- Twitter Released A Draft Policy on Synthetic Media. Here’s What Stood Out to the Activists We Consulted. — January 28, 2020 Earlier this month, Facebook released its policy on manipulated media. As a civil society organization with expert knowledge on the subject, WITNESS was asked to give input on the policy while it was under development, and it’s worth recognizing the positives of Facebook’s pro-active approach in developing a response to this […]
- Access to the Internet is a Human Right WITNESS joins a coalition of groups to speak out against state-led internet shutdowns and to demand that governments around the world #KeepItOn.
- Human Rights Video Weekly: Ukrainian activists attacked by pro-Russian mobs, Colombian community shelled, Ethiopian bloggers detained Police dogs used to attack a man in Papua New Guinea, Ethiopian internet activists arrested, and Saudi Arabian regulation of YouTube videos.
- WITNESS Endorses International Principles on Human Rights & Surveillance We join 150+ organizations from 40+ countries supporting these 13 principles that explain how international human rights law applies to the current digital environment.
- Take Action For Internet Access and Digital Rights at the e-G8! Tomorrow, the French Presidency will host a meeting - the e-G8 Forum - focusing exclusively on shaping the agenda of the forthcoming G8 Summit around key global Internet policy issues. This will be the first time that the Internet's role in society and the economy is explicitly on the G8 agenda.
- The Internet as a Peacekeeper? I recently read an article published on Foreign Policy magazine's website about how the Internet would bring freedom and peace to an entirely new level globally.
- Google unmuzzles itself in China Google has received brickbats a-plenty for its stance in China, where, in order to be permitted to operate by the Chinese government, the search company agreed to censor particular "sensitive" search results - Tiananmen, Dalai Lama, democracy, human rights, and so on.
- What really happened in the Burma internet “shut off”? [via John Palfrey] Next Monday, December 10, is International Human Rights Day, and it seems a good moment do our bit to make sure we don’t forget Burma. COHRE (the Center on Housing Rights and Evictions) has posted two reports – one on Displacement and Dispossession: Forced Displacement and Land Rights in Burma (pdf) and the other naming […]
- Does The Number have a lesson for human rights activists? Our good friend Ethan has done it again, drawing the connection between a recent viral meme, anti-censorship, and human rights in an article on World Changing. A 16 digit number used as a key to decrypt HD-DVDs became the center of an online revolt against internet censorship yesterday, when it was posted on several blogs, […]
- Psiphon – A way around censored sites? Released just this Dec 1st, psiphon is a human rights software project developed by the Citizen Lab at the Munk Centre for International Studies that allows citizens in uncensored countries to provide unfettered access to the Net through their home computers to friends and family members who live behind firewalls of states that censor. If […]
- Human Rights Watch Report on Internet Censorship Human Rights Watch recently published a report on Internet Censorship in China. The report gives details about how corporations like Yahoo!, Microsoft, Google, and Skype are cooperating with the Chinese government censorship efforts. It also gives some good background on the “Great Firewall of China,” which refers to the way in which the Chinese government […]
- China Making Sure That User Generated Content Is Officially Registered Content First Another good post from unmediated originally from techdirt: China has a long history of being a bureaucratic society — and it seems they’re really learned how to apply that bureaucracy to the internet. They have tens of thousands of people monitoring the internet, for example. However, they’re really going to ridiculous extremes in trying to […]
