Index on Censorship weekly news round-up
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Friday, 21 April 2023
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Arab Spring protesters in Tunisia in 2011. Photo: Nasser Nouri/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0
Many Muslims around the world will be celebrating the first day of Eid al-Fitr today, marking the end of the month-long fast of Ramadan. Tunisians will be among them and we wish them and those everywhere Eid Mubarak.
There are other things happening in Tunisia that do not deserve to be celebrated. The country’s leading opposition politician, Rached Ghannouchi, the head of the Ennahda (Renaissance) party and speaker of Tunisia’s Assembly of People's Representatives until it was disbanded, was arrested this week.
According to Tunisia’s President Kais Saied, Ghannouchi’s arrest relates to an alleged call for civil war ([link removed]) in the country when he told his supporters “imagining…Tunisia without Ennahda, Tunisia without political Islam, without the left, or any other component, is a project for civil war". Saied has recently called opposition figures “a cancer…[to be] cured with chemicals” ([link removed]) .
Saied came to power in elections in 2019, but in 2021 he suspended parliament, ousted the prime minister and imposed emergency law. Since then Saied has ruthlessly and repeatedly targeted his opponents, which has led to Amnesty International calling his actions “a political witch-hunt ([link removed]) ”.
Tunisia is a very different place from just over a decade ago. In 2011, it was the country where protests against former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali sparked the Arab Spring and which transformed Tunisia into an open democracy.
We call on the Tunisian government to release Ghannouchi and others who speak out against Saied’s increasingly authoritarian regime, including Ennahda’s Said Ferjani, whose daughter Kaouther has written movingly about his passion in the current issue of Index on Censorship magazine ([link removed]) .
It seems rather flippant to say so but Rached Ghannouchi’s account on Twitter doesn’t have a verified tick. We only mention it because verified ticks on Twitter have also hit the news again this week after owner Elon Musk went through with his plan to turn verified ticks into a paid service. #BlueTick is now trending ([link removed]) on the platform as users note who does and who does not still have a tick. The paid service – which costs £115.20 annually in the UK – prioritises tweets, reduces the number of ads and allows users to post longer tweets and edit them.
Poet Lemn Sissay has penned some words ([link removed]) to mark the disappearance of the icon - “My blue tick has gone (gone gone) | An’ that ain’t right” - while novelist Joanne Harris writes wistfully ([link removed]) , “goodbye little #bluetick…thanks to that self-serving prick”.
Those who still have a blue tick (we assume they paid) include MEP Guy Verhofstadt, the former Belgian prime minister. So does Andrew Tate, the influencer known for his misogynist views, various neo-Nazi organisations, journalist and Covid vaccine sceptic Alex Berenson and Wrexham AFC co-owner, apparently also an actor, Ryan Reynolds.
Maria Ressa, Aung San Suu Kyi, Bill Gates, the Auschwitz Museum, Alexei Navalny (seriously ill right now in a Russian penal colony after suspected poisoning ([link removed]) ) and Donald Trump are among those who do not.
The changes at Twitter mean that we are now in a place where we don’t know whose account is authentic or not. This matters – a lot. Much has been made of the role of social media in the Arab Spring. We are now in a world where protesters are required to register, including their phone number, and pay to be verified. The dictators are going to love that. And it makes knowing who to trust that much more challenging.
The move on paid verification has also coincided with the platform dropping the use of labels on the accounts of broadcasters ([link removed]) , such as the BBC and PBS, that suggest they are "Government-funded" or "China state-affiliated". Perhaps this is to encourage them to splash out on a verified tick.
Twitter has also made changes to its content moderation policy this week. In a blog post ([link removed]) entitled “Freedom of Speech, Not Reach” the company said it would apply “visibility filtering” to restrict the reach of tweets that violate its policies by making the content less discoverable. It said it believed “Twitter users have the right to express their opinions and ideas without fear of censorship” and it would allow the platform “to move beyond the binary ‘leave up versus take down’ approach to content moderation”.
What is concerning is that the policies on what is allowed on the platform are being changed surreptitiously. At some time on 7 or 8 April, the social media network quietly changed its conduct policy relating to slurs on the platform. The policy says the platform “prohibits targeting others with repeated slurs, tropes or other content that intends to degrade or reinforce negative or harmful stereotypes about a protected category.” The following sentence, which has now been removed, said: “This includes targeted misgendering or deadnaming of transgender individuals.”
We can only hope that all the changes at Twitter do not turn into the “rapid unplanned disassembly” ([link removed]) that Elon Musk’s Starship, the world’s biggest rocket, suffered this week.
Mark Frary
Associate editor
** Join us for our spring magazine launch
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As India becomes the world’s largest nation it should be the world’s largest democracy. But was India ever a real democracy? If it was, how is it being threatened under current leader Narendra Modi? And what does the word democracy even mean?
What can be done to protect the rights of minorities in India? What will Modi’s priorities be ahead of the 2024 elections? And crucially just how resilient is Indian democracy and is it open to everyone? The newest edition of Index on Censorship magazine explores these questions as we examine the role of free expression in contemporary Indian society. To launch the issue join Salil Tripathi, award-winning journalist, Dr Maya Tudor of the Blavatnik School of Government at the University of Oxford, Hanan Zaffar, a journalist and film maker based in South Asia, and Jemimah Steinfeld, Index editor-in-chief, for an online panel discussion about past, present and future challenges to India’s democracy. Book your free tickets here ([link removed]) .
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** From the archive
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** Windows on the world
Golrokh Ebrahimi Iraee
September 2018
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Iraee, who has been sentenced to seven further years in prison in Iran ([link removed]) for “gathering and colluding against national security” and producing “propaganda against the state” sent us her poetry from prison in 2018. She said: “I have counted the bricks…in the walls of the cell that has devoured me. And now it has been years.” Read her words ([link removed]) and those of fellow prisoner Nazanin Zaghari-Ratcliffe.
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