socialmedian: Threatened Voices

User-submitted headlines for this story

Clip

Threatened Voices

Submitted by Patronusanalytical from Google Reader

Nov 03, 2009

Summary

My friend and colleage Sami Ben Gharbia just launched a fascinating and useful new site: Threatened Voices. It’s an interactive map of bloggers under arrest and under threat around the world, with an accompanying timeline that makes it possible to track the phenomenon of arresting bloggers over the past several years. It’s an uncomfortable fact that, as blogs become a more influential public space, the technique of arresting bloggers to silence online speech becomes increasingly common.

The Threatened Voices map complements another map that Sami maintains on Global Voices Advocacy, the Access Denied Map. That map is an overview of government efforts to block online publishing platforms, like Blogger or YouTube. I continue to believe that censorship of these types of sites is one of the most serious problems the web faces today. When a government blocks a website, it blocks the voice of one person or one group – when they block a tool like Wordpress or Twitter, they block all the voices that wanted to use that tool, which might represent hundreds or thousands

...Read the full article

Comments (0)

Add Your Comment