![]() ![]() In the past, the ITU has been a key body for China and other leading internet censors, particularly Russia, to push for changes to international regulations to legalize or enable their controls. This week, the UN’s International Telecommunication Union gathered for its quadrennial meeting in Dubai. In recent years, however, especially since President Xi Jinping came to power, China has actively worked with foreign governments to help them build firewalls of their own, and lobby at the United Nations and other bodies to reduce protections for internet freedom worldwide. Since the first virtual blocks were laid in the Great Firewall, China has acted as a potential model for online censorship, with everyone from Bono to US lawmaker Joe Lieberman citing Beijing’s policies in arguments for greater internet controls. “Governments in countries such as Egypt and Iran rewrote restrictive media laws to apply to social media users, jailed critics under measures designed to curb false news, and blocked foreign social media and communication services.” “Throughout (2018), authoritarians used claims of ‘fake news’ and data scandals as a pretext to move closer to the China,” the report said. This has been further boosted by the ongoing panic in the US and other countries which have typically been the biggest proponents of internet freedom over fake news and alleged election interference online. In fact, as the Freedom House report demonstrates, the internet is an excellent tool for social control, enabling surveillance and guiding of public opinion that would have been impossible in the past. If the Soviet Union couldn’t surprise a platoon of pamphleteers, how can China survive an army of bloggers?” By this logic, authoritarianism becomes unsustainable once the barriers to the free flow of information are removed. ![]() “In other words, let them tweet, and they will tweet their way to freedom. “Viewing it through the prism of the Cold War, they endow the internet with nearly magical qualities for them, it’s the ultimate cheat sheet that could help the West finally defeat its authoritarian adversaries,” Morozov writes. The combined forces of globalization and the web were, Thomas Friedman wrote in 2000, “acting like nutcrackers to open societies.”īut as writer Evgeny Morovoz has demonstrated, this assumption was often based on a willful misreading of the events of the Cold War, and the effectiveness of strategies like smuggling photocopiers and fax machines through the Iron Curtain and Radio Free Europe broadcasts. “They are unprofessional, irresponsible and made with ulterior motives,” Lu added.ĭuring the early decades of the internet, many influential thinkers claimed the internet – by its very nature – would spread democracy and freedom of speech. “A cohort of countries is moving toward digital authoritarianism by embracing the Chinese model of extensive censorship and automated surveillance systems,” Freedom House said.Ĭhina’s Foreign Ministry spokesman Lu Kang told a regular press conference Thursday that the report’s findings “are sheer fabrications.” During 2018, the authors found, “internet freedom declined for the eighth consecutive year.” “We used to see blocks roughly once every six weeks they now try to block our service multiple times every day,” he said.Īs I document in my book, “ The Great Firewall of China: How to Build and Control an Alternative Version of the Internet,” Beijing’s model of the internet is now spreading beyond its borders, with China’s censors working actively with their counterparts in Russia, Uganda and a host of other countries to build up internet controls and crack down on online dissent.Ī new report from Freedom House – a US government-funded NGO – supports this. Sunday Yokubaitis, chief executive of VPN company Golden Frog, told CNN they have “witnessed a massive increase” in attempts to block their services in China. China’s censors have reigned in blogs, social media, and US search giants, and repeatedly defeated or stymied any attempts to undermine the Firewall, from virtual private networks (VPNs) to the dark web. ![]() Beijing has consistently defied all the confident predictions (including by people far more knowledgeable about the internet than Clinton) that this would be impossible. ![]()
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