensuring that the tradition of both folk music and that of the female artist stays alive. She continues to be an ambassador for the Freemuse Organization which advocates freedom of expression for musicians and composers across the world.
Sophia Smith-Galer is a member of Index on Censorship’s Youth Advisory Board. She is an MA student studying Broadcast Journalism at City University in London. She studied Spanish and Arabic previously at Durham University.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_single_image image=”85476″ img_size=”full” alignment=”center” onclick=”custom_link” link=”https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2016/11/awards-2017/”][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]
Seventeen years of celebrating the courage and creativity of some of the world’s greatest journalists, artists, campaigners and digital activists
2001 | 2002 | 2003 | 2004 | 2005 | 2006 | 2007 | 2008 | 2009 | 2010 | 2011 | 2012 | 2013 | 2014 | 2015 | 2016 | 2017[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_basic_grid post_type=”post” max_items=”12″ style=”load-more” items_per_page=”4″ element_width=”6″ grid_id=”vc_gid:1492506354793-87f74769-0713-9″ taxonomies=”2562, 7359″][/vc_column][/vc_row]
Each year, the Index on Censorship Freedom of Expression Awards gala honours courageous champions who fight for free speech around the world.
Drawn from more than 400 crowdsourced nominations, this year’s nominees include artists, journalists, campaigners and digital activists tackling censorship and fighting for freedom of expression. Many of the 16 shortlisted are regularly targeted by authorities or by criminal and extremist groups for their work: some face regular death threats, others criminal prosecution.
The gala takes place Wednesday 19 April at the Unicorn Theatre in London and will be hosted by comedian, actor and writer Katy Brand. If you aren’t lucky enough to be attending, you can catch the night’s events by tuning into coverage and a live Periscope stream @IndexCensorship beginning at 7:30PM BST.
We will be live tweeting throughout the evening on @IndexCensorship. Get involved in the conversation using the hashtag #IndexAwards2017.
Luaty Beirão, Angola
Rapper Luaty Beirão, also known as Ikonoklasta, has been instrumental in showing the world the hidden face of Angolan President José Eduardo dos Santos’s rule. For his activism Beirão has been beaten up, had drugs planted on him and, in June 2015, was arrested alongside 14 other people planning to attend a meeting to discuss a book on non-violent resistance. Since being released in 2016, Beirão has been undeterred attempting to stage concerts that the authorities have refused to license and publishing a book about his captivity entitled “I Was Freer Then”, claiming “I would rather be in jail than in a state of fake freedom where I have to self-censor”.
Rebel Pepper, China
Wang Liming, better known under the pseudonym Rebel Pepper, is one of China’s most notorious political cartoonists. For satirising Chinese Premier Xi Jinping and lampooning the ruling Communist Party, Rebel Pepper has been repeatedly persecuted. In 2014, he was forced to remain in Japan, where he was on holiday, after serious threats against him were posted on government-sanctioned forums. The Chinese state has since disconnected him from his fan base by repeatedly deleting his social media accounts, he alleges his conversations with friends and family are under state surveillance, and self-imposed exile has made him isolated, bringing significant financial struggles. Nonetheless, Rebel Pepper keeps drawing, ferociously criticising the Chinese regime.
Fahmi Reza, Malaysia
On 30 January 2016, Malaysian graphic designer Fahmi Reza posted an image online of Prime Minister Najib Razak in evil clown make-up. From T-shirts to protest placards, and graffiti on streets to a sizeable public sticker campaign, the image and its accompanying anti-sedition law slogan #KitaSemuaPenghasut (“we are all seditious”) rapidly evolved into a powerful symbol of resistance against a government seen as increasingly corrupt and authoritarian. Despite the authorities’ attempts to silence Reza, who was banned from travel and has since been detained and charged on two separate counts under Malaysia’s Communications and Multimedia Act, he has refused to back down.
Two-tailed Dog Party, Hungary
A group of satirists and pranksters who parody political discourse in Hungary with artistic stunts and creative campaigns, the Two-tailed Dog Party have become a vital alternative voice following the rise of the national conservative government led by Viktor Orban. When Orban introduced a national consultation on immigration and terrorism in 2015, and plastered cities with anti-immigrant billboards, the party launched their own mock questionnaires and a popular satirical billboard campaign denouncing the government’s fear-mongering tactics. Relentlessly attempting to reinvigorate public debate and draw attention to under-covered or taboo topics, the party’s efforts include recently painting broken pavement to draw attention to a lack of public funding.
Arcoiris, Honduras
Established in 2003, LGBT organisation Arcoiris, meaning ‘rainbow’, works on all levels of Honduran society to advance LGBT rights. Honduras has seen an explosion in levels of homophobic violence since a military coup in 2009. Working against this tide, Arcoiris provide support to LGBT victims of violence, run awareness initiatives, promote HIV prevention programmes and directly lobby the Honduran government and police force. From public marches to alternative awards ceremonies, their tactics are diverse and often inventive. Between June 2015 and March 2016, six members of Arcoiris were killed for this work. Many others have faced intimidation, harassment and physical attacks. Some have had to leave the country because of threats they were receiving.
Breaking the Silence, Israel
Breaking the Silence, an Israeli organisation consisting of ex-Israeli military conscripts, aims to collect and share testimonies about the realities of military operations in the Occupied Territories. Since 2004, the group has collected over 1,000 (mainly anonymous) statements from Israelis who have served their military duty in the West Bank and Gaza. For publishing these frank accounts the organisation has repeatedly come under fire from the Israeli government. In 2016 the pressure on the organisation became particularly pointed and personal, with state-sponsored legal challenges, denunciations from the Israeli cabinet, physical attacks on staff members and damages to property. Led by Israeli politicians including the prime minister, and defence minister, there have been persistent attempts to force the organisation to identify a soldier whose anonymous testimony was part of a publication raising suspicions of war crimes in Gaza. Losing the case would set a precedent that would make it almost impossible for Breaking the Silence to operate in the future. The government has also recently enacted a law that would bar the organisation’s widely acclaimed high school education programme.
Ildar Dadin, Russia
A Russian opposition and LGBT rights activist, Ildar Dadin was the first, and remains the only, person to be convicted under a notorious 2014 public assembly law. Aimed at punishing anyone who breaks strict rules on protest, the law was enacted to silence dissent after a wave of demonstrations following Putin’s last election victory. Dadin’s crime was to stage a series of one-man pickets, often standing silently with a billboard, attempting to duck the cynical law and push for free expression. For his solo enterprise, Dadin was arrested and sentenced to three years imprisonment in December 2015. In November 2016, website Meduza published a letter smuggled from Dadin to his wife, exposing torture he claimed he was suffering alongside fellow prisoners. The letter, a brave move for a serving prisoner, was widely reported. A government investigation was prompted, and Dadin was transferred – against his will – to an undisclosed new location. A wave of public protest led to Dadin’s new location in a Siberian prison colony being revealed in January 2017. In February 2017, Russia’s constitutional and Supreme Courts suddenly quashed Dadin’s conviction, ruling he should be released and afforded opportunity for rehabilitation.
Maati Monjib, Morocco
A well-known academic who teaches African studies and political history at the University of Rabat since returning from exile, Maati Monjib co-founded Freedom Now, a coalition of Moroccan human rights defenders who seek to promote the rights of Moroccan activists and journalists in a country ranked 131 out of 180 on the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index. His work campaigning for press freedom – including teaching investigative journalism workshops and using of a smartphone app called Story Maker designed to support citizen journalism – has made him a target for the authorities who insist that this work is the exclusive domain of state police. For his persistent efforts, Monjib is currently on trial for “undermining state security” and “receiving foreign funds.”
Jensiat, Iran
Despite growing public knowledge of global digital surveillance capabilities and practices, it has often proved hard to attract mainstream public interest in the issue. This continues to be the case in Iran where even with widespread VPN usage, there is little real awareness of digital security threats. With public sexual health awareness equally low, the three people behind Jensiat, an online graphic novel, saw an an opportunity to marry these challenges. Dealing with issues linked to sexuality and cyber security in a way that any Iranian can easily relate to, the webcomic also offers direct access to verified digital security resources. Launched in March 2016, Jensiat has had around 1.2 million unique readers and was rapidly censored by the Iranian government.
Bill Marczak, United States
A schoolboy resident of Bahrain and PhD candidate in computer science at the University of California, Berkeley, Bill Marczak co-founded Bahrain Watch in 2013. Seeking to promote effective, accountable and transparent governance, Bahrain Watch works by launching investigations and running campaigns in direct response to social media posts coming from activists on the front line. In this context, Marczak’s personal research has proved highly effective, often identifying new surveillance technologies and targeting new types of information controls that governments are employing to exert control online, both in Bahrain and across the region. In 2016 Marczak investigated several government attempts to track dissidents and journalists, notably identifying a previously unknown weakness in iPhones that had global ramifications.
#ThisFlag and Evan Mawarire, Zimbabwe
In May 2016, Baptist pastor Evan Mawarire unwittingly began the most important protest movement in Zimbabwe’s recent history when he posted a video of himself draped in the Zimbabwean flag, expressing his frustration at the state of the nation. A subsequent series of YouTube videos and the hashtag Mawarire used, #ThisFlag, went viral, sparking protests and a boycott called by Mawarire, which he estimates was attended by over eight million people. A scale of public protest previously inconceivable, the impact was so strong that private possession of Zimbabwe’s national flag has since been banned. The pastor temporarily left the country following death threats and was arrested in early February as he returned to his homeland.
Turkey Blocks, Turkey
In a country marked by increasing authoritarianism, a strident crackdown on press and social media as well as numerous human rights violations, Turkish-British technologist Alp Toker brought together a small team to investigate internet restrictions. Using Raspberry Pi technology they built an open source tool able to reliably monitor and report both internet shut downs and power blackouts in real time. Using their tool, Turkey Blocks have since broken news of 14 mass-censorship incidents during several politically significant events in 2016. The tool has proved so successful that it has begun to be implemented elsewhere globally.
Behrouz Boochani, Manus Island, Papua New Guinea/Australia
Iranian Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani fled the city of Ilam in Iran in May 2013 after the police raided the Kurdish cultural heritage magazine he had co-founded, arresting 11 of his colleagues. He travelled to Australia by boat, intending to claim asylum, but less than a month after arriving he was forcibly relocated to a “refugee processing centre” in Papua New Guinea that had been newly opened. Imprisoned alongside nearly 1000 men who have been ordered to claim asylum in Papua New Guinea or return home, Boochani has been passionately documenting their life in detention ever since. Publicly advertised by the Australian Government as a refugee deterrent, life in the detention centre is harsh. For the first 2 years, Boochani wrote under a pseudonym. Until 2016 he circumvented a ban on mobile phones by trading personal items including his shoes with local residents. And while outside journalists are barred, Boochani has refused to be silent, writing numerous stories via Whatsapp and even shooting a feature film with his phone.
Daptar, Dagestan, Russia
In a Russian republic marked by a clash between the rule of law, the weight of traditions, and the growing influence of Islamic fundamentalism, Daptar, a website run by journalists Zakir Magomedov and Svetlana Anokhina, writes about issues affecting women, which are little reported on by other local media. Meaning “diary”, Daptar seeks to promote debate and in 2016 they ran a landmark story about female genital mutilation in Dagestan, which broke the silence surrounding that practice and began a regional and national conversation about FGM. The small team of journalists, working alongside a volunteer lawyer and psychologist, also tries to provide help to the women they are in touch with.
KRIK, Serbia
Crime and Corruption Reporting Network (KRIK) is a new independent investigative website which was founded by a team of young Serbian journalists intent on exposing organised crime and extortion in their country which is ranked as having widespread corruption by Transparency International. In their first year they have published several high-impact investigations, including forcing Serbia’s prime minister to admit that senior officials had been behind nocturnal demolitions in a Belgrade neighbourhood and revealing meetings between drug barons, the ministry of police and the minister of foreign affairs. KRIK have repeatedly come under attack online and offline for their work –threatened and allegedly under surveillance by state officials, defamed in the pages of local tabloids, and suffering abuse including numerous death threats on social media.
Maldives Independent, Maldives
Website Maldives Independent, which provides news in English, is one of the few remaining independent media outlets in a country that ranks 112 out of 180 countries on the Reporters Without Borders Press Freedom Index. In August 2016 the Maldives passed a law criminalising defamation and empowering the state to impose heavy fines and shut down media outlets for “defamatory” content. In September, Maldives Independent’s office was violently attacked and later raided by the police, after the release of an Al Jazeera documentary exposing government corruption that contained interviews with editor Zaheena Rasheed, who had to flee for her safety. Despite the pressure, the outlet continues to hold the government to account.
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I want to begin with a story that took place not long before the fall of the Soviet Union. It illustrates what happens when an oppressive regime, and its institutions, loses its monopoly and control of information.
A deputy chairman and general of the KGB had invited a private citizen and acquaintance to his office on Lubyanka Square in central Moscow. The private citizen was working in the newly created private sector as an communications officer.
In the totalitarian state of the Soviet Union a deputy chairman of KGB, the secret police, was one of the best informed people in the country.
The KGB controlled what information should be made available to the public, they were in charge of surveillance of the population and reported back to the party leadership about conversations in lines for vodka, about dissidents, about foreigners, about anything. The KGB had special access to information that no one else was allowed to read, listen to or watch.
The KGB controlled the so called special archives, Spetskhrany, where forbidden books were hidden out of the public’s sight and Soviet citizens needed special permission to access them.
KGB-generals and high ranking party officials read The Gulag Archipelago by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn and other banned works of literature. They studied Russian emigre writers and the emigrant press that ordinary citizens were not allowed to read or put on their book shelves. If they did, they risked ending up in a labor camp in Siberia.
All that started to change with Mikhail Gorbachev’s glasnost policy during the second half of the 1980s. The regime’s loosening grip on society, the opening up of the country to alternative ideas and people from other parts of the world, the challenging of Soviet taboos and official ideology played a crucial role in the demise of the USSR.
In this process the KGB and other repressive institutions lost their status as the ultimate gatekeepers of information and in the end they, therefore, lost power.
As I mentioned, the conversation between the KGB general and a private citizen who was an outsider to the regime but no dissident took place at the time of the unravelling of Soviet power. The private citizen, let’s call him Yura, was of course curious to find out why the KGB general wanted to talk to him. It turned out that the KGB general had just one question to this guest: “Yura, he said, could you please tell me what is going on in the country? I just don’t have a clue.”
For anyone with experience of the Soviet Union that was an astonishing question. A KGB general asking a private citizen about what was going on in the country was highly unusual. It revealed the changed relationship between power and information. It indicated that Soviet censorship had come to an end.
[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row equal_height=”yes” content_placement=”middle” el_class=”text_white” css=”.vc_custom_1489569355941{background-color: #6b6b6b !important;}”][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_custom_heading text=”Protect Media Freedom” use_theme_fonts=”yes” link=”url:https%3A%2F%2Fwww.indexoncensorship.org%2Fdefend-media-freedom-donate-index%2F|||”][vc_column_text]
We monitor threats to press freedom, produce an award-winning magazine and publish work by censored writers.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][vc_column width=”1/2″ css=”.vc_custom_1489569293052{background-image: url(https://www.indexoncensorship.org/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/newspapers.jpg?id=50885) !important;}”][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]This is being said as a preface to a few observations about dictatorships, power and censorship.
Every dictatorship is based on the control and manipulation of information. That’s why censorship is crucial to any oppressive regime. It cannot survive without it. Censorship is by definition closely connected with power and the exercising of it.
To be more specific: Censorship is an instrument to assist in the attainment, preservation or continuance of somebody’s power, whether exercised by an individual, an institution or a state. It is – as Michael Scammell, one of the founders of Index on Censorship has put it – “the extension of physical power into the realm of the mind and the spirit”. (1)
With the redistribution of power from state to non-state actors – from Google and Facebook to ISIS and thousands of NGOs and social movements around the world and with new ways and discourses to silence unwelcome expression not always associated with state power it makes sense to introduce a broader definition of censorship – a definition that doesn’t focus exclusively on the state and the use of hard power to silence speech.
I think this is of importance in the context of Censorship Awareness Week and our attempt to understand and deconstruct the more subtle mechanisms of what Tom Cushman called “prevention of the mind”. This goes for states, institutions and individuals.
We live in a world of cognitive biases that from time to time operates as censors. They close our mind and prevent us from seeing complexities and different sides of a problem. Be it confirmation bias, blind spot bias, courtesy bias, hindsight bias, outcome bias, social biases, ingroup bias, stereotyping and so on and so forth or the bias of a public opinion – remember John Stuart Mill’s warning against the Tyranny of public opinion?
A definition of censorship may go like this:
“Censorship describes a variety of processes… formal and informal, overt and covert, conscious and unconscious, by which restrictions are imposed on the collection, display, dissemination, and exchange of information, opinions, ideas and imaginative expression.” (2)
In the following I will focus on the history of censorship in Europe in order to understand one of its fundamental premises. Then I’ll take a look at the internet and the way governments try to control it with increasing success. I will pay special attention to China, because it is the most powerful country trying to undermine the internet’s libertarian and transnational core. Finally, I will return to Europe and the US and ask what can be done to counter censorship and self-censorship in our part of the world.
Censorship is a loaded word. It triggers negative associations in most people in spite of the fact that everybody, people and governments, support it and practise from time to time and in one form or another.
It’s a bit like the debate about freedom of speech and its limits. People say I am in favor of free speech, but… until nothing is left of free speech.
When it comes to censorship they say: I am against censorship, but… – and then it goes: We need to shut down offensive speech, we need to protect the country, we need to fight terrorism, we need to protect the truth or the public order or religious and national symbols or certain feelings or public morals and social cohesion.
The list goes on and on depending on time and place.
Censorship in Europe was first and foremost connected to the church. The church exercised strict control over the dissemination and interpretation of the holy scriptures. The church and the state were for centuries so close that what was seen as injurious to the church was automatically regarded as injurious to the state.
The church’s authority to act as censor started to erode as a result of the Reformation when the heresy of choice was introduced. It became impossible to maintain that there were no possible alternatives to the Roman way.
The impact of the Reformation in the aftermath of the invention of the printing press proved to be decisive in determining a changing attitude to censorship. It lead to a conceptual separation of words and deeds, of expression and action as Michael Scammell says in his seminal essay on censorship and its history. I quote:
“Up to the 17th century, action and expression, had been held to be virtually one where religious heresy and political crimes were concerned. To advocate on orthodox or dissenting religious views was tantamount to a physical attack on church members or property, while to advocate political change or express hostility to the prevailing order was ‘sedition’ and equivalent to treason.
“The consequence of this breakthrough was that a ruling power or government might be expected to take measures against actions hostile to its existence, but it should tolerate the expression of hostile opinions.” (3)
In other words the distinction between words and deeds is fundamental to upholding freedom of speech. It paved the way for a doctrine of religious tolerance and religious freedom and later for freedom of expression. The distinction serves as a line separating democracy from dictatorship, a free society from an unfree society. The former does not treat words as if they were actions, the latter does. That’s why dissidents end up in jail for word crimes in a dictatorship while they sit in parliament or become presidents in democracies. Think of Vaclav Havel or Andrei Sakharov.
I believe that it is of the utmost importance to keep this fundamental distinction in mind in today’s world, where so many people are eager to equalise words with deeds insisting that words can be as harmful as actual physical violence and therefore we have to criminalise them. We don’t want to return to the Middle Ages.
Today censorship is regarded as abnormal and as an emergency measure and therefore it tends to hide when it becomes the norm and institutionalised. If censorship is being exercised openly governments may give it another name in order to provide it with a cover of decency or to present it as a necessary measure to counter a domestic or foreign threat.
The dream of any free speech activist would be to see the end of censorship. With the introduction of the internet it was a widespread assumption that it would be impossible to exercise censorship as before. US President Bill Clinton in 2000 laughed at the possibility that the internet could be controlled.
In 1996, internet pioneer John Parry Barlow, wrote a Declaration of Independence of Cyberspace. It said:
“Governments of the Industrial World, you weary giants of flesh and steel, I come from Cyberspace, the new home of Mind. On behalf of the future, I ask you of the past to leave us alone. You are not welcome among us. You have no sovereignty where we gather. We are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity.” (4)
Governments, Barlow claimed, did not “possess any methods of enforcement that people living in cyberspace had to have to fear.”
As late as 2011 one of the leaders of the uprising against the Mubarak government in Egypt said: “It you want to liberate a people, give it the internet.”
Today things look different and you may as well say:
“If you want to empower the government and provide it with tools to put you under surveillance and limit your freedom, give it the internet and digital technology.”
The internet is seen by governments as both a threat and a means of control.
Today John Parry Barlow’s declaration from 20 years ago sounds utopian. Back then a lot of people hoped that the internet once and for all would do away with censorship.
It didn’t happen. Around the world new systems of control are taking hold. They are stifling the global conversation and repression and violence against journalists are at record levels. Today governments are increasingly exercising their sovereignty on the internet, fencing it in through the establishment of national borders and enforcing their own laws and limitations.
Just to give you one example showing how the internet and the digital technology has been transformed from a tool of liberation into to a tool of repression:
At the time of demonstrations in Iran in 2009 security agents tortured journalists and activists in order to get passwords to their social media and e-mail accounts, and then combed through their networks and arrested their sources and colleagues. (5)
In this way the internet is repeating developments that took place after the invention of other new technologies from the printing press in the 15th century to radio and television in the 20th century. Sooner or later governments find ways to control the new technology to their own advantage.
The Democrators (6)
We don’t have that many hard core dictatorship in the world today. The director of the New York based Committee to Protect Journalists Joel Simon labels the new autocrats “democrators”.
They prefer to rule by manipulation, not by force. Dictators impose their will. Democrators govern with the support of the majority. Dictators control information, democrators manage it. Democrators win elections, dictators denounce elections as a key to legitimate government.
Democrators span the globe and the ideological spectrum.
The two most successful democrators are Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan and Russia’s Vladimir Putin.
They tolerate private media but manage critical expression through diverse measures such as national security prosecutions, punitive tax audits, manipulation of government advertising, and seemingly reasonable content restrictions like prohibitions on hate speech, extremism or support of terrorism – restrictions that liberal democracies also have though they apply them with more restraint and checks. When democrators like Erdogan and Putin do crackdown on media, they cast their efforts as consistent with international law.
China is a league of itself (7). It represents the most formidable attempt to show that a powerful determined state can still control the flow of information, ideas and images across and within its frontiers.
The Chinese Party-state claims the right to control all expression within its frontiers on three grounds.
First, it refers to the idea of information sovereignty, second, it insists that is has a civilisational difference that justifies control of the internet so that it doesn’t come under the influence of non-Chinese values and finally the communist party claims that it knows best what is good for the people.
China is the country with the most internet-users in the world, 642 million people or 22 percent of all users in the world and the fastest-growing connected population is also the world’s most ambitious censor. An estimated 2 million censors police the internet and the activities of users, among them 300,000 party members who are paid to push the party line online.
Nevertheless, 76 percent of Chinese questioned in a poll in 2014 said they felt free from government surveillance. Thanks to the internet the Chinese government has been able to deploy censorship strategies that are subtle and harder for the public to see. They have combined traditional oppression with more sophisticated way of exercising censorship. It’s been called “networked authoritarianism”.
The Great Firewall of China – a complex system of internet filtering and blocking and directing that allows the government to block hundreds of thousands of websites. The system works because all internet traffic in or out of China passes through only eight gateways. In cases of regional unrest the government can simply unplug the internet.
Censorship is being delegated to private companies.
China has created its own tech companies – Baidu instead of Google, RenRen instead of Facebook, Sina Weibo instead of Twitter – that makes it easier to control, filter and block the digital technology.
And China is building a global coalition to counter US dominance on the internet. This group of countries than involves Russia, Iran, Turkey and countries in the Middle East, Africa and Asia are fighting on 2 fronts.
To the Chinese leadership mass media is not a forum through which individuals can realise their right to freedom of expression; rather it is the means through which societies can advance their collective interest as defined by the country’s leadership. This is an understanding of the media that China shares with a lot of governments.
After having visited China I want to bring you back closer to our life and reality and say a few words about self-censorship.
Self-censorship is driven by fear. It is closely connected to censorship and intimidation of the public space. When people stop fearing for the consequences of what they say dictatorships fall. Fear is often a very legitimate feeling, but it comes at a price. A fear society doesn’t have to apply repressive laws because people themselves will internalise the limits of freedom that have been drawn by intimidators of one kind or another. Citizens will practice self-censorship so that there will no need to silence them. They will silence themselves.
Self-censorship is invisible. You will only learn about it if people are honest about their motivations for not saying one thing or the other out of fear. You cannot pass a law that protects people against fear. It’s extremely destructive for a society.
Writers and artists in repressive societies have to struggle with self-censorship but self-censorship is also a fact of life in democracies, though for other reasons. In the words of the Serbian writer Danilo Kis self-censorship is a process that involves an external pressure, political or social, that forces you to give up sovereignty over your work and let others decide what to say and not to say. This definition reveals the existential core of self-censorship.
Exercising self-censorship you abandon part of yourself to the censors. In an essay from 1986 on censorship and self-censorship Kis wrote:
“The fight against self-censorship is anonymous, lonely and without witnesses. It makes its subject feel humiliated and shameful for cooperating. It means that you read your own text with another person’s eyes. It’s a situation where you become your own judge, more suspicious and tougher than anybody else. (…) The self-appointed censor is the author’s alter ego, an alter ego that leans over the author’s shoulder and sticks his nose in the text. (…) It’s impossible to defeat this censor because he is like God – he knows everything and sees everything. He is the product of one’s own mind, of one’s own nightmares. This alter ego succeeds in undermining and corrupting even the strongest individuals that the external censorship hasn’t been able to destroy. Self-censorship allies itself with lying and spiritual corruption when we deny that it exists.” (8)
Censorship and self-censorship have become the preferred way to manage diversities of culture, religion and opinion in a world where more and more people are living in cities and having a life on line and therefore are becoming physical and virtual neighbors.
A lot of it is being done out of the most noble and honorable intentions – to protect minorities, to avoid offending religious sensibilities, to keep the social peace and so on and so forth.
Nevertheless I believe this is the wrong way because it makes it more difficult to understand one another. Silence rarely promotes a deeper understanding between human beings.
It also undermines what Jonathan Rauch has called the Liberal Science model (9), that is, that in a knowledge producing society there can be no final say and no personal authority when it comes to determining who has a right to say what, ask questions and challenge what is being said. No matter, whether the insistence on a final say or personal authority comes from fundamentalists or humanitarians or egalitarians.
Fundamentalists want to protect what they see as the indisputable truth, political or religious, while the humanitarians want to stop what they see as verbal violence and the egalitarians insist that some perspectives should have preferable treatment.
There is no way to advance knowledge peacefully and productively by adhering to principles advocated by humanitarians or egalitarians. Their principles undermine liberal science and ultimately peace and freedom. Knowledge cannot be had except where criticism is unfettered and doubt is never rebuked. The only way to decide who is right is through open-ended public checking of each by each, through criticism and questioning. This is the epistemological constitution of a liberal society.
I want to end by quoting the British historian Timothy Garton Ash who last year published a fine book on the principles of free and better speech in a globalised world. Garton Ash explains why free speech is so important to understand others and ourselves.
Timothy Garton Ash writes: “Over the last half century, human enterprise and innovation, from the jet plane to the smartphone, have created a world in which we all are becoming neighbours, but nowhere is it written, that we will be good neighbours.
“Central to this endeavour is free speech. Only with freedom of expression can I understand what it is to be you. Only with freedom of information can we control both public and private powers. Only by articulating our differences can we clearly see what they are, and why they are what they are.
“Openness about all kinds of human difference is as vital as civility. I cannot fully express myself – that is, my self – unless I identify my differences with others. We all notice differences and respond to them both consciously and unconsciously. Unless we explore these responses and feelings, we have no chance of digging down to the hidden biases of which we are not aware.
“If we ‘speak as we feel/not what we ought to say’, as Shakespeare puts it at the end of King Lear, we can learn from experience what is hurtful to others, and hence discover for ourselves what it takes to live together as neighbors.
“Rather than brushing our perceptions of human difference under the carpet, where they fester like rotten banana skins, we speak about them openly but civilly – as well as in such registers as art and humor.”
Flemming Rose is a Danish journalist, author and since 2010 foreign affairs editor at the Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten.
Notes:
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Each week, Index on Censorship’s Mapping Media Freedom project verifies threats, violations and limitations faced by the media throughout the European Union and neighbouring countries. Here are recent reports that give us cause for concern.
The Madrid Journalists Association (APM) received a petition from a group of journalists they had experienced a “systemised campaign of personal and network harassment” from the left-wing Podemos party.
According to a press release from APM, the reporters said they had been harassed and pressured by the Podemos, led by Pablo Iglesias, for over a year. The press release also said that the harassment came in the form of threatening phone calls, emails, and messages or comments on social media such as Twitter. APM believes that the harassment is an attempt by Podemos officials to improve their reputation and image by eliminating any media criticism of the party.
Elvi Fundo, the news editor for the online publication Citynews.al and Radio Best, was attacked in Tirana on the morning of 8 March. The reporter was on his way to his office in the city when he was violently assaulted by two unknown assailants and suffered from injuries which landed him in the hospital.
Fundo, who is known for publishing investigations into corruption and conflict of interests, told the Balkan Insight that he does not believe the attacks had political connotations. Instead, Fundo said, he believes the attack was “the work of criminals financed by corrupt media clans tied to drug-trafficking.” Both journalists and politicians, including the Albanian Union of Journalists and Prime Minister Edi Rama, have condemned the attack as a threat to media and press freedom.
Journalists and politicians, including the Albanian Union of Journalists and Prime Minister Edi Rama, have condemned the attack as a threat to media and press freedom. Although the police have launched an investigation into the assault, the identity and motive of the assailants are still unknown.
Reporter Igor Zalyubovin and photographer Vladimir Yarotsky were arrested and detained by officers of the Russian Security Service (FSB) in Svetogorsk on 7 March. The journalists, who work for Snob, a Moscow-based independent news magazine, were taken to a detention centre and charged with crossing into a border zone without permission.
Zalyubovin and Yarotsky had rented an apartment in Svetogorsk, a town of about 15,000 outside the border of Finald, to use while reporting on Mayor Sergey Davydov’s claim that it is a “city without sin” because there are no homosexual residents. A 2014 law requires journalists to have specific permission from the FSB to work in the border zone, however, according to Snob’s editor-in-chief, they did not apply for a permit due to time constraints.
The Committee to Protect Journalists denounced the incident and said that this is the second time that journalists were detained and forced to leave Svetogorsk for border zone violations while doing follow-up reporting on the Mayor’s comments. [/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row equal_height=”yes” content_placement=”middle” css=”.vc_custom_1489421829923{background-color: #d5473c !important;background-position: center !important;background-repeat: no-repeat !important;background-size: cover !important;}” el_class=”text_white”][vc_column width=”1/2″][vc_column_text]
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Nu Ener, a news editor for the Yeni Asya daily, said was arrested by police on charges of association and membership to the FETO/PDY terrorist organisation.
According to a report published in Yeni Asya, Ener was originally detained following a police raid on her home on 3 March. Three days later, the 4th Criminal Judicature of Peace found that she was guilty of membership to the terrorist organisation which has ties to Fethullah Gulen, the Muslim preacher whom the Turkish government blames for the failed coup this past July. Ener was specifically accused of using Bylock, a mobile communications application, to help organise the coup attempt.
Ener, who remains incarcerated in the Bakirkoy Prison for women, is one out of 155 journalists currently imprisoned in Turkey.
The circulation of Pras Press, a new satirical newspaper by Bulgaria’s “Society of Rude Cartoonists,” was blocked by the State Distribution Company on 5 March. The newspaper, which is known as the Bulgarian version of ‘Charlie Hebdo,’ first went on sale on 1 March, but since distribution ceased, only one tenth of the printed copies has been sold.
Journalist Ivan Bakalov said that he believes MP Delyan Peevski is behind the incident although he is not one of the listed owners of the State Distribution Company. Bakalov and his colleagues believe that the mocking of political elites in Pras Press likely contributed to the circulation block.
Despite Bulgaria’s low ranking of 113 in the 2016 Press Freedom Ranking of Reporters without Borders, the journalists of Pras Press have pledged to bring their case to the Commission for Protection of Competition, the state prosecution, caretaker government, and President Rumen Radev in hopes to resume circulation.[/vc_column_text][/vc_column][/vc_row][vc_row][vc_column][vc_column_text]
Click on the bubbles to view reports or double-click to zoom in on specific regions. The full site can be accessed at https://mappingmediafreedom.org/
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