Isam Bayazidi’s Blog

I wasn’t able to blog or access the internet much while I was in Tunis, so I will start in the next days blogging about the event, and the last days.

As soon as I was in the ICT4ALL Exhibition, I started to look for the societies and people I know. I met Ethan who introduced me to Hivos people in the event. As well I met Hossein Darakshan, and Isaac Mao whom I met in the Wikimania last August.

There I knew about a session that will take place on the 17th-18th Nov, titled “Expression under Repression”. It was a joint effort between Hivos and Global Voices. The seminar had some very interesting panel speakers, and discussions about freedom of expression and censorship on the internet.

Cases from Zimbabwe, China, Iran and Malaysia were introduced, giving a picture of the status of freedom and censorship in those countries as an example. There was supposed to be a blogger from one of the Arab countries present as well, but certain “censorship” efforts made it impossible. Read more in Ethan’s blog.

As well, Internet filtering and censorship was introduced, explaining the methods, technologies, and giving examples of sites censored in different arab and non-arab countries. After the session I tried to get more information about Internet censorship in Jordan, and basically they are aware of only one site that is censored from Jordan, which is a US-based e-newspaper that is almost censored in all arab countries, as it’s editor is known to be attacking all rulers and governments of the Arab world.

For me, attending this session was worth going to Tunis, I am glad that light is being shed on Freedom of expression in the internet, specially for bloggers.

Pictures:

Next: Wikimedia in WSIS

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