Well, here we go again... the mainstream media yesterday jumped on rumors that Algeria had shut down the Internet, with seemingly no effort to check facts with people on the ground. This wouldn't be the first time that an unsubstantiated rumor of this sort was spread by so-called...

Former Ambassador to Morocco Marc Ginsberg (during the Years of Lead, it should be noted) has penned a piece for the Huffington Post asking if Qatar-based Al Jazeera has fueled "Tunisteria" (that is, stoked the already-burning fires spreading across the Middle East toward the direction of intifada).

It's...

Imagine a fairly widespread, fairly mainstream ethos in which politicians, pundits, and academics convened to denigrate practitioners of Christianity or Judaism. Imagine that these commentators picked apart the New or Old Testament to find its most heinous contents, then used those phrases to justify their hatred and distrust. Imagine a...

It has now been four years since Google announced its intent to censor search results in China. In January of 2006, after finding Google.com to be down about 10% of the time, Google made the now infamous decision to start up Google.cn while complying with Chinese laws. In an...

In President Obama's much-vaunted 2009 speech in Cairo, he made a commitment to supporting reform in the Arab world. Though there was plenty in the speech to criticize, many advocates for free speech saw this as a welcome change and hoped for genuine follow-through. Yet, 2009 has been a terrible...

Author's Note: The JIDF requested that I correct a couple of errors: First, that they do not boast of receiving 100,000 hits per month, and second, that they are also dedicated to what they call "Islamic terrorism and jihadist content." Their further comments are contained within the comment section of...

The Gaza Freedom March, an international caravan for peace set to culminate in a nonviolent march alongside the people of Gaza on December 31 to end the illegal blockade, has already faced its share of trouble. Though blocked by Egypt, the organizers of Code Pink, one of the...

Mohammad Alsaafin is a Palestinian refugee, from the village of Fallujah which lies in what is now Israel. He has never visited the village; his grandparents were exiled from there in 1949, a year after the founding of Israel, and took refuge in Gaza. Mohammad and his father...

This article originally appeared on Global Voices Online, November 18, 2009.

Aminatou Haidar is a leading activist for independence of the Western Sahara (from Morocco). Born in 1967, she was "disappeared" by Moroccan authorities for her activism at age twenty, only to reemerge three years later. In 2005,...

When a favorite site rolls out a new feature, users are supposed to ooh and ahh, not cringe. One of Facebook's latest features has me doing just that. After logging in recently, I peeked at the ubiquitous "suggestions" box on the right side of the screen, only to see that...

It's perhaps not that shocking that the film world is rallying around Roman Polanski. After all, plenty of artists over the years have worked with Polanski, all the while fully aware of his crimes. The Academy itself ignored them, awarding Polanski with the honor of Best Director; Harrison Ford ignored...

When President George W. Bush left office, only 22% of the country's citizens approved of his leadership. President Obama enjoys an approval rating of 50%, a respectable number. In Iran, Venezuela, and China, press have reported on approval polls of the leadership.

So when an independent poll conducted in Morocco...

From the Great Firewall to the Myanmar Wide Web, Asia is well-known for its practices in Internet filtering. China has long taken the lead in blocking Web sites, filtering sites across the spectrum - from social to political content, pornography to Internet tools. The OpenNet Initiative (full disclosure: I'm involved)...

On March 28, as political tensions in Madagascar showed no signs of letting up, a young man named Razily decided to take a stroll down Antananarivo's most famous avenue. It would have been a day like any other, except that on this particular day the avenue was flanked by...

Author's note: Shortly after the publication of this piece, LinkedIn contacted me to state that they had become aware of the issue and were fixing it. They have issued a statement which reads:

This article was originally featured on Global Voices Online.

The saga of journalist and blogger Laila El-Haddad, who writes at Raising Yousuf and Noor: diary of a Palestinian mother, was carefully covered by Global Voices last week. However, as El-Haddad moved into her 36th hour at the...

Laila El-Haddad is from Gaza. Maybe you know her: She's a journalist and pundit, but perhaps even more prominently she is a blogger, writing about her experiences in Gaza and the United States, and her proud role as a mother of two, Yousuf and Noor.

But in spite...

On Wednesday, I got the news that Omidreza Mirsayafi, Iranian blogger and new friend of mine, had passed away in prison in Iran. He was arrested last April, tried last November, and detained in February following an interrogation. On December 21, I wrote a piece for the Huffington Post entitled...

This blog post originally appeared on the OpenNet Initiative blog. The OpenNet Initiative investigates, exposes and analyzes Internet filtering.

Many a DVD collector over the years has been disappointed upon learning that their rare DVD from Taiwan or France can't be played on their American DVD player. Just as...

Today's op-ed in Australian IT by Bernadette McMenamin, CEO of an organization called Child Wise is naive at best, dangerous at worst. McMenamin, whose organization seeks to prevent child sexual abuse, claims that Australia's internet filtering scheme is the...