State-sponsored censorship has varied greatly throughout history—whether used as a means of protecting society from moral corruption or to protect a regime’s status quo. It has served as a powerful tool to limit the freedom of speech and expression. In British India, significant bans were imposed by the government through legislative measures like the Indian (Press) Emergency Act 1931 among others, as an effort to curtail the active role of the press in the freedom movement. Therefore, in order to be established as individual or fundamental rights, freedom of speech and expression had a very long history that is closely intertwined with social movements in South Asia.
In recent years, the use of the internet has added new meaning to social movements—opening doors for seamless flow of information through blogs, emails, social networking platforms, and text messages. These modern tools collectively constitute a new public square to express and exchange ideas. While transnational migration of ideas can easily be found through the travels of the Gandhian ‘satyagraha’ to the West, resulting in some instances of recruitment of missionaries returning from India to the civil rights movement of the sixties; the use of the internet has expedited the movement of ideas faster than ever before. Perhaps it is not inconceivable that ideas often end up hatching in cyberspace rather than migrating through borders or through human carriers. This makes the internet an indispensable medium through which people are able to share ideas and express themselves. This is best exemplified by the ‘Arab Spring,’—illustrating that the internet is increasingly being used as a channel for mobilizing social movement activities, especially those concerning democracy and human rights. The internet is now probably one of the first and fastest medium for activists to mobilize and advocate for political, social, and economic reform.
These new forms of media also pose potential legal, economic, and security challenges for governments and are, therefore, creating new targets for government-imposed censorship. Some restrictions can be legitimate like where governments limit speech that could pose grave security concerns or speech related to a significant public interest, such as the need to regulate websites or activities related to child pornography or pedophilia. Issues of such gravity require state scrutiny—although any such regulation should aim to strike a balance between privacy and freedom of expression. In authoritarian states, the justification for curtailing freedom of expression in new media, like the internet, slide heavily on the side of unbridled regulation. Fearing the untested power of new technologies, authoritarian states have developed various methods to counter or regulate internet freedom. For example, in China, the internet is heavily regulated and citizens are denied access to websites and information that considered inappropriate or harmful. Iran has also attracted significant protests and criticism in the past due to its decision for banning discussions in the media of any topics that threatens the status quo of the regime. Thus, while freedom of speech and expression in the age of internet and beyond may seem limitless given the ease with which information can be disseminated, censorship still occurs in one form or another in most countries in the world.
In Bangladesh, a nation which is both post-colonial and post-authoritarian, the use of the internet is a recent development, along with other development initiatives there. However, Bangladesh is a very old site for contestation, especially where social movements and struggles for democracy and rights are concerned. Its first political rupture was from India in 1947, followed by its secession from Pakistan within 25 years in 1971. Its largely military-ruled history has witnessed governments curtailing press activities, to the point of persecuting journalists.
Internet As A Sight For Contestation And Freedom Of Expression In Bangladesh
By Cynthia Farid