Introduction One day in early 2015, Habib Battah, an investigative journalist who operates the website Beirut Report, noticed new construction works in the city’s Hamra district. Hoping that this was the physical manifestation of much-touted plans to upgrade the notoriously slow internet in Lebanon, he observed thin blue pipe being laid into newly dug trenches, […]
In Tunisia and Bahrain, government officials are pushing for laws that would further restrict online freedom of expression in both countries. Sixteen deputies from Nidaa Tounes, the ruling party in Tunisia, and one deputy from another party proposed a bill calling for certain types of online speech to be outlawed. The Tunisian bill, which would […]
Seventeen Arab activists, including myself and Alaa Sayegh representing SMEX, met in the ever-charming city of Amman for a weekend of presentations, conversations, and workshops hosted by 7iber, a Jordanian citizen media collective, and supported by 7amleh, a Palestinian citizen media collective, and the American Friends Service Committee. The conference—tweets were aggregated with the hashtag […]
Many groups of NGOs, activists in the Arab region are coming together online and offline in the last two years to protest and react against specific laws that is affecting negatively their rights as Internet users. We witnessed many campaigns to expose and postpone these unjust law. Legislative process takes time, not months but years, […]
