Great, now that I have got your attention, let’s talk about something way more serious and more pressing which has been systematically ignored in some Asian culture: Internet Censorship. Yes, I know this might come as a disappointment to some of you who are just here for the cute Hamster video but I promise, after this article, you will be a lot more well-informed and you will still get your video at the end. Or, you can just skip straight to the end but please don’t do that. That’s gonna make Mr. Hamster really sad:(
Alright, let’s dive into this. So last night, I had a soccer game and got back quite late, around 11pm to be exact. Not wanting to disappoint my three regular readers, I was going to write a short article about why I enjoy soccer and how it has been an integral part of many cultures around the world. As I logged onto medium.com, something weird happened. Instead of taking me straight to the website, my browser just kept loading and eventually returned an error message. Curious and suspicious, I kept trying over and over again but nothing worked. Finally, after half an hour playing around and doing some research, I turned on my VPN and tried again: it worked in less than a second. This confirmed my suspicion that Medium has become one of the latest target of another government censorship block. By then, it was already 11:30pm and I was exhausted so I decided to go to sleep, pissed at the notion that my government has yet to disappoint me again. This is probably one of the biggest middle fingers they have shown me.
Waking up early in the morning, I decided to do some more research about the subject. After reading a few English articles, I found out that there has been a long and complicated history of government censorship in my country (can’t arrest me if you don’t know which country I am talking about). It is shown that many social media platforms and news website have been targeted by the government, most notably Facebook, Twitter, Youtube (intermittently) or the more recent BBC, Medium and numerous other personal blogs. Along with censorship, there have been many arrests made on our citizens who post political views opposing the one-party rule system or simply activists who push for a more democratic government. These arrests are made under different crimes such as “propaganda against the State”, “very dangerous and serious conduct that negatively affects national social stability, public order”, “tax fraud”, “carrying out activities with the intent of overthrowing the government” or even more ridiculously “calling for multiparty democracy”.
Take a look at one of the cases. In 2008, a 56 years old blogger was charged with “Tax Fraud” after he called for a boycott using his blog. The blogger stood trial and was sentenced to serve 2 and a half years in prison. He was supposed to be released by the end of 2010 but he is still being held in detention right now (ten fucking years later), this time under the charges of “Propaganda against the State”. His family has not heard from him for almost a year now and they are denied of their rights to visit him in detention. Many concerns about the blogger’s health have been raised to none of which has the government responded. This is one of the biggest internet silencing case so far.
Another notable case involves a Catholic Priest being imprisoned for committing a “very serious crimes that harmed national security” by trying to organize a boycott of the upcoming election. Sources shown that this Catholic Priest suffered a stroke while being imprisoned and was shortly released for treatments a few months later after increasing pressure from human rights organizations. However, a few months after, despite efforts of Amnesty International, he was swiftly returned to prison in very poor health conditions. Ironic how in other countries, people has the option to abstain from voting whereas here, you are basically forced to vote. In lighter tone, it’s like being forced to have fun at a social gathering with your boss or else you will get fired. We are so democratic we force everyone to voice their opinions whether they want to or not. Oh, and we also arrest and silence people who disagree with us but that’s a different matter.
In a smaller scale, government censorship has also targeted many high school students. There are multiple cases where students are summoned for a hearing in front of a board because they posted their opinions online. My friend was telling me that one of her peers got a visit from local officials for merely expressing their views in Facebook Messenger which is an Instant Messaging platform! (Bruh the things they monitor.) Remember, the cases I am telling you about are the ones that have been reported. Living in a country where journalism is heavily regulated, many of these cases barely make it to the news. Just imagine the government being so insecure to the point they would gladly silence any TEENAGER who has opinions against them. This shows a weakness in governing, a lack of confidence in management and qualifies us as a mere visage of fake democracy shielding a much bigger issue of speech suppressions and political silencing.
Aside from censoring “political dissidents”, they also passed an unofficial act blocking all websites they deemed containing unhealthy content for society. This includes a lot of pornography sites such as Pornhub, XVideos,… Since I am already talking about censoring, might as well touch a little bit on this uncomfortable subject for many conservative Asians. The government claims that these sites promote rape, sexual assaults and domestic violence. However, a study conducted recently shows that rape cases actually decreases when porn becomes more readily available. In the Czech Republic, when pornography became legal after the fall of the Communist government, rape cases decreased by almost 40% in an 18 year period. Child sexual abuse is another despicable crime that also decreased by more than half after the legalization of porn. Closer to home in Asia, many countries including Japan, China and Hong Kong (territory) also saw a decrease in sex crimes after legalizing porn.
Okay, my VPN bandwidth is going to run out soon so I gotta close. It’s simply terrifying how we are living in the 21st century and yet many people around the world are still denied one of their most basic human rights: the freedom of speech. Frankly, I am scared as hell posting this article because I don’t want to be taken away and reeducated but this is something that has to change in the long run. If we want to live up to the nation that we claimed to be, it’s time to give our people their voices. Thank you for sticking with me until the end of this long read. To lighten the mood, here, as I promised, Tiny Hamster Eating Tiny Burritos.
For those of you in countries that censor Medium.com, I recommend getting the app on your phone or downloading a VPN (Hotspot Shield works for me) on your laptop. As of now, only the website is censored but that can change any time.
