Protecting the Internet from Dictators: Technical and Policy Solutions to Ensure Online Freedoms

Censorship or self-control? Hate speech, the state and the voter in the Kenyan election of 2013

“…Both authoritarian and democratic governments have endeavoured to control new media by means of regulations, software and hardware (Rodan 1998). More dramatically, authoritarian governments (including those of Egypt, Ethiopia, Sudan and Uganda) have gone so far as to shut off Internet, cellular telephony, Twitter, Facebook, regular telephony and television broadcasting in an effort to control protest and limit dissent (Golkar 2011; Etzo & Collender 2010; Bowman & Camp 2013; Daily Nation 2016).…”

“…Newspapers can be censored and television broadcasts can be tightly controlled, as is the norm in countries such as China, Myanmar and Iran. As a result, repressive governments – including Libya, the Sudan, Syria and the Egyptian government – have taken some extreme measures to control political communication over electronic and social media, including blocking Twitter and Facebook, and even shutting off cellular telephony and the Internet (Bowman & Camp 2013). Most recently, in the February 2016 Ugandan election, President Museveni shut off social media temporarily.…”

“…On one side of this equation are governmental efforts to prevent election-related violence caused by hate speech (Bekoe 2012). On the other side of the equation, state-sponsored efforts to control election-related and political speech in Africa have frequently not been benign, as in the case of the DRCs ban on all text messaging and the shutdown of opposition radio stations and newspapers on 3 December 2011 (Ighobor 2013) or the case of Uganda President Yoweri Museveni's efforts to censor Facebook and Twitter during the ‘Walk to Work Campaign’ (Bowman & Camp 2013) and during the 2016 Ugandan general election. The authors argue that shutting down the Internet, or television broadcasting (as the Kenyan government did in 2008) or specific social media sites such as Twitter is an unmistakable act of censorship.…”

Incompetents, criminals, or spies: Macroeconomic analysis of routing anomalies

“…The efficacy of attacks of nation-states on the reachability of the Internet for their residents was further illustrated during the Arab Spring, as rapid dropoffs for Egyptian and Libyan populations were easily observable but less easily repairable (Dainotti et al, 2011;Bowman & Camp, 2013).…”

Current and Emerging Trends in Cyber Operations

“…Middle Eastern governments now infiltrate social networking sites with methods to disrupt, interfere with, and misdirect communications and planning activities. The overall rise of the cyber approach to both fomenting and combating extremism may be summarized as a direct reflection of the physical unrest in the Middle East driven by years of dictatorship-led repression and oppression (Bowman and Camp 2013).…”