text:
Cambodia’s internet gateway could intensify surveillance and censorship · Global Voices
Mong Palatino

A computer room in a commune in Cambodia. Photo by PANHA KiM (KiM MeY), Panoramio upload on Wikipedia. (Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license.)
Cambodia’s sub-decree on the establishment of the National Internet Gateway (NIG Sub-Decree) was signed by Prime Minister Hun Sen on February 16, amidst concerns raised by several stakeholders about its potentially adverse impact on e-commerce and human rights.
The sub-decree was drafted in July 2020 and discussed with telecommunications operators in August. It proposed the rerouting of internet traffic into a single gateway to facilitate revenue collection and enhance services. In December 2020, the Asia Internet Coalition expressed concern that some provisions of the sub-decree could be used to automatically block online content.
Forty-five civil society groups issued a signed statement after the signing of the sub-decree, warning that it could lead to intensified surveillance and privacy violations. They cited Article 6 of the NIG Sub-Decree, which authorizes the blocking of online connections or content deemed to “affect safety, national revenue, social order, dignity, culture, traditions and customs.” The statement asserts that:
…government surveillance cultivates an environment of fear, creating incentives for self-censorship and directly undermining the ability of journalists and human rights defenders to undertake their work.
This highly subjective and undefined list of reasons for censoring content gives the RGC [Royal Government of Cambodia] broad powers to police and censor online content, with the NIG providing unfettered access to and control over all data exchanges in the country.
Several groups are also worried that the sub-decree could affect e-commerce, because of the additional regulations imposed on tech companies:
We are concerned that this sub-decree will become an obstacle for technology companies and become a reason for investors to not invest in, or even leave, Cambodia’s online sector.
Chak Sopheap, executive director of Cambodian Center for Human Rights, noted that the directive was passed at a time when the government is accused of silencing online critics and persecuting opposition leaders.
The timing of this NIG is particularly concerning as the last few years have seen a sharp increase in the number of citizens being threatened, harassed and even prosecuted for their use of the internet and for exercising their right to free speech on online platforms. pic.twitter.com/ehUBp2cC5w
— Sopheap Chak (@sopheapfocus) February 17, 2021
Human Rights Watch linked the sub-decree to the draconian policies imposed by the Hun Sen government during the pandemic:
Cambodia’s National Internet Gateway is the missing tool in the government’s toolbox for online repression. It’s no coincidence that after shutting down critical media across the country, the Hun Sen government has now turned its attention to online critics, just in time for the nationally organized commune elections due in 2022.
The Ministry of Posts and Telecommunications insisted that the sub-decree was necessary to tame the country’s “disorderly” internet landscape. It also described the statements of human rights groups as “unfounded, politically motivated, untrue and contradictory to the objectives stated in the Sub-Decree.”
The Ministry also denied that the government was aiming to install a China-style internet firewall, or that it would arbitrarily collect the personal data of internet users. Rather, the Ministry added, the sub-decree would benefit Cambodians:
It will also help prevent illegal cross-border network links, including online gambling, cyber threats, pornography and online fraud.
Cambodia had 14.8 million mobile internet subscribers as of May 2020, according to a Telecommunication Regulator of Cambodia report.
In May 2018, the Cambodian government adopted the Inter-Ministerial Prakas (proclamation) on Website and Social Media Control, which expanded internet surveillance by mandating several government agencies to block websites hosting content considered “incitement, breaking solidarity, discrimination and willfully creating turmoil leading to undermining national security, public interest and social order.”

author: Mong Palatino


text:
‘Pandemic Big Brother’: Highlighting impact of COVID-19 restrictions on digital freedoms in Eastern Europe · Global Voices
Tanya Lokot

The Pandemic Big Brother global map tracking state use of digital technologies during the coronavirus pandemic. Screenshot of the Pandemic Big Brother website.
From genome sequencing to track virus mutations to smartphone apps monitoring close contacts with those who test positive, countries around the world have harnessed technological solutions to combat the COVID-19 pandemic. But digital rights activists fear that digital surveillance has become so normalized during the pandemic that it may be hard to roll these measures back once it's over, especially in countries where digital freedoms are already under threat.
Pandemic Big Brother, a joint initiative of Russian digital rights organization Roskomsvoboda and Belarusian human rights center Human Constanta, has been tracking global COVID-19-related “restrictions of civil rights that are realised with digital technologies.” The initiative ranks countries around the world on how restrictive and overbearing their tech-enabled pandemic measures are and, more importantly, whether they are lifted once the public health situations improves. As the founders note,
We consider that compliance with digital rights is crucial for respecting the right to privacy, private and family life, freedom of speech, freedom of movement, and other human rights regardless of the scope of the emergency.
Global Voices and Runet Echo took a look at the Pandemic Big Brother interactive map and the initiative's latest summary report, “COVID-1984: Surveillance in a pandemic year,” to see how countries in our region have used digital means to intervene in people's pandemic lives.
The project tracks media and official reports of restrictions of civil and digital rights across several key areas:
The recent Pandemic Big Brother report focused on a few key surveillance technologies: the creation and use of mobile apps to track or restrict citizens’ movements and monitor close contacts, the deployment of CCTV (close-circuit video cameras) and face recognition technologies; and the use of various location-based and geotagging tools.
Digital rights activists warn that “the ability to access information about the geolocation of mobile devices can be a threat to privacy, freedom of movement, choice of residence and freedom of assembly, and can undermine public trust in authorities.”
Measures deployed: drone control, limited access to official information, mobile phone surveillance, freedom of speech violations, surveillance using state-made apps, legal prosecution, video monitoring and facial recognition.
The first lockdowns were introduced in Moscow and Moscow region at the end of March 2020. Since then, the project recorded a number of ways Russia has used technology to control and police its citizens during the pandemic. As cities across Russia went in and out of lockdown, reports of government-mandated quarantine surveillance apps and other mobile phone-based tools, such as public transport QR-code passes, dominated media coverage.
Since the start of the pandemic, the Russian authorities have launched four different apps, which are used to issue digital passes, monitor people under quarantine and track contacts with those infected with coronavirus.
Another dominant technology that gained widespread attention was the automated facial recognition system deployed across the CCTV networks in Moscow, Saint Petersburg, and other major cities in Russia. There were also reports of drones and tracker bracelets deployed by local authorities to monitor self-isolating citizens.
According to the report, since the start of the pandemic, “over 1.1 million people were prosecuted in Russia under the administrative code for violating coronavirus restrictions.”
Aside from surveillance tech, Russian authorities also policed online speech, dispensing fines for alleged COVID-19 fakes posted on social media and threatening journalists and medical workers for disclosing or questioning COVID-19 statistics released by the state.
Vaccination is now well underway in the country, and the Kremlin has announced the development of a new mobile surveillance app to track vaccinated citizens’ health.
Measures deployed: limited access to official information, freedom of speech violations, legal prosecution, and other measures.
Though Belarus has been less tech-savvy in terms of restricting citizens’ movements or tracking their location and close contacts, the authorities have nonetheless cracked down on online spaces. This coincided with the ongoing anti-government protests in the country, giving law enforcement an additional pretext for restricting free expression, cracking down on street rallies, and policing social media.
As early as March 2020, Belarusian authorities started dispensing warnings and fines for allegedly fake coronavirus-related news and posts on social media. In May, an ambulance paramedic was detained for seven days for critiquing the state's feeble response to the pandemic on a YouTube live stream.
Throughout the pandemic, the Belarusian state has limited access to official figures on those who contracted the virus, were hospitalized or died of COVID-19. In April 2020, the state-run StopCOVID portal stopped publishing regional breakdowns of COVID-19 numbers. State-owned media were accused of misrepresenting the pandemic situation in the country in comparison to other parts of the world.
Measures deployed: freedom of speech violations, surveillance using state-made apps, and other measures.
Compared to Russia, Ukraine's use of digital technologies in the pandemic has been relatively modest. Though the new Ministry of Digital Transformation has touted its first steps in the ongoing reform of electronic governance as a success, their efforts to digitize citizen-state relations through the all-encompassing “state in a smartphone” app have met with criticism from digital rights advocates. A massive citizen data leak in May 2020 and ongoing lack of clarity about privacy guarantees and data security in the new system continue to plague the Ministry's efforts.
In April 2020, Ukraine launched an app to control observance of self-isolation measures, aimed at those who had recently travelled outside the country or were suspected of being COVID-positive. In the course of 14 days, users could receive up to 10 notifications, including those that required them to take a selfie. The new GPS-enabled app was criticized for needless sharing of user information with “third parties” (as stated in its user agreement).
Throughout the year, there were also reports of malfunctions in the app, where it falsely identified users as being in a different location or did not work on some smartphones. This created difficulties, especially for citizens crossing the border between government-controlled Ukraine and occupied territories of self-proclaimed Luhansk and Donetsk People's Republics in the East of the country.
Other developments included the Ukrainian parliament allowing the collection of patients’ data without their consent for a specified period during and after active quarantine. However, this measure has also been used in many EU countries and EU experts note it does not violate the General Data Protection Regulation.
In May 2020, Ukraine's state security service reported that its cybersecurity forces had blocked over 2,300 social media groups for spreading COVID-19-related disinformation. According to law enforcement, they identified 323 “agitators” who shared false information about the pandemic online. Criminal cases were opened against 16 of them, as these individuals allegedly “had their actions directed by Russian authorities” in order “to create chaos and panic” in Ukrainian society around the public health crisis.
Pandemic Big Brother reported no violations of digital rights or restrictions of civil liberties with regard to the use of technology during the pandemic in Moldova.

source: news-globalvoices

license: Creative Commons - Attribution - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

author: Tanya Lokot


text:
A plan to allow logging in Cameroon’s biologically rich Ebo Forest was halted, but the area remains vulnerable · Global Voices
Ekonde Daniel

View of the Ebo forest hills in January 2021. Photo by Ekonde Daniel. Used with permission.
Cameroon's Ebo forest is a biologically diverse area that is home to a rich selection of flora and to critically endangered primates, including the only population of chimpanzees in the world known to be able to crack nuts and extract termites with tools.
In July 2020, the Cameroon government designated the 141,706-hectare Ebo a Forest Management Unit (FMU) and approved a logging concession in the area. A few weeks later, in August 2020, much to the relief of conservationists who had opposed the plan, the government reversed the decision, issuing a decree stating that the plan to allow logging had been suspended.
The decision pleased many residents of the area as well.
“If they [the government] conclude to take the forest without talking to us, we will go into the forest and become rebels,” Chief Dekath Moise Nguile told me. “We will do what is happening in Bamenda,” he added, referring to a town in Cameroon’s troubled northwestern region.
I had joined Chief Nguile, a local chief, for a visit to the Ebo forest, some six hours’ drive from Douala, the economic capital of Cameroon.
“There you have the trees, the gorillas and chimpanzees – our parents are buried there. It’s war that drove us to this place,” Nguile said referring to the settlement where residents of his village live and where he has a house. “We have our sacred places there that when we have problems, we go and pray.”
Chief Dekath Nguile meets with a tribeswoman in the village upon his arrival from Cameroon's economic capital, Douala. Image by Ekonde Daniel. Used with his permission.
The trip on which I accompany Nguile is one of many he makes regularly to the forest, where his ancestral village is also located, one of 40 communities in the area.
On arrival at one community, we met Chief Emmanuel Belema, a community head, spreading out cocoa beans in front of his house on the edge of Ebo forest. Belema had learned about the July 2020 decision to open up the forest for logging from the radio, his only connection to the outside world.
Chief Emmanuel Belema spreads out cocoa beans in front of his house. Image by Ekonde Daniel. Used with permission.
“We are here waiting for the government. Before they exploit the forest they should tell us what they will give us. If there is nothing to help us, then we don’t know how we will respond to them,” Belema told me.
Belema believes that elites from his village who now live “in the big cities of Douala and Yaoundé” are the ones negotiating with the government to have the forest cut down for industrial use. “But we are the guardians of this forest,” he said, then paused for a while. “It worries us. We won’t be happy if that happens.”
Whether gold mining or logging, concession companies have long faced opposition from the residents of their areas of exploitation. This is partly because promises of sustainable management or the construction of amenities are never fulfilled. Add to that alleged land-grabbing and pollution by the French business group Bolloré in Cameroon’s Littoral region, and constant clashes between Chinese miners and locals in the gold-rich Eastern region.
Like Nguile, the area where Belema lives is not his original settlement. They relocated to this area, which hosts a community of about 200 people, because of a guerrilla war about 50 years ago.
Nguile’s clan was also among the victims of forced removal in the 1960s, when Cameroon’s government was fighting the rebel arm of the political party Union des Populations du Cameroun (UPC). Because UPC members hid in the bushlands to carry out their hit-and-run operations, the state evacuated the natives of the area.
In January 2021, there are more than 200 people living on the edge of Ebo forest. Image by Ekonde Daniel. Used with permission.
In February, I spoke on the phone to Dr. Ekwoge Abwe, a researcher with San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance for the Ebo Forest. “Ebo is considered an important tract of forest in the Gulf of Guinea biodiversity hotspot,” he told me.
Abwe has been working in the forest since 2004. In 2005, he and 13 others from a permanent research station in Ebo, observed and recorded a large population of Cameroon-Nigeria chimpanzees in the forest. The chimps are considered which are “the most threatened, with only between 3,500 and 9,000 of the animals left in the wild.”
Abwe told me that the Ebo is home to about 1,000 of the primates or 1/9 of the total world population. But what is more peculiar about the ones in Ebo, the researcher notes, is that “they are the only chimpanzees that crack nuts using tools and at the same fish for termites using tools.”
“Other populations do one, but the ones at Ebo do both which makes the forest a really, really unique area,” Abwe said, also noting that since 2005, 28 new plants have been discovered that are “endemic to the forest.”
Despite its rich biota and the fact that it holds 35 million tonnes of carbon, Cameroon’s government has dragged its feet on designating the zone a national park, a request conservationists have been making since 2005.
“These are some of the reasons we are advancing to the government,” Abwe told me. Instead of logging this area, we should think of other ways of generating alternative and sustainable revenues for the local communities.”
But increasing investments in timber in Cameroon, a sector formerly dominated by Europeans but now dominated by Chinese companies, do not guarantee Ebo’s safety, especially given the importance of timber production to Cameroon's economy.
In July 2020, around the time of the initial announcement, Cameroon's Minister of Forestry and Wildlife said the country had already preserved more than twice the 12% forest cover the United Nations requires, and that not all the trees in Ebo were not going to be felled. I visited Cameroon’s Ministry of Forestry and Wildlife on February 25 to find out whether there was a chance that the forest could be opened to industrial logging in the future, but I found nobody there who would speak on the record.
Since the government suspended the logging plan, it has yet to say anything further. “These people [the concession companies], whom I may call vultures, are still looking on how to cut it,” Abwe said.
Until Ebo is designated a protected area, the forest remains fair game for those seeking to exploit its offerings.
Boris Karloff Batata contributed to this story.
Editor's note: On March 11, 2021, we updated the post to reflect the new name of San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance (formerly, San Diego Zoo Global’s Central Africa Programme). We also clarified that Dr. Abwe and 13 others, working from a permanent research observatory station in Ebo forest, recorded (not discovered) a huge population of wildlife primates.

author: Ekonde Daniel


text:
After 28 years, Kenya qualifies for major African basketball tournament, led by record-breaking female coach · Global Voices
Richard Wanjohi

Kenya's Men's Basketball team. Image courtesy of Kenya Basketball Federation
After a 28-year hiatus,  Kenya's national basketball team recently qualified for the FIBA's AfroBasket 2021 tournament to be held in Kigali, Rwanda. “Team Morans,” as they are popularly known, were among the final qualifiers for the tournament, in Yaounde, Cameroon. They join other countries including reigning champions Tunisia, hosts Rwanda, basketball powerhouses Angola, Senegal and the Democratic Republic of Congo who will be competing in Kigali.
Kenya is renowned for its prowess in athletics, as well as rugby in team sports, but this time it was the country's basketballers who caught national and global attention.
After 28 years, @Teammorans finally earned a spot to the upcoming @FIBA #AfroBasket 2021!
Congrats ? to ??!#Qualified pic.twitter.com/wjHTlrx33R
— FIBA AfroBasket (@AfroBasket) February 22, 2021
Gidson Olda noted on the blog PearlRadio.com that the Kenya campaign started off slowly:
The Morans began their final campaign to qualify for the Afrobasket tournament today but lost against Senegal 51-69 . The Morans who are under the tutelage of Australian coach Liz Mills were a much improved side from the previous qualifier and led the first and second quarter before surrendering in the third.
This loss motivated the team, with Australian coach Liz Mills at the helm, to give their all and in the second game caused a major upset, beating the more fancied Angola by 74-73 with a buzzer-beater from Tylor Ongwae, a win that was summed up in the Afro News blog;
“We started slowly but once we locked down on defence, we shut down their opportunities to score and that intensity flowed into our offense. We never gave up and we knew if it was close in the fourth and we could push to win it,” Coach Mills said during an interview at the team’s hotel on Sunday.
The news of the victory and qualification woke Kenyans up on February 21 in a frenzy of excitement, and goodwill messages including from Kenya's Head of State. Others who congratulated the team's historic performance included the Sports Cabinet Secretary Amina Mohamed who said the Morans achieved a rare feat, proving Kenyan basketball has come of age.
“With the exceptional support of their technical bench, the Morans have consistently perfected their game and with consistent determination, defied all odds to qualify for the FIBA Afrobasket Championships slated for August this year” the CS said in a statement, saying that the ministry was very proud of Morans having come from behind in the first half to beat Angola, which is one of the finest basketball teams on the African continent, which is not a mean achievement.
The CS further said that the Ministry has fully facilitated all national teams to safely resume training to prepare for upcoming continental meets, international championships and the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Tokyo later this year.
Congratulations to the Kenya “Morans” for defeating Angola for the first time in the history of basketball in Africa (74-73) at the qualifiers for Afrobasket 2021! We are behind you all the way! @Teammorans #MORANSTOTHEWORLD @moscakenya @JoeOkudo @CASnoor pic.twitter.com/Vw6bdjTSXp
— AMB.(Dr.) Amina C. Mohamed (@AMB_A_Mohammed) February 20, 2021
But the Morans’ victory wasn't the only noteworthy achievement that night. Liz Mills, the Australia-born coach, also made history by becoming the first female coach to lead an African team to the AfroBasket tournament—and a men's team to boot! Mills bettered a previous record held by Beninois Brigitte Affidehome Tonon who was the first woman to lead a men's national team in Africa when she guided Benin to the regional qualifiers of the FIBA AfroBasket in 2017.
Having previously coached the Rwanda and Cameroon national teams as an assistant coach, Liz Mills was appointed in early 2021 to add the “X-factor” to a great run for the men's team. She had been appointed after the team's previous coach Cliff Owuor indicated he would not be available for the February 2021 qualifiers.
Going into the qualifiers, Mills understood the weight of the assignment and the expectations of the nation. In an interview on the FIBA website, she said it is a culmination of 10 years working in Africa, having started as a club coach and eventually as assistant manager on national teams.
Liz Mills and the Kenya Men's team Morans celebrate after the final whistle is blown winning 74-73 against Angola
Mills revealed that she had given firm instructions that the ball be in Tylor Ongwae’s hands for the last play. The move worked as Ongwae made a jump shot with three seconds to the buzzer sending the Kenyans into ecstatic celebrations on the court. Ongwae, who had a brilliant game efficiency of +18, led the Kenyans with 16 points.
Morans player Tom Bush Wamukota said Ongwe has proved to the world that Kenya is not only known for athletics but other sports too.
Coach Mills said she was proud of the team and is looking for more than just to qualify:
“I’m personally proud of all the players. Next up is the AfroBasket in Rwanda in August and then we get straight to World Cup qualifiers,” she said, adding that Kenya is not going to Rwanda just to participate.
Mills now leads the Kenyan national team to the tournament proper, and she paid homage to the trailblazers in a tweet as shown below;
Thank you @yndoye35 ?? I've always been proud to coach in Africa & thankful to Africa, & specifically @Teammorans , for giving me the opportunity to be the first female head coach of a men's team at a major @fiba continental tournament ?❤@FSBBOFFICIEL @Basket_Senegal pic.twitter.com/YaRhDhTyw4
— Coach Liz Mills (@Coach_LizMills) February 19, 2021
? EPIC MOMENT ?@Coach_LizMills is the 1st female coach to lead a country (Kenya ??) to the @AfroBasket Final Round ??
She assumed the head coach role for the February 2021 #AfroBasket Qualifiers! pic.twitter.com/BJVfWAfSAL
— FIBA (@FIBA) February 22, 2021
Kenya's Morans joined 15 other teams which represent their countries in Kigali Arena at Rwanda's capital, Kigali from August to September this year.

author: Richard Wanjohi


text:
For this Filipina journalist, every day is a battle with fear · Global Voices
CIVICUS

Filipina journalist Inday Espina-Varona, used with permission.
Women journalists, feminists, activists, and human rights defenders around the world are facing virtual harassment. In this series, global civil society alliance CIVICUS highlights the gendered nature of virtual harassment through the stories of women working to defend our democratic freedoms. These testimonies are published here through a partnership between CIVICUS and Global Voices.
There has been a hostile environment for civil society in the Philippines since President Rodrigo Duterte took power in 2016. Killings, arrests, threats, and intimidation of activists and government critics are often perpetrated with impunity. According to the United Nations, the vilification of dissent is being “increasingly institutionalized and normalized in ways that will be very difficult to reverse.”
There has also been a relentless crackdown against independent media and journalists. Threats and attacks against journalists, as well as the deployment of armies of trolls and online bots, especially during the COVID-19 pandemic, have contributed to self-censorship—this has had a chilling effect within the media industry and among the wider public.
One tactic increasingly used by the government to target activists and journalists is to label them as “terrorists” or “communist fronts,” particularly those who have been critical of Duterte’s deadly “war on drugs” that has killed thousands. Known as “red-tagging” in the Philippines, this process often puts activists at grave risk of being targeted by the state and pro-government militias. In some cases, those who have been red-tagged were later killed. Others have received death threats or sexually abusive comments in private messages or on social media.
Rampant impunity means that accountability for attacks against activists and journalists is virtually non-existent. Courts in the Philippines have failed to provide justice and civil society has been calling for an independent investigation to address the grave violations.
Filipina journalist Inday Espina-Varona tells her story:
The sound of Tibetan chimes and flowing water transformed into a giant hiss the night dozens of worried friends passed on a Facebook post with my face and a headline that screamed I’d been passing information to communist guerrillas.
Old hag, menopausal bitch, a person “of confused sexuality”—I’ve been called all that on social media. Trolls routinely call for my arrest as a communist. But the attack on June 4, 2020 was different. The anonymous right-wing Facebook page charged me with terrorism, of using access and coverage to pass sensitive, confidential military information to rebels.
That night, dinner stopped at two spoonsful. My stomach felt like a sack with a dozen stones churning around a malignant current. All my collection of Zen music, hours of staring at the stars, and no amount of calming oil could bring sleep.
Strangers came heckling the next day on Messenger. One asked how it felt to be “the muse of terrorists.” Another said, “Maghanda ka na bruha na terorista” (“Get ready, you terrorist witch”). A third said in vulgar vernacular that I should be the first shot in the vagina, a reference to what President Rodrigo Duterte once told soldiers to do to women rebels.
I’m 57 years old, a cancer survivor with a chronic bad back. I don’t sneak around at night. I don’t do countryside treks. I don’t even cover the military. But for weeks, I felt like a target mark in a shooting range. As a passenger on vehicles, I replaced mobile web surfing with peering into side mirrors, checking out motorcycles carrying two passengers—often mentioned in reports on killings.
I recognized a scaled-up threat. This attack didn’t target ideas or words. The charge involved actions penalized with jail time or worse. Some military officials were sharing it.
Not surprising; the current government doesn’t bother with factual niceties. It uses “communist” as a catch-all phrase for everything that bedevils the Philippines. Anonymous teams have killed close to 300 dissenters and these attacks usually followed red-tagging campaigns. Nineteen journalists have also been murdered since Duterte assumed office in 2016.
Journalists, lawmakers, civil liberties advocates, and netizens called out the lie. Dozens reported the post. I did. We all received an automated response: It did not violate Facebook’s community standards.
It feels foolish to argue with an automated system but I did gather the evidence before getting in touch with Facebook executives. My normal response to abusive engagement on Facebook or Twitter is a laughing emoji and a block. Threats are a different matter.
We tracked down, “Let’s see how brave you are when we get to the street where you live,” to a Filipino criminology graduate working in a Japanese bar. He apologized and took it down.
After I fact-checked Duterte for blaming rape on drug use in general, someone said my “defending addicts” should be punished with the rape of my daughter.
“That should teach you,” said the message from an account that had no sign of life. Another said he’d come to rape me. Both accounts shared the same traits. They linked to similar accounts. Facebook took these down and did the same to the journalist-acting-as-rebel-intel post and page.
The public pressure to cull products of troll farms has lessened the incidence of hate messages. But there’s still a growth in anonymous pages focused on red-tagging, with police and military officials and official accounts spreading their posts.
Some officers were actually exposed as the masterminds of these pages. When Facebook recently scrapped several accounts linked to the armed forces, government officials erupted in rage, hurling false claims about “attacks on free expression.”
This reaction shows the nexus between unofficial and official acts and platforms in our country. It can start with social media disinformation and then get picked up by the government, or it leads with an official pronouncement blown up and given additional spin on social media.
We’ve officially filed complaints against some government officials, including those involved with the top anti-insurgency task force. But justice works slowly. In the meantime, I practice deep breathing and try to take precautions.
Officials dismiss any “chilling effect” from these non-stop attacks because Filipinos in general, and journalists in particular, remain outspoken. But braving dangers to exercise our right to press freedom and free expression isn’t the same as having the government respect these rights.
Two years ago, journalist Patricia Evangelista of Rappler asked a small group of colleagues what it could take for us to fall silent.
“Nothing,” was everyone’s response.
And so every day I battle fear. I have to because silence would be a surrender to tyranny. That’s not happening on my watch.
Inday Espina-Varona is an award-winning journalist from the Philippines and contributing editor for ABS-CBNNews and the Catholic news agency LiCASNews. She is a former chair of the National Union of Journalists of the Philippines (NUJP) and the first journalist from the country to receive the Reporters Without Borders (RSF) Prize for Independence.

author: CIVICUS


text:
How human voice matters in the Chinese political discussion on Clubhouse · Global Voices
The Stand News

Image from the Stand News. Used with permission.
The following post is the second part of a Chinese feature report on the Chinese political discussions on Clubhouse in early February 2021 published on Stand News on February 12. The English version is translated by Neris Jonathan and published on Global Voices under a content partnership agreement. You can read the first part here.
The most distinctive attribution about Clubhouse in comparison with other social media is its audio medium.
Jane Wong was the first Hong Kong-based IT engineer invited to Clubhouse during the trial period. She explained that when she first joined the platform, it was basically made up of tech workers from Silicon Valley and used by some small circle of celebrities to talk about their start-up experience. Only by February 2021, it had become popular in Hong Kong. She highlighted the platform’s audio character when commenting about its popularity:
Audio communication generates a sense of authenticity and people are more willing to discuss in an orderly manner… Audio communication makes you realize that on the other side of the screen, there is a real person speaking. It generates a sense of intimacy. Hence, people are very respectful when speaking and seldom argue.
Charles, the host of Xinjiang chatroom, agreed:
One would not face any consequence using text as medium as they were hiding behind the screen; however, if thousands of people hear one’s voice and the speech was hurtful and indecent, others will react instantly.
Zhang Jiaping, a prominent journalist and founder of community content platform, Matters, also pointed out that audio communication has recovered the warmth in actual human communication:
People’s accents, the slang they used, the speed at which they were speaking, the breaks they took to breathe – all these details were concealed in written texts.
Within the three days before Clubhouse was blocked, Zhang Jieping only slept for about three to four hours, during the rest of the time she was mostly plugging into Clubhouse.
She was attracted to one particular voice which came from an official from the village community committee up in the mountains of Hubei province (Mainland China). He was sharing what he had learnt and how shocked he felt upon listening to the discussions in the “Xinjiang room” and the “Tiananmen incident room”:
[His voice] it was so authentic…his accent and the way he spoke was not like that of the city folks we hear all the time, his voice was very touching. He was speaking from his heart. A Taiwanese writer who happened in the same discussion room said it felt like watching one of Jiang Zhanghe’s movies [on China rural grassroot community] when he heard the man’s voice.
Zhang believes that Clubhouse will bring a paradigm shift in the development of social media and that text-based social interaction on the Internet would transform into audio based communication:
Perhaps Clubhouse will mark the beginning of the audio social network community… The main medium for our social interaction has always been our voices. The fact that we have shifted to use text for our communication is due to the technological restriction of the Internet…. the popular use of SMS and emoji in all these years has reflected that text based communication is nothing natural.
She believed that the shift to audio will further lower the threshold of communication – people who don’t know how to write or who find it difficult to express through writing can participate in public discussion:
Whenever the breakthrough of communication technology could bring along the lowering of threshold in communication, it could always unleash people’s creativity that couldn’t have ever imagined.
Similar to Jane Wong, Zhang also observed how audio had generated a new communication order:
Sound is linear, unlike written text with which we can read ten lines at a glance. In Clubhouse, the participants can only listen to one person at a time to effectively receive the message. Very naturally people have to speak one after another. Everyone has to wait for their turn to speak and the rule is embedded in the medium.
She noticed that usually for those who jumped the queue to speak, they were usually bad speakers. On the contrary, those who waited patiently for their turn were usually rather open-minded and that regardless of their opinions, they would express themselves in a respectful manner.
However, after Clubhouse was blocked in China, the intimacy in political discussion on Clubhouse was also affected. Zhang said:
I wasn’t as hooked as I previously was after Clubhouse was blocked in China, I couldn’t listen to the voices I wanted to listen to.
The voices that Zhang treasured was the shocking utterance of ordinary people when they first heard about what happened in Xinjiang and in Tiananmen Square.
You could hear the shock from their voices that they were hearing these things for the first time. Regardless of their opinions, whether they defended against or denied or accepted what they had heard, you could definitely tell from their voices that they were shocked and confused about the reality that they had imagined. In my opinion, these moments are invaluable. The discussion has shaken their belief system, this is what we call communication. On the other hand, many people from Taiwan and Hong Kong said that for the first time they had the chance to hear such authentic voices coming from ordinary mainland Chinese people, which is far different from the kind of stereotypical Chinese people that they usually think of… But there will be less moments like these now that Clubhouse is blocked in Mainland China. More frequently she heard ‘don’t try to fool us, I also had overseas living experience.’
Despite the block, Zhang believed that the paradigm shift from text to audio social media communication has started and Clubhouse is just the beginning.

author: The Stand News


text:
Oman detains activists over online posts criticizing projects that could destroy Dhofar Plain · Global Voices
Gulf Center for Human Rights

Editor's note: This post was written and published by Gulf Centre for Human Rights, an independent, nonprofit organization that promotes freedom of expression, association and peaceful assembly in the MENA region.
Omani activists detained and persecuted for voicing their objections to government plans to construct developments in the Dhofar Plain. Image published on GCHR.
Omani security authorities in Dhofar Governorate is cracking down on online activists who oppose the governor's development plans that will change the sultanate's southern region and wipe away parts of its landscape that have survived for centuries.
Poet Salem Ali Al-Maashani and Amer Muslim Bait Saeed were detained on Sunday February 28, Gulf Centre for Human Rights (GCHR) and the Omani Association for Human Rights (OAHR) have learned from reliable sources. The arrests are a result of the Internal Security Service's (ISS) campaign against activists seeking to preserve the traditional way of life in the Dhofar Plain that has existed for hundreds of years.
The Dhofar province is a tourist attraction for its exquisite scenery which includes vast expansions of fertile lands straddling valleys and mountains, as well as a lush coastal plain that hosts Salalah, the provincial capital. Camel herders roam these areas freely, undeterred by urban constructions.
The detained activists rejected the government's plans to transfer control over the Dhofar Plain to the Ministry of Housing and Urban Planning, which will allow the construction of housing complexes in these green spaces.
Internet activist Bait Saeed, who manages a popular YouTube channel under the name “Amr Al-7kli” in which he publishes video clips of beaches and various places in the Dhofar Governorate to promote tourism, was briefly detained for Twitter posts he published.
On 13 February 2021, he posted on his Twitter account:
مفارقات عجيبة !!
بعض المواطنين تقام لهم مهرجانات للإبل تدعمهم وتشجعهم ،، وفي نفس الوقت ، وفي طرف آخر تلغى عنهم المهرجانات ويُجبرون على ترك مراعيهم قصرا ويهجّرون من موطنهم ، هل كلّنا مواطنون بنفس الدرجة في هذا البلد ؟ #نقل_تبعية_سهل_ظفار
#نقل_تبعيه_سهل_ظفار2
— عمرو الحكلي (@amr_al7kli) February 13, 2021
Weird paradoxes !!
Some citizens get to enjoy camel festivals being organized for them to support and encourage them, and at the same time, and on a different side, festivals are canceled for others who are forced to leave their pastures and are displaced from their homeland. Are all citizens equal in this country? #Transfer_Sahel_Dhofar
He was released on Monday, March 8, after Salalah's Court of First Instance acquitted him.
Reliable local sources stated that Bait Saeed and Al-Maashani were held by the Special Division of the Salalah Police Command, which summoned and arrested them as soon as they presented themselves. The Special Division, which represents the executive arm of the ISS, executes, on its behalf, arrest and detention orders for activists. These same sources confirmed that the Special Division also summoned a number of Twitter activists in the Dhofar Governorate who were forced to sign pledges not to tweet on the issue of transferring authority over the Dhofar Plain.
On his Twitter page, poet Al-Maashani wrote a thread of posts in February criticizing the governor and warning of the implications of transferring the authority over Dhofar Plain. The thread included:
#نقل_تبعيه_سهل_ظفار
ظفار قاطبة ضد هذا القرار الذي يفرض عليهم دون اشراك او مراعاة،
وسبق ايضاً ان وقفت ضد قرارات مشابهة ناهيك عن بعض الاوامر التي تصادمت على اثرها القبائل ببعضها،
وتصادمت مع الدولة في بعض الاحيان،
اليوم نطالب السلطان هيثم حتى نتجنب مثل الازمات ب #إقالة_محافظ_ظفار
— سالم المعشني (بوعامر) (@s_a_71) February 12, 2021
#Transfering_Dhofar_Plain_Authority Dhofar as a whole is against this decision, which is imposed on them without consultation or consideration,
It has also previously stood against similar decisions, not to mention some orders that resulted in clashes between tribes, and with the state at times,
Today, we call on Sultan Haitham, in order to avoid such crises, to #dismiss_governo_of_Dhofar
On 25 February 2021, Al-Maashani published a tweet pointing out “the importance of drawing all components of the society and involving them in this issue to draw up a road map in line with the interest of the homeland and the citizen.” In another tweet posted on 23 February, he called on the authorities to respect freedom of opinion and expression, as stipulated in Articles 18, 29 and 31 of the Basic Law of the State.
In a similar case, environmentalist Dr. Ahmed Issa Qatan was detained on 23 February 2021, on charges of using social media in ways that could disrupt public order. Qatan, who was released on bail on Monday March 8, had also spoken out against the governor's Dhofar plans. According to the Public Prosecution’s office in the city of Salalah, Dhofar's provincial capital, Dr Qatan “used the Internet to publish what would harm the public order by inflaming public opinion, undermining the integrity of the minister and those working with him, accusing them of corruption and favoritism while infringing on their personalities … through the social networking application Twitter.” The pubic prosecutor's referral letter alleged that Qatan had committed “a misdemeanor to use the Internet to publish information that would harm the public order, according to the text of Article 19 of the Omani Cyber Crime Law”.
The Public Prosecution requested the court to confiscate the device used for the tweets in accordance with the provisions of Article 32/A, with the Twitter account used being permanently closed in accordance with the provisions of Article 32/B of the same law.
Article 19 of Oman's Cyber Crime Law states: “Punishment by imprisonment for a period no less than a month and not exceeding three years and a fine of not less than one thousand Omani Rials ($2601) and not exceeding three thousand Omani Rials ($7803), or one of those two penalties, for whomever uses the information network or information technology means in the production, publication, distribution, purchase or Possession of anything that would prejudice religious values or public order.”
Both GCHR and OAHR condemned in the strongest terms the arrest campaign led by the ISS against all environmental defenders in the Dhofar Governorate. The human rights groups called on the ISS to immediately release the three activists, Dr. Ahmed Issa Qatan, poet Salem Ali Al-Maashani and Internet activist Amer Muslim Bait Saeed (Amr Al-Hkli), and put an immediate end to “the policy of silencing other opinions and systematically targeting human rights defenders, including Internet activists.”
The two human rights groups also said that Omani authorities are taking advantage of the current exceptional situation imposed by the Coronavirus (Covid-19) pandemic to pass their plans to transfer authority of the Dhofar Plain at a time when citizens are preoccupied with matters of their health and self-preservation. “The authorities in Oman must respect public freedoms, including freedom of expression and opinion, on and off the Internet,” the human rights groups said.

author: Gulf Center for Human Rights


text:
On International Women’s Day, Trinidad & Tobago citizens #ChooseToChallenge gender-based violence · Global Voices
Janine Mendes-Franco

Women at a protest at Woodford Square in Port of Spain, Trinidad, in 2016. The protest came after then mayor of the city, Raymond Tim Kee, victim-blamed Japanese steel plan player Asami Nagakiya, who was found murdered on February 10, 2016. Photo by Janine Mendes-Franco, used with permission.
On International Women's Day, as people the world over focus on striving for equality by celebrating women's achievements and calling out gender bias, Trinidad and Tobago is focused on women's safety in the wake of concerning rates of gender-based violence in the country.
As many as 15 local civil society groups, including feminist, human rights, LGBTQ+ and social justice organisations, conducted a “Walk-Out for Women” on March 8.
An editorial in the Trinidad and Tobago Guardian noted:
This country has seen women soar in all spheres of life, from media, politics, law enforcement and business, all the way to the Presidency. […]
But many women in this country have also been suffering in silence […] many have endured and still endure violence.
The country's two most recent high-profile femicides, those of Ashanti Riley, who was abducted by the driver of a Private Hire (PH) car and Andrea Bharatt, who was last seen alive as she and a friend got into a vehicle bearing false taxi plates, have made people that much more aware of the urgency of the problem.
In the wake of these two murders, Trinbagonians advocated for tangible steps to be taken to protect women. Thus far, parliament has passed the Evidence Bill, which introduces more modern mechanisms for evidence gathering in criminal trials, and approved pepper spray as a self-defense tool, leaving many to wonder if the deaths of these two young women have finally signalled a turning point in what citizens are willing to take.
Pressure from citizens and civil society groups—inclusive of the March 8 Walk-Out for Women—has remained consistent. The march, a collaborative effort among various civil society groups, including Womantra, CAISO, Conflict Women, Act for Change TT, and the Network of NGOs of TT for the Advancement of Women, convened at Port of Spain's main transportation hub and ended in front of the Red House, the seat of Trinidad and Tobago's parliament, where participants called on members of the government and opposition to “take immediate action against gender-based violence.”
Many netizens—men included—also posted videos explaining why they are “walking out.”
A woman at a protest at Woodford Square in Port of Spain on February 12, 2016, after Japanese steel pan player Asami Nagakiya was found murdered. Her placard, “Teach our sons not to abuse women,” speaks to the core of the issue of gender-based violence in Trinidad and Tobago. Photo by Janine Mendes-Franco, used with permission.
In the spirit of this year's #ChooseToChallenge theme for International Women's Day, many Trinidadian women spoke out, including President Paula-Mae Weekes, whose public silence at the time of the young women's deaths attracted much criticism on social media. While she felt this was “fair and perfectly understandable in a society which has become accustomed to instant reaction and social media fodder,” the president made the point that society must shoulder some of the responsibility for producing the type of men that commit such unspeakable crimes.
In the three years in which she has held the office of president, as many as 155 women have lost their lives because of gender-based violence; continued advocacy from a vibrant electorate, she said, would help create a climate that would render transformative change when it comes to the safety and well being of women in the country.
Comedian Simmy the Trini agreed, posting on Facebook:
If we want to see change, we need to continue challenging the systems that impact us negatively. We need to continue pressing for legislation that takes into consideration our various issues and challenges.
I am grateful to be alive at a time when women are collectively speaking up and out against the atrocities we face. No longer willing to suffer in silence. No longer ashamed or afraid to demand the right to live lives free of violence with access to education, healthcare and opportunities for empowerment.
As the Guardian editorial put it:
Gender-based violence and domestic violence are no longer ‘not my business’ in Trinidad and Tobago; now they are everybody’s business. They are being seen for what they are—crimes against women. Crimes that are no longer culturally accepted. Crimes that can no longer be buffered with an apology or easily dismissed.
These crimes have been hurting this country’s women and doing unspeakable damage to the heart of this nation—which women undoubtedly are.

author: Janine Mendes-Franco


text:
Baloch protests in Iran underscore repression against the ethnic minority · Global Voices
Hamid Yazdan Panah

Baloch protestors in the Iranian city of Saravan demonstrate near a government building. Photo Source: The National Council of Resistance of Iran. Used with permission.
Anti-government protests broke out in the southeastern Sistan-Baluchistan province of Iran earlier this month, following the fatal shooting of at least ten Baloch fuel traders by the Iranian regime in February, and fueled by decades of repression and neglect against the Baloch people.
Iran Human Rights Monitor, a local group of activists observing rights violations in the Islamic Republic, posted on Twitter:
IRGC forces clashed with Baluch locals in Sistan & Baluchestan border region in SE #Iran
Local sources say at least 8 people were killed & dozens were wounded.
IRGC forces have a history of shooting impoverished Baluch citizens who are forced to carry fuel to make ends meet. pic.twitter.com/5ANRtuNkre
— IRAN HRM (@IranHrm) February 22, 2021
Sistan-Baluchistan is Iran’s poorest province, with nearly half of the 1.346 million population living under the poverty line. It is also the only province in which the rural population exceeds those living in urban communities, and has been historically under-resourced.
The shooting incident is the latest in a long history of discrimination faced by the Baloch population in Iran. Sandwiched between the borders of Iran, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, the Baloch population is a historically disenfranchised minority that is relegated to the fringes of society, provided little to no economic opportunity, and systematically targeted by state violence.
A March 2 statement by Amnesty International on the shooting said:
Testimony from eyewitnesses and victims’ families, coupled with video footage geolocated and verified by the organization’s Crisis Evidence Lab, confirms that on that day [February 22], Revolutionary Guards, stationed at Shamsar military base, used live ammunition against a group of unarmed fuel porters from Iran’s impoverished Baluchi minority causing several deaths and injuries… At least 10 people, including a 17-year-old boy, were killed on 22 February, according to Baluchi human rights activists who interviewed primary sources.
Following these killings, demonstrations broke out in the Sistan-Baluchistan province, with protestors setting fire to a police car and occupying government buildings. Clashes with authorities reportedly left at least one police officer dead. Authorities reportedly shut down internet connections in the region, while human rights groups reported multiple arrests.
The protests reflect rooted discontent over decades of government negligence. According to a report published in June 2016 by Iran Human Rights Review, the development budget of Baluchistan is less than 0.001 percent of the total national budget. The report said:
More than half of the development budget is spent on security and policing in the province. While hundreds of billions of tumans (a unit of 10 rials) are spent to establish security and police stations and Revolutionary Guard Centres, many students continue to occupy sheds as classrooms.
The lack of economic resources is coupled with policies and practices that discriminate against the Sunni Baloch, both culturally and religiously. The push to marginalize Baloch identity is further heightened by the fact that many Baloch children are living undocumented in Iran. Thus, they are not only denied the ability to obtain an education in their native tongues, but in some instances are denied citizenship altogether.
The state-sanctioned repression does not stop there: For decades the Baloch have been the targets of countless campaigns of arrest, imprisonment, and execution in Iran. In 2016, the Iranian Vice President made headlines when she referenced a village in Balochistan in which all of the men were executed, noting that the survivors in the village had resorted to smuggling to survive.
The discussion of the Baloch people has long centered on their engagement in what is often referred to as “unlawful cross border commerce”, a problematic framework in and of itself as it imposes restrictions related to trade and movement on these communities. Historic Balochistan straddles the border of three nation-states, and Baloch who engages in trade throughout this region is often labelled terms such as “smuggler.”
These labels have also been used for years to justify the repression and killings of Baloch in Pakistan by the state.
Pictures of a number of Baloch citizens who were killed during today's shooting by the IRGC forces in Sistan and Baluchestan Province, SE #Iran#بلوچستان_تسلیت pic.twitter.com/8PZxf8vreE
— IRAN HRM (@IranHrm) February 22, 2021
For decades, thousands of Baloch have been criminalized, arrested, and executed as smugglers and outlaws, a charge that has historically been levied against other border communities in Iran.
Earlier this month, in a statement condemning the execution of a Baloch prisoner, the United Nations said that at least 21 Balochi prisoners were executed in Zahedan, Mashhad, and Isfahan prisons since mid-December 2020. The statement added that many of those executed “had been convicted on drug or national security charges, following flawed legal processes.”

author: Hamid Yazdan Panah


text:
Called a prostitute by the prime minister, a Slovenian journalist tells her story · Global Voices
CIVICUS

Evgenija Carl. Photo used with permission.
Women journalists, feminists, activists, and human rights defenders around the world are facing virtual harassment. In this series, global civil society alliance CIVICUS highlights the gendered nature of virtual harassment through the stories of women working to defend our democratic freedoms. These testimonies are published here through a partnership between CIVICUS and Global Voices.
The space for civil society and media in Slovenia has been in decline since Prime Minister Janez Janša’s government came into power in March 2020. Media freedom has come under attack from the Prime Minister, who has made both online and offline threats against journalists and independent media outlets.
The scale of attacks against journalists from the prime minister and the leading Slovenian Democratic Party (SDS) prompted the Council of Europe to issue a warning against the harassment and intimidation of journalists.
The government has taken steps to diminish media independence with media outlets like Nova24 TV, Nova24 online and Planet TV increasingly being funded by parties close to Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister, Viktor Orbán, a close ally of Janša. Civil society groups working on culture, human rights, media freedom and the environment have also faced repeated restrictions.
Evgenija Carl is an investigative journalist from Slovenia. After she produced a television report about the opposition SDS party in 2016, a leading politician at the time, Janez Janša, called her a “prostitute” on Twitter. When Janša later became Slovenian prime minister, the online abuse intensified.
This is Evgenija Carl's story:
He called my colleague and I, a journalist working in the field of international politics for the national Slovenian Television station (RTVSLO), “retired prostitutes” who sell our services for 30 to 35 euros. This person went on to become Prime Minister of Slovenia: Janez Janša.
His tweet read:
Na neki FB strani javne hiše ponujajo poceni usluge odsluženih prostitutk Evgenije C im Mojce PŠ. Eno za 30€, drugo za 35€. #ZvodnikMilan.
— Janez Janša (@JJansaSDS) March 21, 2016
Brothels offer cheap services of retired prostitutes Evgenija C and Mojca PŠ. One for 30 €, second for 35 €.  #PimpMilan.
I'm an investigative journalist, working in journalism for 25 years. I have always experienced attacks from those who dislike my reporting but five years ago, in 2016, the incident I experienced above led to me being on the receiving end of major public lynching on social media.
The most visible politician Janez Janša, leader of the strongest Slovene opposition party at the time, Slovenian Democratic party (SDS), had written this insulting tweet. In his tweet, he also mentioned that the former president of Slovenia, Milan Kučan, was our pimp.
Are you wondering why we experienced Janša's brutal attack and lynching on Twitter? This attack was in retaliation for our factual television insert about members of Janša's SDS party. His comments were by no means an outburst in a moment of rage, but rather a conscious act—he wanted to humiliate us as journalists and even more so as women, because for him we are just ordinary “whores.” This is how Janša deals with women in general.
My colleague and I filed a lawsuit against him and once again we were targeted by him and his loyal followers, among them politicians and some extreme right-wing media. This is an unprecedented lawsuit in Slovenia and it is still ongoing. I knew the path that followed would not be easy, but I never imagined the onslaught of attacks we would face—it was like a stampede.
Janez Janša in 2018. Photo by European People's Party, CC BY 2.0.
The methods used by the circle of Slovenian extreme right-wing populists, such as Janša, some local dignitaries, their supporters, sympathisers and followers, defamed us via social networks including Twitter and Facebook. They used far-right-oriented media, which support the party’s propaganda, to write degrading online articles about journalists who don't share their political views. These media outlets were established by members of the SDS party, who sold the majority of stakes to Hungarian companies with owners who are close to Janša’s political ally, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban.
Since Janša’s first tweet, the label “prostitute” is often attached to my name. I regularly receive public insults, cynical notes, letters and e-mails from anonymous people that intend to humiliate me. One recent tweet directed at me read: “She is just an ordinary jihad … journalism is a whore … In America they would call her: ten-dollar hooker!”
On several occasions, I have also received envelopes with white powder; on one occasion there was a substance in the envelope that affected my respiratory system. These letters also include death threats, and almost always arrive after court hearings in the lawsuit against Janša.
They attack my children by mentioning them in online articles about me or on social media, exposing them to the public. Nothing, absolutely nothing is sacred to them when it comes to settling accounts with me. It started with us. And now, in the last 11 months since Janez Janša once again took leadership of the Slovenian government, those attacks were even more brutal and have been escalating.
During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Slovenian president declared war on the media and called journalists his main political opponents. Most of the harsh tweets are intended to defame female journalists. We are called “bitches, whores, drunks,” and they are able to insult us with impunity and without any hint of a guilty conscience. This also shows the structure of male chauvinism, which is cultivated by the Slovenian political leadership headed by the prime minister.
A few weeks ago, I was called an organiser of a protest on social media, for simply sharing a notice of the protest being staged by parents and children against the closure of schools. I was accused of being guilty of causing death because it’s alleged that the protesters spread the coronavirus infection. Janša manipulates photos, recordings, spreads lies, and says that I am among those who help spread the virus and sow death. He called my colleagues and me the “coalition of death.”
How do I feel about all this? Sometimes I feel depressed and hopeless. Sometimes I feel like I live in a parallel universe because to a normal, reasonable, cultured person, something like this is inconceivable. I wonder how it is possible for “keyboard warriors” to always be willing to express their thoughts in an aggressive way and how even such a small matter can trigger an explosion of sexism and misogyny.
Various European institutions and media around the globe are doing their jobs, drawing attention to the unbearable situation under Janša's leadership and his attitude towards the media and journalists, especially his primitive attitude towards women, which is then “enabled” by his followers.
Such expressions and actions are completely permissible in Slovenia, never sanctioned, and they are growing under the guise of freedom of speech. Women are mostly affected, politicians are full of prejudices related to women, as if the path in this matter has never been crossed, as if obstacles have not yet been broken, as if the battles won by those before us served nothing.
I really wish for legal frameworks that can put an end to such online harassment. I want abusive posts to be taken down quickly—many insulting posts about me are still online. I want the media to condemn attacks on journalists more decisively. In our case, when Janša described us as “retired prostitutes,” the CEO of national Slovenian television at the time acted opportunistically and did not condemn the act. The management of the media house that I work for was silent for a week but because of public pressure was almost forced to condemn the insult, without even specifically mentioning Janša.
The fear of revenge, opportunism, pragmatism is penetrating every pore of our country and it is just getting worse.


text:
Scenes from Myanmar’s deadliest week as coup enters second month · Global Voices
Global Voices South East Asia

Anti-coup protests continued in Myanmar despite the use of violence by security forces. Photo shared by citizen journalists, used with permission
The month of February ended with at least 18 people being killed by security forces in a nationwide crackdown targeting anti-coup protesters and even journalists. The attacks continued during the first week of March, turning many communities into “war zones” and leading to mass arrests. Despite the use of violence by police and Tatmadaw (armed forces) against unarmed civilians, protests continued to gather support as activists pressed for the restoration of democracy.
The Tatmadaw staged a coup on February 1 and detained the country’s elected leaders. The military government, however, immediately faced strong opposition from citizens who organized various forms of resistance while pleading for UN intervention.
The biggest protest took place on February 22 through a general strike that paralyzed city centers across the country. Since then, security forces have resorted to more violent methods in suppressing the anti-coup movement. Dozens were killed in police operations on February 27, February 28, March 3, and March 5.
Citizen journalists told Global Voices about what they witnessed during a protest at Baho road in Sanchaung on March 3:
Police used rubber gun, sling shots, smoke and sound bomb. Nobody got arrested that day and people were protesting peacefully. The police came forward and started cracking down the crowd violently. Nobody got arrested from our protest group in Baho road.
A glimpse of the tension between police and protesters on March 3 at Baho road in Sanchaung. Video shared by a citizen journalist pic.twitter.com/uqakmrmKsd
— GlobalVoices SE Asia (@gvsoutheastasia) March 8, 2021
On March 5, eyewitnesses said police used smoke bombs against protesters:
Police fired two smoke bombs toward the crowd so we shoot fireworks to scare them and you can see fireworks exploding in the video.
Police fired smoke bombs at protesters in Yangon, Myanmar on March 5. Video shared by a citizen journalist pic.twitter.com/bdX4GPNTgm
— GlobalVoices SE Asia (@gvsoutheastasia) March 8, 2021
Citizen journalists are playing a huge role in the way the world is watching the atrocities unfold in Myanmar. Millions of videos and photographs are being shared on social media despite the high risk. My piece is now airing on BBC World News and BBC Burmese. pic.twitter.com/b65qZSOSR2
— Freya Cole (@freya_cole) March 5, 2021
Workers are among the most active participants of the protest movement:
Its 1200.
As I requested them to stay under shadow, workers replied “its ok, we r waiting a shadow under sun”.
I admire their dedication.
With them, I hve guts to accomplish anything.
နေရိပ်အလာ နေပူကစောင့်ရမှာ တဲ့။ #WhatsHappeningInMyanmar in KyunTaw Street, Sanchaung. pic.twitter.com/LDcfKAV5X5
— Thinzar Shunlei Yi #WhatshappeninginMyanmar (@thinzashunleiyi) March 2, 2021
On March 7, our source saw military personnel randomly shooting and setting off sound bombs in neighborhoods.
To combat this, people are closing all their lights and community guards (like neighborhood watch) are asking people to switch off lights in order to not attract gunshots.
Residents also mocked the police and military by shouting “Happy New Year” when sound bombs were used in their communities:
In response, people were shouting happy new year to mock the military's tactics. Another wonderful example of the resilience and humor the people of Myanmar have maintained since the start of the coup.
Terrorist junta’s soldiers tried to scare people by shooting guns around the neighborhoods at night ?
People responded back by cracking fireworks and yelling “Happy New Year” ? pic.twitter.com/zzLzroMKYn
— Civil Disobedience Movement (@cvdom2021) March 7, 2021
In recent days, the police and military were seen deploying troops in schools, hospitals, and monasteries. Our source said:
Seems like military is also trying to station themselves among civilians, making their bases in hospital, monasteries and schools.
Security forces have stationed inside universities/schools/public hospitals among civilian quarters ahead of Monday’s general strike.
The public is totally against it, claiming those areas are neutralized zones as per Geneva Convention. #WhatsHappeningInMyanmar
— Hnin Zaw (@hninyadanazaw) March 7, 2021
Several protesters were able to share their stories with journalists. Ye Myint, a 27-year-old Sanchuang resident, recalled how they acted during the clash with the police:
Our tactic now is simple: If they shoot, we run. Then we reassemble.
Another protester described her experience during a brief detention:
I hid my phone before entering the transport vehicle and posted on my Facebook that I was arrested, so my folks would see it. Upon arrival, men were sent directly into the cells and women were detained in a lecture room next door. Then the policewomen searched us again, and my phone was taken away.
We were also interrogated by soldiers the next day. They took photographs of us from the front and both sides, like you see in the movies.
They were soon released with a warning that they will be charged if they continued to join protests.
The funeral for a young martyred protester was attended by thousands of sympathizers:
Mourners attend the funeral of 19-year-old Kyal Sin, who was killed during anti-coup protests in Mandalay. Known as “Angel,” she was one of millions who joined protests across Myanmar after the military seized power and ousted Aung San Suu Kyi and other elected leaders. pic.twitter.com/oEtkbIewSK
— Radio Free Asia (@RadioFreeAsia) March 4, 2021
Residents defied curfew regulations and lit candles for fallen protesters:
After facing very brutal and violent crackdown by terrorist junta today, people in North Oakkala defied the curfew and came out to light candles to pay respects to the fallen martyrs. pic.twitter.com/JorCbWwOCu
— Civil Disobedience Movement (@cvdom2021) March 3, 2021
The death of protesters emboldened fellow activists to continue fighting for democracy:
Its been a long day. My eyes swollen, my heart still aches for we lost innocent young souls but at the end of a day, I question myself, “Do we hve options?”
And I gotta wipe tears & get on streets again tomorrow. https://t.co/6bJYuOZ8a3
— Thinzar Shunlei Yi #WhatshappeninginMyanmar (@thinzashunleiyi) March 3, 2021
Nighttime raids and arrests were conducted on March 6 and 7. Among those arrested was the father of an elected official:
My father was beaten up while he was being taken away. The soldiers and police destroyed our father’s house.
A Frontier journalist expressed admiration for protesters:
Over these few days, I developed a deep admiration for these young protesters. Not just because of their bravery, but also because of their skill; each day, as they gained more experience, their tactics improved. The police simply couldn’t crush them; each time they advanced, the protesters melted away. If the police withdrew, they returned to the same spot; if the police stayed, the protesters simply moved to a new location. They used social media to study the situation and work out where they should go next.
Kyaw Zwa Moe of The Irrawaddy acknowledged the fighting will of the young protesters:
…they are so determined to see the death of the military dictatorship, there is simply no way their movement can die. Their determination to annihilate the mighty and cruel military dictatorship knows no bounds. The only conceivable outcome is victory.
*With additional reporting from Global Voices’ Civic Media Observatory project

author: Global Voices South East Asia


text:
Who can become a parent in France? · Global Voices
Laila Le Guen

Graffiti calls for PMA (‘procréation médicalement assistée’ or in English ‘medically assisted procreation’) to be available to all, Paris, 2018. Photo by Ittmostt on Flickr (CC BY 2.0)
Families that do not fit into the “traditional” cisgender heterosexual mold have existed for decades and have progressively gained acceptance in French society. Yet, recognition of kinship and access to fertility treatments are still not guaranteed by law, a situation that highlights inequalities when it comes to starting a family.
Attempting to make good on his 2017 campaign promise, French President Emmanuel Macron is pushing for a bill to be passed “by summer 2021”, with its most prominent feature meant to legalize access to IVF and artificial insemination by single women and lesbian couples. But this key reform was recently rejected by the High Chamber, leaving many activists disillusioned in the midst of this long legal battle. Some hope that the bill will eventually be adopted by the Lower Chamber.
Yet, the debate goes deeper than the story of a monolithic state pitted against progressive forces.
This much is clear: for French authorities, not everyone has an equal claim to becoming a parent. First, single women are qualified as “vulnerable” by some lawmakers in the High Chamber, not to mention the lack of consideration of trans people, who are barely taken into account in the country's national plan against LGBT+ discrimination. It looks like in France, some people’s desire to procreate remains illegitimate and is still treated as abnormal, forcing many single women and LGBTQI+ people to go abroad until the country decides to open assisted reproduction technologies (ART) to them.
A sore point for groups such as La Manif Pour Tous, which oppose the draft law, is that lesbian couples or single women could be having a child without a father, thus “preventing them from accessing their real origins.” Such a concern for children’s well-being could easily be resolved by the proposal of semi-anonymous donations, whereby information about the donor could be made available under certain conditions, rather than by preventing women from accessing ART.
The real objection, though, seems to hinge on the fear that men are losing their place in society. Opponents to the draft bill often refer to women's access to procreation without the involvement of a man, other than as a sperm donor, as tantamount to giving a stamp of approval to “fathers becoming disposable.” This seems to pose an existential threat to a society organised around the gender binary.
La Manif Pour Tous’ perspective also puts aside the mental burden already resting on women when it comes to procreation and child-rearing. Baptiste Beaulieu, a French medical practitioner, points out in one of his tweets that in many cases, it is women who handle most of the childcare, though “at the mere mention of ART for all women here (on Twitter), you will see a herd of males defending their right to devote themselves to a fatherhood that they often delegate in real life.” One might then retort, somewhat tongue-in-cheek: is it healthy for heterosexual couples to have children? This decision is obviously not ours to make and that's kind of the point.
Being a “good candidate” to adopt a child is likewise largely dependent on being a financially stable, steady, and preferably heterosexual couple, as well as white and non-disabled, according to a recent study on adoption placement practices in France. Social workers operate under the assumption of what is considered “best” for the child. The law's implementation is carried out by discrete actors who make a range of decisions affecting citizens’ intimate lives.
We are left wondering what a “good family” is and, more fundamentally, who counts as a family in the eyes of the French government—a government largely made up of elected representatives who are not affected by the issues discussed here.
French law has remained quite conservative on the matter, retaining the primacy of the biological as a principle. Specifically, the law regards as parents the two people who are presumed to have contributed genetic material to the child’s conception, i.e. the person who gave birth and the man who is married to her or comes forward to be registered as the father. All other cases, from co-parenting and blended families to LGBTQ+ parents, currently have to be resolved with some legal tinkering, usually involving an adoption process.
Concretely, this means that when three or four people decide to go down the co-parenting route, only two of them are initially identified legally as the parents, the others being left out of the picture entirely until adoption papers are filed. Lesbian couples face a similar conundrum since only the mother who has given birth can be registered on the birth certificate. In these situations, if a separation occurs before the adoption process is finalized, one of the parents can be completely cut out of the child’s life.
With existing “atypical” families being more and more visible and outspoken, the very concept of family is undergoing a social redefinition. On the ground, the contours of the concept are expanding but judges and lawmakers still have the power to shrink them back, drawing frontiers that parcel out who is legitimate as a parent. What’s at stake here is more than a legal technicality: even if the draft bill that is inching its way along the hallways of government is eventually adopted, much remains to be done to fully embrace all the diversity that currently makes up French families.
There is still a long way to go towards normalizing parenthood outside the strict norms currently laid out by the law. Whenever parenthood isn't achievable without medical assistance or at least without the intervention of a donor, everybody—from religious leaders to politicians—wants to have a say. The material and mental barriers created by these debates might, sadly, lead some would-be parents to think twice about their plans. In any case, those who brave the burdensome administrative procedures to eventually have children do so after careful planning and consideration and with the knowledge that they are skirting the law.
It is hard to foresee which direction the Parliament will end up taking regarding this issue, but we are sure about one thing: activists—on both sides of the issue—will not let it go.

author: Laila Le Guen


text:
Global Voices to collaborate with UNESCO on a digital activism toolkit for promoting languages online · Global Voices
Global Voices

Illustration by Adriana García and used with permission.
Global Voices, through its Rising Voices initiative, is pleased to announce a new partnership with UNESCO to produce an open educational toolkit for Indigenous and other under-resourced or minority language communities seeking to incorporate digital media and internet-based tools into their language promotion activities.
According to the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, the right to free expression and to access information in one’s native language is one of the fundamental conditions for full empowerment of indigenous peoples. Preserving the vitality of indigenous languages helps to preserve and protect traditional knowledge, which often exists mainly in oral form, and at the same time safeguards the culture and identity of indigenous communities.
One of the ways communities are working to exercise these rights is through the use of digital media and internet-based tools. By taking advantage of increasing connectivity and more affordable devices, communities are extending both the reach of content they produce in their native their languages and their access to information and knowledge produced by others, as well as their ability to communicate with their peers in other communities.
At the forefront of this trend are those language digital activists who take a “do-it-yourself” approach to creating digital content, social media campaigns, online educational materials, and communication platforms. The overarching spirit of these activists is one of sharing—of skills, experiences, and knowledge.
These language communities, however, still face a number of key obstacles to optimal use of the internet and digital media to promote their languages online. These include barriers to access, as well as technical, technological, linguistic, socio-cultural, and even legal or political challenges.
The good news is that many of these challenges are being addressed by digital activists around the world, who are developing effective strategies and solutions which could be adopted and adapted to suit other communities’ unique contexts and realities. These lessons and best practices will be incorporated into this resource to provide a broader overview of the various elements that go into creating digital activism projects and campaigns.
The toolkit is not meant to be a step-by-step guide; rather, it will provide a roadmap for digital activism that will be co-designed in close collaboration with existing and new networks of digital activists and other partners, as preparations continue for the International Decade of Indigenous Languages 2022-2032.
In creating this resource for existing and emerging digital activists, the partnership between Global Voices and UNESCO fulfils a recommendation outlined in the Los Pinos Declaration [Chapoltepek] prepared at UNESCO’s high-level closing event of the 2019 International Year of Indigenous Languages:
“Promotion of networks of digital activists and champions for the teaching and learning of indigenous languages, as well as the exchange of best practices related to the use of technology.”

author: Global Voices


text:
How COVID-19 ramped up a simmering hostility between Brazil and China · Global Voices
Giovana Fleck

While a climate of truce between Brasília and Beijing ensued during Bolsonaro's first year in the presidency, the relationship deteriorated with the COVID-19 pandemic. Image: Giovana Fleck/Global Voices
Brazil's president, Jair Bolsonaro, has never been known for being sympathetic to the Chinese government.
In February 2018, when he was still a sitting congressman, Bolsonaro traveled to Taiwan, where he met with government officials, prompting the Chinese Embassy in Brazil to produce an angry letter.
On the campaign trail later that year, Bolsonaro repeatedly criticized the Asian country, saying its “advance” in Brazil needed to be “stopped.”
And shortly after he was elected, he made another biting remark when he suggested that China could “buy in Brazil, but not Brazil [itself].”
While a climate of truce between Brasília and Beijing ensued during Bolsonaro's first year in the presidency, the relationship deteriorated with the COVID-19 pandemic—to the detriment of Brazil, which has struggled to keep the virus under control or speedily immunize its population.
More than 266,000 people have died in Brazil as a result of the pandemic, making it the world's second-deadliest outbreak after the United States. The health crisis was compounded by a new variant discovered in Manaus, a capital in the Amazon region.
Bolsonaro has spent most of 2020 defending the theory of herd immunity and drugs without any proven effectiveness against the virus. And while governments around the world scrambled to secure vials of the COVID-19 vaccine, Bolsonaro refused to negotiate with drug companies, especially the Chinese ones.
So far, around 7.25 million vaccine doses have been administered to Brazilians, most of them of CoronaVac, developed by Chinese laboratory Sinovac Biotech and manufactured in Brazil by Butantan Institute, a public research center in São Paulo state. A smaller batch of Oxford/Astrazeneca doses are being distributed to priority groups.
Bolsonaro pulled no punches when it came to the CoronaVac vaccine, whose manufacturing in Brazil has been hyped by São Paulo governor João Doria, a former ally of the president, and now his political rival.
While Butantan was finalizing the third phase of studies, pursuing the validation for CoronaVac, Bolsonaro claimed, in a public appearance on December 15, that its “origin” made it untrustworthy, meaning that coming from China made the vaccine unreliable. The following week, Bolsonaro cancelled the purchase of 46 million doses of CoronaVac after it had been confirmed by the Ministry of Health. “The Brazilian people will not be anyone’s guinea pig,” Bolsonaro said at the time.
Despite Bolsonaro's rejections, on January 18 the National Regulatory Agency (Anvisa) approved emergency use of both the Oxford/Astrazeneca and Sinovac vaccines.
But supplies needed to manufacture the CoronaVac vaccine were held up in China for five days, allegedly because of the government’s strained relationship with Beijing. As reported by El País Brasil, in exchange for China speeding up the procedures, Brasilia signaled that it will not impose restrictions on the Chinese company Huawei in the 5G internet frequency auction due to take place in Brazil. The active ingredients were finally sent to Brazil on January 25.
On February 18, Butantan Institute blamed the “diplomatic attrition” between the federal government and China for the delay in delivering doses of the CoronaVac vaccine to the Ministry of Health, adding that “the Ministry of Health omits the fight with China” and “ignores facts when attributing the delay to Butantan” and other Brazilian institutions.
With a population of over 161 million above 18 years old, the country needs at least 242 million doses to immunize its population.
In March 2020, while Brazilian cities were starting to adopt social distancing measures to stop the spread of the virus, the president's son, congressmen Eduardo Bolsonaro, criticized and blamed China for its stance on the outbreak of the COVID-19, using his Twitter account.
This would be the first of a series of attempts by Bolsonaro's allies to blame China for the pandemic. In April, the Brazilian chancellor, Ernesto Araújo referred to the coronavirus as “comunavirus,” in a pun on “communism.”
“Bolsonaro's lack of management during the pandemic heightened the chaos in the country, where finding a culprit became the president's escape narrative,” says Edivan Costa, anthropologist and social scientist who dedicated his career to focusing on the ethnography of Chinese migrants in Brazil.
According to Costa, the Chinese government became an easy target for the president. “He reproduced Trump's style as if translating the same things the former U.S. president used to say to Portuguese,” said the researcher in a call with Global Voices.
According to the Image and Cyberculture Studies Laboratory (Labic) of the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES), these ideas took root in social media among supporters of the president mostly after the virus was registered in Brazil, and this relied on fake news and speculation to spread anti-China sentiment. The research shows that the origin of such discourses was a mix of social uncertainty and the validation (or denial) of information shared by the media.
“The defense of Bolsonarism had a well-defined bias: to deny both the seriousness of the facts announced by the WHO (World Health Organisation) and the efficiency of the Chinese government in handling the health crisis,” stated the report developed by Labic which analyzed thousands of posts on social media to detect anti-China trends up to September 2020.
To Edivan Costa, this is a narrative crisis, where a populist government finds a scapegoat to blame for its own inefficiency. “Brazil is a strategic country that China will not break away from; at a certain level, they depend on each other. But this narrative crisis is only bad to Brazil, which is not only losing economic potential, but people's lives,” said the social scientist.
On February 18, during his weekly live broadcast on social media, Bolsonaro disclosed the vaccination card of his 93-year-old mother. He wanted to make the point that his mother didn't take the CoronaVac, but the Oxford/Astrazeneca vaccine, instead. He showed a card with Oxford/Astrazeneca written on it, but the document indicated the serial number of a CoronaVac vaccine batch and the date for the second shot also compatible with CoronaVac.
During the live, Bolsonaro accused the nurse who gave his mother the shot of coming back and modifying her vaccination card. São Paulo's governor, João Doria, called Bolsonaro's claim “absurd.” On March 8, Olinda Bolsonaro received her second shot of CoronaVac, while Doria went on to say that she was now safe, thanks to the vaccine developed at Butantan Institute—the Chinese one.
This story is part of a Civic Media Observatory investigation into competing narratives about China’s Belt and Road Initiative, and explores how societies and communities hold differing perceptions of potential benefits and harms of Chinese-led development. To learn more about this project and its methods, click here.

author: Giovana Fleck


text:
Online rape threats connect Lebanese activist to ‘thousands of other women’ facing abuse · Global Voices
CIVICUS

A viewer of a video presented by journalist Maya El Ammar left a comment that read: “The presenter’s body is like a sweet shop and is worth a rape”.
Women journalists, feminists, activists, and human rights defenders around the world are facing virtual harassment. In this series, global civil society alliance CIVICUS highlights the gendered nature of virtual harassment through the stories of women working to defend our democratic freedoms. These testimonies are published here through a partnership between CIVICUS and Global Voices.
Since October 2019, anti-government protests known as the “October Revolution” have erupted across Lebanon. Protesters have called for the removal of the government and raised concerns about corruption, poor public services and a lack of trust in the ruling class. Protests have been met with unprecedented violence from security forces. The country has faced an ongoing political crisis, which was worsened by the Beirut port explosion in August 2020. Feminists have been at the forefront of the revolution and have stepped up to provide assistance in the aftermath of the explosion. Since the revolution began, the government has intensified its crackdown on free speech, and journalists have also faced attacks.
Maya El Ammar is a feminist writer, activist and communications professional who currently contributes to various media outlets as a journalist, writer and translator, produces her own opinion videos covering a range of feminist and human rights issues and publishes gender-focused articles in collaboration with independent media platforms alongside her job as a media strategist for a non-profit organization. She has a BA in journalism and an MA in communication studies.
This is Maya El Ammar's testimony:
“The presenter’s body is like a sweet shop and is worth a rape,” was one man’s reaction to a 2018 video I produced, not on sugar-apples, but on the bias of Lebanese media in covering femicide cases.
“If that’s what you wear for work … I wonder what your nightgown looks like?”
“Why don’t you eat a ‘banana’?” and,
“Why should I hear from an impure woman such as yourself?” wondered others.
That was in response to my piece in the same year on the kafala (guardianship) slavery-like conditions enforced on domestic workers and their similarities with marriage laws in our region.
A year later, things escalated to, “Reply to my email and answer my calls or else I’ll have to come to your office, Maya.” That was the first time in my life I consulted a lawyer, for this very polite threat was the culmination of a sickening combination of online and offline stalking, delusions, lies, and what I call a man's “revenge thorn” after I pursued a story—my story—without him.
In my case, it was a male videographer and civil society worker I crossed paths with. He has even gone so far as to start harassing the person at the center of the story, in order to punish me. But luckily, I survived that, too. I even told myself what I would never tell my friends or say out loud, that this was still considerably trivial in comparison to the more serious violations my colleagues, and women in general, face. The “It’s not daily threats or rape yet” melody kept me going because there was so much I wanted to do that I did not wish to be stopped, let alone to publicly share.
The strange revelation that has just hit me is that thousands of other women are having to deal with similar violations as I write this, and as you read it.
Many of them are probably dealing with their ordeal with an odd level of acceptance. And I say this because, as women, I suppose we have always seen those misogynist and ad-hominem commentaries hovering over our heads, coming to land in the digital spaces we decided to claim, just as we once decided to claim public spaces. History does repeat itself sometimes.
Thanks to our own experiences with gender-based violence in the offline world, we have rationalized the reality that our virtual world would only naturally mirror our off-screen existence.  Thanks to the women whose inspiring trajectories have often had to be turned into outright warnings for their successors, we have perhaps unintentionally come to terms with the inevitability of going about our lives being victimized. It turns out that as girls we all had to be born prepared, though unarmed. And the worst part of it all is realizing decades later that as women, we still are unarmed, underequipped and uncared for. So we might as well care less for ourselves and our own wellbeing, might we not?
As women journalists and activists from the Middle East and North Africa, our force is a destabilizer, but also a parasite, a thing to deal with later when the ever more important issues are dealt with. And as independent women journalists and activists, we are all the more unprotected and unendorsed by any higher establishment.
“Hope for the best but always expect the worst,” my sister used to tell me.
I don’t think she realizes that I ended up expecting the worst, incessantly. Instead of chasing hope, I opted for being on alert for the worst. At the time, maybe I thought this could help me grow into Destiny Child’s “strong, independent woman.” But a few years later I found out that it actually meant I had to coexist with my fears, and accept this open relationship with the leftovers from my Freeze-or-Flee-or-Fight skills. In digital terms, these would be the Ignore-or-Block-or-Report skills.
But report to whom? To giant tech corporations that couldn’t care less about our safety, so they prioritize removing language that bothers authoritarian and “apartheid” regimes in the region over addressing reports of sexist and harmful content? Or to companies that are much quicker to disapprove “sensitive ads” and censor political Arabic content than they are to respond to threats of violence, bullying and harassment?
Report to whom? To national cybercrime bureaus that may have proved effective in tracking and arresting perpetrators of blackmailing and sextortion, and yet remained way more effective in unlawfully prosecuting social media users and arresting journalists, including women, for expressing unwelcome opinion?
As I write these lines, I cannot but think of my female colleagues who are constantly pushed to deal with the shadow of a monstrous police-state apparatus compounded by outpourings of attacks against “who they are,” but rarely against “what they say.”
Miraculously, these same women refuse to back down and are becoming even more determined to point the finger at the corrupt and the harasser, and dig for answers on who killed their colleagues, the researchers, the thinkers, the journalists, and on who was behind the improperly stored 2,750 tonnes of ammonium nitrate that destroyed half of Beirut.
If the recently approved anti-harassment law was passed in Lebanon for a reason, it should be for them, and for the 307 per cent rise in official reports of online violence during the COVID-19 pandemic. This new—albeit weak—law should be for all the women whose work is never enough and are often expected to sacrifice more, yet are the first to be sacrificed during crises.
This new law, which encompasses online harassment and could see the most flagrant perpetrators spend up to four years in prison, should be for all the brave women who are taking individual and collective action to protect themselves and their communities. Most importantly, it should be for those among us who are still reluctant to seek help for fear of retaliation, and lack of trust and hope.