Deutsche Welle: Ugandan author charged for criticizing President Museveni on social media. “Award-winning author Kakwenza Rukirabashaija is currently being detained while facing two counts of ‘offensive communication’ after making unflattering remarks about President Yoweri Museveni and his son on Twitter.”
Associated Press: Russia blocks website of group that tracks political arrests. “A Russian organization that tracks political arrests and provides legal aid to detainees said Saturday that government regulators blocked its website, the latest move in a months-long crackdown on independent media and human rights organizations.”
Reuters: Apple warns Thai activists “state-sponsored attackers” may have targeted iPhones. “Apple Inc issued on Wednesday alert messages to at least six Thai activists and researchers who have been critical of the government, warning it believed their iPhones had been targeted by ‘state-sponsored attackers’, according to activists and the alerts reviewed by Reuters.”
Bloomberg CityLab: Hong Kong’s New Museum Tries to Please Art World — and Beijing. “When planning for M+ began in the early 2000s, Hong Kong was still a relatively free-wheeling place, a cosmopolitan gateway to the growing economy over the border. No more. After mass protests, the 2020 national security law made all kinds of dissent a criminal offense, leaving the staff of M+ to interpret the rapidly expanding rules governing expression. Compounding the challenge, the more than 8,000 works in the M+ collection include a HK$1.3 billion ($167 million) collection of Chinese contemporary art donated by Swiss collector Uli Sigg in 2012, featuring work by Zhang Xiaogang and noted dissident Ai Weiwei.”
CNN: Meta denies Kazakh claim of exclusive access to Facebook’s content reporting system. “Facebook-owner Meta Platforms on Tuesday denied a claim by the Kazakh government that it had been granted exclusive access to the social network’s content reporting system. In what it called a joint statement with Facebook (FB), the Kazakh government on Monday touted the purported exclusive access as a compromise solution after the Central Asian nation threatened to block Facebook for millions of local users.”
BBC: Yahoo pulls out of China over ‘challenging’ business conditions. “Yahoo has become the latest US tech company to end its presence in mainland China as tougher regulations are imposed there.The firm said its decision was due to an ‘increasingly challenging business and legal environment’ in the country.”
KFGO: Belarus classifies social media channels as ‘extremist’ in new crackdown. “The Belarusian interior ministry on Friday classified three of the country’s most popular opposition social media channels as extremist organisations, meaning that people can face up to seven years in prison for subscribing to them. Social media channels such as Telegram messenger were widely used during mass street protests against President Alexander Lukashenko last year both to coordinate demonstrations and share footage of a violent police crackdown.”
Washington Post: The case against Mark Zuckerberg: Insiders say Facebook’s CEO chose growth over safety. “Late last year, Mark Zuckerberg faced a choice: Comply with demands from Vietnam’s ruling Communist Party to censor anti-government dissidents or risk getting knocked offline in one of Facebook’s most lucrative Asian markets. In America, the tech CEO is a champion of free speech, reluctant to remove even malicious and misleading content from the platform. But in Vietnam, upholding the free speech rights of people who question government leaders could have come with a significant cost in a country where the social network earns more than $1 billion in annual revenue, according to a 2018 estimate by Amnesty International.”
Wired: One Woman’s Mission to Rewrite Nazi History on Wikipedia. “[Ksenia] Coffman can’t recall exactly when her concern set in. Maybe it was when she read the article about the SS, the Nazi Party’s paramilitary, which included images that felt to her like glamour shots—action-man officers admiring maps, going on parade, all sorts of ‘very visually disturbing’ stuff. Or maybe it was when she clicked through some of the pages about German tank gunners, flying aces, and medal winners. There were hundreds of them, and the men’s impressive kill counts and youthful derring-do always seemed to exist outside the genocidal Nazi cause. What was going on here? Wikipedia was supposed to be all about consensus. Wasn’t there consensus on, you know, Hitler?”
Deutsche Welle: Turkish government increases pressure on social media. “Turkish opposition politicians and activists have made great use of the internet to circumvent state control of the mainstream media. They are alarmed by government plans to crack down even more on online platforms.”
Hurriyet Daily News: Prosecutor launches probe into ‘Help Turkey’ social media posts. “The Ankara Chief Public Prosecutor’s Office has launched a probe into social media posts that asked for foreign help with the hashtag ‘Help Turkey’ amid the massive wildfires. In a statement on Aug. 5, the prosecutor’s office argued that the posts were trying to show the country as ‘incapable’ and ‘attempted to create panic, fear and concern among the public.’”
Asia Times: HK media erase their archives amid rising arrests. “Several online media outlets in Hong Kong took down opinion articles and videos from their websites or said they would move out of the city after one more columnist of the Apple Daily was arrested at the airport on Sunday.”
Marketplace: What the authoritarian crackdown on social media means for global activism. “It’s been more than a decade since the revolution that came to be known as the Arab Spring, when protesters across the Middle East challenged — and in some cases overthrew — authoritarian governments. Social media played a central role in helping activists organize and build support. Now, autocratic leaders around the world have been stifling dissent on these platforms or banning them altogether. Russia, China, India and Nigeria are some recent examples. Could social media play the same role today that it did in 2010?”
The Diplomat: Social Media Is Blurring the Lines of National Sovereignty. “During the Cold War, Soviet citizens were banned from traveling outside their homeland. Nowadays, for economic reasons, authoritarian states have greater motivations for tolerating, and sometimes even encouraging, their populations’ mobility. Online communication has become a platform from which anyone can speak. But equally, integrated communication may provide new opportunities for governments to suppress voices abroad. Unless regulated, surveillance technologies and disinformation techniques will only become more effective in manipulating or silencing public opinion.”
ProPublica: Sheryl Sandberg and Top Facebook Execs Silenced an Enemy of Turkey to Prevent a Hit to the Company’s Business. “Turkey was demanding the social media giant block Facebook posts from the People’s Protection Units, a mostly Kurdish militia group the Turkish government had targeted. Should Facebook ignore the request, as it has done elsewhere, and risk losing access to tens of millions of users in Turkey? Or should it silence the group, known as the YPG, even if doing so added to the perception that the company too often bends to the wishes of authoritarian governments?”
