Web Censorship on the Increase

mid-devonian writes "Close on the heels of the temporary blocking of YouTube by a Turkish judge, a group of academics has published research showing that Web censorship is on the increase worldwide. As many as two dozen countries are blocking content using a variety of techniques. Distressingly, the most censor-heavy countries (which includes China, Iran, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, Burma and Uzbekistan) seem to be passing on their technologically sophisticated techniques to other areas of the world. 'New censorship techniques include the periodic barring of complete applications, such as China's block on Wikipedia or Pakistan's ban on Google's blogging service, and the use of more advanced technologies such as 'keyword filtering', which is used to track down material by identifying sensitive words.'"

Comments

Re:Saturday Night Live Syndrome

[bcrowell]

Only Thailand and Turkey are countries that even have a medium record of civil rights.
Turkey is way worse than "medium." If you try to assert the truth of the Armenian genocide, they kill you.

Re:Saturday Night Live Syndrome

[Glowing Fish]

I was giving them, as they say, the benefit of the doubt.

I don't know a lot about Turkey, I know it is a non-totalitarian state that has committed genocide against ethnic minorities in the past, and continues to lie about it. I know they also persecute minorities and dissidents.

But as far as I know, in Turkey, you could go into a bookstore, and find, say, a copy of War and Peace and buy it and read it. Or you could see most Hollywood movies. So the government doesn't censor every aspect of life, like they do in, say, North Korea.

But again, I am not a big expert.