As the number of banned websites keeps increasing in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA), the question on the minds of the region’s growing youthful internet-savvy population is how far the government censorship will go.
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Governments in the Middle East are stepping up a campaign of censorship and surveillance in an effort to prevent an estimated 33.5 million Internet users from viewing a variety of websites, whose topics range from human rights to pornography. As a result, millions of Middle Easterners are finding it harder by the day to access popular news and entertainment sites such as Facebook, MySpace, YouTube and Flickr. [or even Amazon.com in Syria]
Some young internet users try to do something about it: 25-year-old student Hani Noor and his cousin created a Facebook group called We All Hope They Don’t Block Facebook in Saudi Arabia. Many others are busy setting up proxy servers to circumvent the official restrictions. But is this cat-and-mouse game of staying a step ahead of the censors really the most productive use of time and resources for both the authorities and the region’s youths? With the population between the ages of 12 and 24 now at 100 million (and growing) and the highest youth unemployment rate in the world, the prime concern of MENA governments should be how to combat the looming unemployment crisis, not how to block more websites. Meanwhile, the region progresses down the path among the most censored places in the world.
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Five of the world’s top 13 Internet censors are in the Middle East, according to the most recent report from Reporters Without Borders, the journalism advocacy group that lobbies against Web censorship. Only four Arab countries have little or no filtering: Lebanon, Morocco, Jordan and Egypt — but Egyptian politicians are considering a law that would criminalize some online activity. At the other end of the spectrum are Saudi Arabia and Syria, consistently described by human-rights groups as the most hostile toward the Internet. (…) Iran’s hard-line Shiite Muslim leadership is another zealous censor of the Internet. The government boasts of filtering 10 million ”immoral” websites in addition to all the major social networking outfits and dozens of pages about religion or politics.
It is important to keep in mind that censorship – whether online or in any other media – restricts more than just political freedoms. Censorship also limits the economic freedom of pursuing, exchanging, and researching new ideas that could otherwise translate into opportunities for entrepreneurship and job creation. MENA governments bent on controlling access to the web content would be better off channeling their efforts toward creating an environment where entrepreneurs – especially young entrepreneurs – are encouraged to think creatively and can use the internet as a tool to help them do so.
Published Date: January 07, 2008