10 Worst Countries to be a Blogger

Committee to Protect Journalists

Note: all beacons of democracy. Totalitarianism in one form or another, Islam or communism - name your poison.

CPJ names the worst online oppressors. Booming online cultures in many Asian and Middle Eastern nations have led to aggressive government repression. Burma leads the dishonor roll.

New York, April 30, 2009—With a military government that severely restricts Internet access and imprisons people for years for posting critical material, Burma is the worst place in the world to be a blogger, the Committee to Protect Journalists says in a new report. CPJ’s “10 Worst Countries to be a Blogger” also identifies a number of countries in the Middle East and Asia where Internet penetration has blossomed and government repression has grown in response.

“Bloggers are at the vanguard of the information revolution and their numbers are expanding rapidly,” said CPJ Executive Director Joel Simon. “But governments are quickly learning how to turn technology against bloggers by censoring and filtering the Internet, restricting online access and mining personal data. When all else fails, the authorities simply jail a few bloggers to intimidate the rest of the online community into silence or self-censorship.”

Comments

[Ladywolfnl]

Pameal, you forgot about The Netherlands.......censuring bloggers is overthere very bad considering that they have a free speech law. Blog sites have companies working for them to "moderate" people that react or write articles.

About a year ago I started writing for WUZ, a Blog on the Telegraaf in the Netherlands. Time after time I was moderated (censured), because I was deemed to be too radical regarding “Our Islamic brothers”.
Then I got the idea to write THE story, completely self moderated, and finally I hit the front page of Netherlands’ most read newspaper. Below is my “moderated story”. Requesting a reaction, I received more then a thousand reactions to the article, and no government or other authority could redact the story.
My message: “Do you American people want to sink this low that no method of writing can be possible other than to do it the “European” way?

The Story: Moderated writing:

Today I would like to write a little essay: A bit of history explained as it was never explained before. I tried to write it in a way that no one could be offended, exactly as the Dutch and European authorities prefer to see it. I am very curious as to your reactions.
Today, July 23th, the day of the “person”, we all know in the higher hemisphere and who had a son, from the relation of a carpenter, not himself, and a young lady, later in history honored because of her son, I wish you good morning.
I read an article today in the newspaper about a thing that was used a lot by the employees of a man with a little black moustache about 60 years ago, and he had these iron things falling on our country in an attempt to turn us into a people that normally live in the jungle, where they are captured to work for us for free.
This man wanted to create a new Society, calling it The Third Community, because there had already been two previously. This man, with the little black moustache, was extremely annoyed with “certain” people, who didn’t really like the son of the guy in the higher hemisphere that I described in the first paragraph. These were the people that asked the Romans, who were taking care of their country in those days, to shorten the life cycle of this young man in a degrading natural way. Probably because his father was a carpenter, this son had to drag a wooden constructed object through the town, created from two wooden poles that were nailed together. Finally, he climbed up onto wooden poles.
Presently, we have a holiday to remember what he did then.
To come back to my story…..the thing that was found on the Dutch beach has the technical function that when it touches something it creates fire and power, with the ability to make some kind of damage. Because of that, the man with the little black moustache gave his employees free green colored clothing, because that was the handiest when they had to hide in the woods & when they came too close to the employees of another guy, who wasn’t too happy with the man with the little moustache. Therefore, he also hired employees to prevent that the man with the little black moustache, was able to drop his devices on certain European soil.
Well…that device, which might cause some fire and noise, was found on the beach, sucked out of the sea, with a machine not every one is very happy about, because a lot of people think that the sand in the sea should stay there because of environmental reasons and not be sucked up.
To come back on the managers of these little explosive devices, designed, developed and dropped by the employees of the man with the little black moustache…they wore black work clothes, were not really beloved, but so they could differ themselves from the common employees. Therefore they also had special emblems on their work clothes. This emblem was arranged of two times the 19th letter of the alphabet, which made it look like a double lightning.
Well…..these black clothed employees, they had a special task for the guy with the little black moustache, as he blamed some people that they were guilty of nailing that young guy on that wooden construction, to shorten his life cycle in a less natural way. They brought these people to special resorts that were arranged like vacation resorts, but really weren’t. Actually served another purpose. Just like the ovens that were there, but were not meant to bake bread. Next time I’ll explain some more about these resorts.
Well……..some people actually claimed to be friends of this son of that carpenter, who actually claimed to be another one’s son, and were very proud on him. There were about
Twelve of them. When the son stopped to exist, came back once after that, but that is another story, they started speaking about him. These stories were told over and over again and when some people thought that these stories made some sense, they started writing them down. The next step was that they made a book about it, so that all stories were put in a kind of reasonable order.
These friends, who in the meantime, were able to create a big group of followers, and choose a leader who built a nice cottage in the middle of Rome, a city in Italy, did not only have people agreeing about them…………..
There was a guy in a desert in some little village, who wrote a book, because he himself wanted to be the popular guy, and was also very into young girls. So, as he couldn’t write himself, he had a book written in which he pronounced that some things had to be done in a different way. You could call it a re-education book. Also this guy got some followers.
Therefore, throughout the centuries two different groups developed. A group of carpenters, and a group of non-carpenters. The carpenters are accustomed to work for their living and the group of non-carpenters are used to holding up their hands and making demands, don’t like to work for their living. Nowadays this gives a little problem, because those non-carpenters want to live in the land of the hard working carpenters, who however don’t want to keep carpeting for the not-carpenters.
Well…it’s getting even getting more complicated, but I’ll write about that a next time.!!!

[William Teach]

Not too be too conspiracy minded, but, I wonder if America will make it into at least the top 20 within the near future, considering the way Obama and Democrats go after people personally who they disagree politically.

Anyhow, it is interesting to note that 3 of those countries, Iran, Syria, and Cuba, are countries that Obama is courting heavily. And a 4th, China, is one where Sec of State Clinton said we would worry about their human rights violations.