Western companies face withering criticism on how they exit authoritarian states
International corporations from liberal democracies face a choice when operating in authoritarian countries. Comply with government surveillance and censorship, or leave the country. This decision has...
View ArticleChina ordered a Uyghur journalist extradited to Xinjiang. His wife has taken...
Every day is a protest for Buzainuer Wubuli, 28, and her three young children. Her husband, Idris Hasan (Yidiresi Aishan), is a journalist, computer engineer and activist. He is one of the thousands...
View ArticleThe race to save everything as war threatens the internet in Ukraine and Russia
If the first casualty of war is the truth, its first fatality may soon be the internet. A frantic international effort is underway to preserve Ukraine’s digital history and Russia’s media archive....
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In Beirut, taxi app Bolt spreads despair in an already devastated economy
“First it was Uber and Careem, now it's Bolt, tomorrow it will be something else,” says the stoic Walid. After he’s done with his day job, he puts in several more hours ferrying people to and from the...
View ArticleIs Indonesia criminalizing journalism?
New regulations and revisions introduced in Indonesia this summer will likely have a devastating impact on freedom of expression for all Indonesians, experts say, with the country’s journalists facing...
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Stakes are momentous for the next battles for control of the global internet
It’s been an excruciatingly long three weeks for those gathered in Bucharest, Romania for the International Telecommunications Union’s quadrennial come together. At the I.T.U. Plenipotentiary...
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Mandatory SIM card registration forces users to surrender personal data
Every year, the GSMA, a mobile network and cell phone industry association, publishes a sobering report. It charts the number of countries worldwide that have implemented mandatory prepaid SIM card...
View ArticleChina is gaining control of the world’s data as the US stands by
There came a point ten years ago when Aynne Kokas realized that she could no longer keep WeChat on her personal phone. She had begun research on what would eventually become her new book, “Trafficking...
View ArticleWhat a law designed to protect the internet has to do with abortion
The United States Supreme Court unleashed a political earthquake when it overturned Roe v. Wade in June 2022, reversing nearly fifty years of precedent establishing a constitutional right to abortion....
View ArticleNigeria plunges into a cash crisis on the eve of presidential elections
Just past noon on Friday, February 17, George Chinedu, a trader, was in a lengthy queue in front of Guaranty Trust Bank in Palmgrove, a suburb of Lagos. With the sun beating down on them, a crowd of...
View ArticleEurope’s borders are a surveillance testing ground. The AI Act could change that
The European Union is currently drafting a new omnibus framework — the first of its kind in the world — to regulate the use of artificial intelligence for border control. The Artificial Intelligence...
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Egypt jails its critics as the economy crumbles
A year into Egyptian President Abdel Fattah El-Sisi’s time in office, the former armed forces chief sailed in a yacht up the newly expanded Suez Canal. The $8 billion project, slated to take three...
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People power pushes back ‘Putin’s law’ in Georgia
Last week, Tbilisi’s streets descended into anarchy. Thick gray plumes of tear gas twisted toward the sky outside the parliament building on the main thoroughfare of Rustaveli Avenue. Riot police...
View ArticleNigeria’s digital vote-counting failure decimated public trust in elections
After a long day of voting, the exercise came to an end at a polling unit in Gwarinpa, an estate in Nigeria’s capital city, Abuja, at 2:30 p.m. Or so voters thought. Electoral officers began to tally...
View ArticleTexas lawmakers want to erase abortion from the internet
Since the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade, state legislators across the country have introduced laws implicating the doctors who perform the procedure, reproductive health clinics,...
View ArticleWhy India’s defamation laws are hurting its democracy
On April 3, Rahul Gandhi, a son, grandson and great-grandson of former Indian prime ministers, showed up in Surat, an industrial city in the Indian state of Gujarat, to appeal his conviction for...
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The demolition of dissent in India
On April 1, a Saturday morning, a crowd gathered on a Delhi sidewalk as if before a piece of street theater. The police were there in large numbers. And then the stars showed up — a trio of yellow...
View ArticleVietnam censors Netflix shows for ‘hurting the feelings of the people’
Ordinary Vietnamese people have become increasingly fragile, prone to getting offended at the smallest slight against national pride. Or so the authorities claim. Nowhere is this narrative more...
View ArticleUtah’s online porn law puts teens’ digital rights at risk
A new Utah law intended to keep kids from accessing pornography and other kinds of “harmful material” online is raising critical questions about the First Amendment rights of young people and the...
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Imran Khan is fighting Pakistan’s army with Twitter
“This is the era of social media. You cannot suppress the truth,” said former Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan in a Twitter Space session attended by more than 200,000 users on May 22. “Will you...
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How an EU-funded agency is working to keep migrants from reaching Europe
How an EU-funded agency is working to keep migrants from reaching Europe When he saw the Tunisian coast guard coming, Fabrice Ngo knew he wouldn’t make it to Italy that day. The young Cameroonian had...
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Indian wrestlers say ‘me too’ but the BJP is not listening
On the morning of May 28, the Delhi police manhandled a group of high-profile Indian wrestlers, including Olympic medalists, into a police bus. Images of the athletes — the most prominent of whom were...
View ArticleShould countries build their own AIs?
The generative AI revolution is here, and it is expected to increase global GDP by 7% in the next decade. Right now, those profits will mostly be swept up by a handful of private companies dominating...
View ArticleLithuania goes after bots following spikes in pro-Russian propaganda
Big surges in international attention are unusual for LRT, the public media broadcaster in Lithuania. But last June, that changed suddenly when it began reporting on Lithuania’s decision to enforce EU...
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Inside New Mexico’s struggle to protect kids from abuse
Ivy Woodward can turn her emotions off like a water faucet. It served her well when she worked in child protective services in Hobbs, a small oil town in southeastern New Mexico. She looks at it this...
View ArticleMigrants take the US to court over its glitchy asylum app
It has been more than half a century since U.S. immigration laws were written to enshrine the right to apply for asylum at any port of entry to the country. But a new lawsuit argues that today, the...
View ArticleSenegal is stifling its democracy in the dark
On July 31, after jailing opposition leader Ousmane Sonko and dissolving the political party that he leads, Senegal’s government ordered a nationwide mobile internet shutdown. The communications...
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For Arab dissidents, the walls are closing in
In November 2022, Sherif Osman was having lunch with his fiancee, his sister and other family members at a glittering upscale restaurant in Dubai. A former military officer in Egypt and now a U.S....
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Indian journalists are being treated like terrorists for doing their jobs
When India hosted the G20 summit last month, it presented itself as the “mother of democracy” to the parade of leaders and delegations from the world’s largest economies. But at home, when the world...
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Year in review: Digitization and the apparatus of control
About a year ago, it became popular for Western media commentators to sound the death knell for the social web. Elon Musk “sunk in” as the new owner of Twitter, and the mainstream social media...
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