A Russian Internet service provider unintentionally blocked the entire Russian portal of LiveJournal in one region of Russia while fulfilling a court order to block one LiveJournal blog. Though service to LiveJournal has been restored, the incident demonstrates the ease of overblocking, made all the easier following the passage of a new law in Russia that allows the government to blacklist websites containing pornography, drug advertisements or suicide promotion.
On July 18, a court in Yaroslavl, a region northeast of Moscow, ordered local Internet provider Netis Telecom to shut off access to a neo-Nazi blog hosted on LiveJournal on the grounds that the blog violates Russia’s laws against extremism. According to Global Voices, this blog has appeared on the federal Justice Ministry’s “list of extremist materials” since 2009, even though the blog has not been updated since 2008. The court order instructed the ISP to block the blog by blocking its IP address. Because each LiveJournal blog shares the same IP address, this order actually triggered the blocking of the entire site.
According to The Daily Dot, “LiveJournal blogs don’t have unique IP addresses. That IP belongs to all of LiveJournal Russia, effectively blacking out LiveJournal for everyone in Yaroslavl (a city of nearly 600,000) and all the surrounding areas to which Netis Telekom provides service.” LiveJournal is the most popular blogging platform in Russia. The company’s CEO in Russia, Ilya Dronov, explained further in a blog post that IP blocking cannot just target one specific LiveJournal site, but blocks the entire platform.
IP blocking is a form of technical filtering that can result in overblocking because it can “knock out large swaths of acceptable websites simply because they are hosted on the same IP address as a site with restricted content.” A Yaroslavl prosecutor told reporters that the ISP went beyond the court order, which only required filtering or blocking a specific blog, not the entire portal. However, Anton Nosik, a popular blogger and head of the company that owns LiveJournal, blamed the technological illiteracy of Russian officials for the temporary block of the platform.
The problem lies with technological illiteracy and ignorance about the subject field. This decision was meted out by people who are incapable of assessing its nature and consequences. This problem could be solved by raising the technological literacy of court officials and prosecutors, but there is no incentive to do so because our judges and public prosecutors are the same cops who wouldn’t be able to pass their own re-accreditation.
A spokesperson for LiveJournal U.S. told The Daily Dot that the temporary shutdown was related to a new law in Russia, which makes it easier to remove web pages that contain prohibited materials related to child pornography, drug use and suicide promotion. The law also provides for the creation of an “Internet blacklist” for websites that host such content. LiveJournal in Russia was one of several websites to protest the blacklist law when it was being considered by the Duma, Russia’s parliament. This is not the first time that authorities have applied Russia’s “law on extremism” to justify taking down objectionable online content, and with this new law, it likely will not be the last.
In preparation for Ramadan, which began at sundown on Thursday July 19, the Indonesian Communication and Information Ministry blocked over 1 million pornographic websites from local access. Most of the sites were hosted outside of the country, and the government estimates that there are over 2 billion websites providing pornographic content worldwide.
The Ministry says that the measures are being taken in accordance with Indonesia’s Electronic Information and Transaction Law and Telecommunications Law, which allows the government to block “negative content,” including pornography, libelous statements, and malware. This is the same law that forced Research in Motion to filter all pornographic content on Indonesian Blackberrys in January of last year.
Minister Titaful Sembiring said that the Ministry would block more sites during Ramadan, and that the sites would likely remain blocked after the Islamic holiday. He noted the Ministry’s limitations and requested that Indonesian citizens “actively report to the Communication and Information Minister if they find a link to negative website.”
In recent years the Indonesian government has increased and strictly enforced the censorship of both pornography and negative comments about Islam. Last year, Indonesia’s censorship laws led to a three and a half year jail sentence for a local pop star after two sex tapes were leaked online. Earlier this year, 31 year-old Alexander Aan, who declared himself an atheist over Facebook, was sentenced to five years in prison.
While censorship is not new to Indonesia, censorship of this scale is unprecedented. Historically, Indonesia has not had a comprehensive Internet filtering system in place. Instead, it relies on government censors, tips from individuals, and cooperation with ISPs and Internet cafes to effectuate the regulation of online content.
Several media sources reported last week that China’s popular microblogging service Sina Weibo had blocked the word “truth” from its search function. Though Sina later unblocked the term, the incident showcases the complexities of online censorship in China.
Sina Weibo, which is China’s answer to Twitter, has more than 300 million users. A Hong Kong-based current affairs magazine was one of the first to report that a search for truth yielded no results. Likewise, CNN reported that when they searched for “truth” on Sina Weibo on July 13, they received this message: “according to relevant laws, regulations and policies, search results for ‘the truth cannot be displayed.” CNN later reported that “by July 16, the search results for ‘truth’ were again displayed as normal. No-one, it seems, can explain if this was a temporary censorship aimed at some unknown negative news, or just a technical problem.” There was no independent confirmation from Sina, according to The Guardian.
China uses a multi-layered approach to filtering. China’s “Great Firewall” actively filters websites like Facebook and Twitter. For popular, local social media platforms, like Sina Weibo, China encourages the companies to self-censor their services. These companies regularly block terms relating to politically sensitive topics such as Tiananmen Square.
Still, it is unclear why Sina Weibo would block the term “truth.” Yanshuang Zhang notes two interesting points regarding the incident in The Conversation, an online Australian publication.
1) Only searching for the term “truth” was temporarily blocked, not posting the term.
2) While “truth” is a common term in Mandarin, people rarely search for the term itself. Rather, they search for specific events, even if the truth is potentially at issue. They would not search for “the truth about Chen Guangcheng:” they would simply search for “Chen Guangcheng.”
Though Chinese netizens operate in a heavily controlled online environment, China’s censorship methods are multifaceted and nuanced. A recent study conducted by our colleagues at Harvard University’s Institute for Quantitative Social Sciences found that posts on blogs and message boards are censored “if they are in a topic area with collective action potential and not otherwise. Whether or not the posts are in favor of the government, its leaders, and its policies has no effect on the probability of censorship.” Likewise, Jeremy Goldhorn of Danwei, a company that tracks media and Internet in China, told the China Digital Times that “social media has, perhaps for the first time in Chinese history, given every citizen a space where they can express themselves” despite efforts by the social media companies to delete objectionable material or censor terms.
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