Blog for University

According to Freedom House's annual report on the state of Internet freedom, in 2019 the situation in the country worsened: at the end of the year, Kazakhstan dropped from 46th place to 50th, sitting between Thailand and Russia. Before us in this ranking are Belarus (48th place), Azerbaijan (45th place), and Kyrgyzstan (25th place). The annual ranking evaluates the degree of freedom of print, broadcast, and online media according to the following indicators:  presence of barriers to Internet access (infrastructural and economic barriers to access, legal control and control of the ownership of Internet providers, as well as the independence of regulatory bodies; Kazakhstan scored 10 points out of 25 possible); content restrictions (site and content blocking, censorship; Kazakhstan scores 11 out of 35 possible); violation of user rights (surveillance of online activities, privacy, and consequences for online performances; Kazakhstan scored 11 points out of 40 possible). According to ...

In the early days of the pandemic, back in December 2019, medical professionals, professionals, and citizen journalists tried to raise the alarm in China. However, they were harassed by the government for reporting an outbreak of a then-unknown disease. By February 2020, 5,511 criminal cases had been opened against individuals who published information about the outbreak for "fabricating and deliberately disseminating false and harmful information." In one of the most egregious cases, journalist Zhang Zhan, who traveled to Wuhan in February 2020 to report on the COVID-19 outbreak, went missing in May 2020. It was later revealed that she was detained by the police on charges of "provoking riots" and sentenced to four years in prison. Many other countries, including Russia, have introduced repressive laws restricting the right to freedom of expression and silencing critics undercover or in the context of the pandemic. In Uzbekistan, laws on disseminating information t...

Internet censorship refers to the restriction of content in the virtual world. Internet censorship is most often enacted by a government, although internet service providers, technology firms, and smaller organizations (for example, a school) also enact censorship from time to time. Most often, if an internet service provider or technology company imparts censorship on a large scale they are doing so at the request of a government, or in accordance with a law or regulation [passed by the government]. Like censorship in general, internet censorship is intended to restrict what content or information is available online. It is the concept of limiting the flow of information in order to better protect the population or, in most cases, to protect the country’s interests. How does it work? A common method of internet censorship is  the blocking of IP addresses, the code of numbers that tell your computer where to actually go when you type in a domain name . Certain IP addresses can be b...

The Death of Socrates  by Jacques-Louis David in 1787. The origin of the term censor can be traced to the office of censor established in Rome in  4 43 BC . In Rome, as in the ancient Greek communities, the ideal of good governance included shaping the character of the people. Hence censorship was regarded as an honorable task. Perhaps the most famous case of censorship in ancient times is that of Socrates, sentenced to drink poison in 399 BC for his corruption of youth and his acknowledgment of unorthodox divinities. It is fair to assume that Socrates was not the first person to be severely punished for violating the moral and political code of his time. This ancient view of censorship, as a benevolent task in the best interest of the public, is still upheld in many countries, for example, China. This notion was advocated by the rulers of the Soviet Union (USSR), who were responsible for the longest lasting and most extensive censorship era of the 20th Century. Subsequently, ...