Global Voices to track suppression of free speech online with new site

Global Voices, the non-profit blogging community, has launched a new website to track the suppression of free speech online.

The Threatened Voices site will feature a world map and interactive timeline plotting threats and arrests against bloggers across the world.

The site will also include news updates and information from relevant organisations, such as Reporters Without Borders (RSF) and the Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ).

At time of writing the site was tracking 177 cases of threatened or arrested bloggers. The timeline and map will also be colour-coded to show the status of an individual's case, for example red for 'under arrest' and green for 'released', and can be filtered by country.

At the end of last year the CPJ's annual census suggested that more online journalists were imprisoned than those working in other mediums.



"Professional journalists are increasingly migrating to online media and blogs in pursuit of more freedom, blurring the old lines of definition. And many so-called cyber-dissidents in China, Tunisia, Vietnam or Iran, do not have personal blogs. Other times, bloggers are arrested for their offline activity, rather than for what they have published online," wrote Global Voices' advocacy director Sami Ben Gharbia in an announcement.

"This confusion has sometimes made it hard for online free speech advocates to come up with a good strategies and partnerships to defend bloggers and online activists, but it has never been more important to try."

The site will aim to encourage non-journalists and those outside of Global Voice's community of authors and editors to report free speech and human rights abuses, he added.

"In the process, we are hoping to learn more about when, where and to what extent bloggers are being subjected to abuse in different countries, so we can share that information widely with journalists, researchers, and activists; and work towards creating an internet where everyone can exercise their right to speak freely and where bloggers in prison are not forgotten," he wrote.

Related reading: See Journalism.co.uk's own press freedom timeline.

Free daily newsletter

If you like our news and feature articles, you can sign up to receive our free daily (Mon-Fri) email newsletter (mobile friendly).