Abstract
Index on Censorship’s new CEO,
I was reminded of “can’t stop the signal” earlier this year when Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan tried to ban Twitter. “Twitter, schmitter!” Erdoğan told supporters during a fiery rally speech. “I don’t care what the international community says. Everyone will witness the power of the Turkish Republic.”
The power of the Turkish Republic – or at least the tech-savvy and social media-using part of the republic – was to find workarounds to the ban almost immediately. Twitter itself quickly provided instructions on how to tweet using SMS; users were still able to post by changing their DNS settings or by using Virtual Private Networks. And, most interestingly, these tricks moved rapidly from the online world to the more traditional form of street information-passing: graffiti was scrawled across buildings in Turkey, giving instructions about the internet settings that would circumvent the ban.
For me it was this move, from click to brick, that captured most powerfully the futility of governments’ attempts to “stop the signal” in the digital age – and the way in which digital freedom of expression can help free expression in general to flourish. At Index, we are working with colleagues in Europe, as well as in Kenya, Tunisia, Senegal and India to develop tools that enable journalists, writers, artists, and activists to report from their laptop, smartphone, tablets and via SMS on instances of censorship. This will help us to “grow the signal” so we can build a much more detailed picture of the everyday threats to free expression faced globally.
But we would be wrong to think that these tools alone, or the ease with which social media users circumvented and mocked Erdoğan’s Twitter ban, means that the battle for freedom of expression is won. Far from it. For while it is not possible to stop the signal, it is possible to stop the signallers.
Take China, for example. Free Weibo, a group shortlisted in Index on Censorship’s Freedom of Expression Awards 2014, is doing a remarkable job in republishing all the stories that government censors cut from social media. This helps to keep public discourse alive digitally, but as long as public protest remains outlawed in China and individual dissenters under threat of harassment and arrest, freedom of expression will remain severely curtailed. In Turkey, journalists are regularly jailed by Erdoğan’s government or have criminal prosecutions launched against them. Turkish writer and playwright Meltem Arikan, another Index award nominee, fled her homeland after the government accused her of fomenting unrest through her play Mi Minor. Ironically, politicians urged the public to set up Twitter accounts to denounce Arikan for the play.
ABOVE: Journalists on trial on charges of supporting terrorists and spreading false information, in Cairo, Egypt, March 2014
Credit: EPA/Alamy
Every day, free expression in the digital world is being translated into repression in the physical. In countries across the world, journalists, activists, even individuals making throwaway jokes on social media, are being censured, detained and even tortured and killed. In 2013, more than 70 journalists were killed, two-thirds of those covering political stories. On this year’s World Press Freedom Day in early May, Al Jazeera journalists detained in Egypt for simply doing their jobs learned that they would yet again be denied bail. And this in a country that seemed, during the Arab Spring, to herald the democratic opportunities afforded to society by technology and social media.
Graffiti was scrawled across buildings in Turkey, with instructions on how to circumvent the Twitter ban
John Naughton, professor of the public understanding of technology at the Open University, wrote at the time of Erdoğan’s Twitter ban that the Turkish president had become a laughing stock in less than a week. But, as Naughton also rightly noted in the same article for The Guardian, we laugh at those who strive to stop the signal at our peril. Erdoğan and his like have not lost the free speech battle, nor has the signal yet won. We should not be lulled into thinking that censorship has diminished simply because Twitter workarounds can be found. The persistence of the signal should rather be taken as a rallying call for increased vigilance over all threats to freedom of expression and remind us of the need to defend an individual’s right to free expression in all spheres – on stage, outside parliament, in print as well as online.