A new United Nations report aggregates a number of efforts to measure Internet filtering by governments around the world and concludes “national regulation of the Internet is taking place on a wide scale, despite ambiguity over appropriate policy and uncertainty over its implementation, and risks to freedom of expression.”
Not surprisingly, East and Central Asia, the Middle East and North Africa were found to house states with the most filtering. The most extensive filtering of the 47 surveyed nations was found in China, Cuba, Myanmar (Burma), Oman, South Korea, Sudan, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan, Vietnam, and Yemen. (See full interactive map below).
Government interference with the Internet has been a very high-profile issue in recent months, particularly with the Arab Spring uprisings and the role of the Internet in the unrest (and government attempts to stop or inhibit the Internet as an enabling tool). The report from UNESCO (United Nations EducationCultural and Scientific Organization) does not cover political filtering alone, however. The studies it cites also measured filtering for social (e.g., pornography), security and other reasons.
“This report does not seek to make such value judgements and instead seeks to expose the extent of the legal and regulatory trends affecting freedom of expression online,” it says. “As such, it should be noted that the meta-analysis . . . measures only the extent of filtering rather than the significance of the blocked material.”
Mathew Ingram of GigaOm.com has a more thorough take on the full report that’s well worth a read. He concludes:
“More than anything, the picture that UNESCO paints is of global arms race — but instead of guns and tanks, the weapons are computers and hackers and Internet-tracking tools, and increasingly social networking sites as well.”
UNESCO found that a greater “obstacle to expression” than filtering on one continent (Africa) is lack of Internet access at all — and then moves to block sites and access once it has been established in places such as Gambia and Ethiopia.
The map below, created from data extracted from the UNESCO report, shows filtering ratings for countries from 0 to 3, and depicted by shades of green.
2 = “Substantial filtering”
1 = “Evidence of selective filtering”
0 (lightest shade) = “No clear evidence”
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Below is the chapter from which the map data was extracted. The complete report is available to browse here.
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