27 December 2019
Amid a global upsurge of
political protests and strikes, governments all over the world are shutting
down the internet in desperate bids to stem the tide of popular opposition.
According to preliminary data
from Access Now, 2019 likely saw more deliberate internet shutdowns than any
other previous year. More than a quarter of the world’s countries have shut
down the internet in the past four years.
At least 29 countries carried
out deliberate internet shutdowns in 2019, including India, Sri Lanka, Russia,
Sudan, Indonesia and Iraq.
Since the 2011 uprising in
Tunisia, dubbed a “WikiLeaks revolution” after the organization released
information on the corruption of the country’s ruling class, governments have
increasingly seen the internet as a threat, used by masses of people to
organize strikes, protests and demonstrations. In recent months, workers and
young people have used social media to organize mass demonstrations in Chile,
Lebanon, Iran, Iraq, Ecuador, Honduras, Haiti, Egypt and Algeria.
Last week, police authorities
in India shut down internet access in sections of New Delhi in response to a
wave of popular protests against the Modi government’s Hindu supremacist
citizenship law.
The Modi government has
responded to the demonstrations, which have mobilized broad sections of the
population across ethnic and sectarian lines, with a crackdown that has taken
the lives of dozens of people and the imposition of effective martial law in
broad sections of the country.
India has shut down the
internet more than 104 times this year, up from six times in 2014. The most
notorious of these actions is the ongoing internet shutdown in Jammu and
Kashmir, which has now lasted 135 days, the longest ever in any country
officially called a “democracy.”
The ongoing internet shutdown
in the Kashmir Valley now affects over seven million people, making the most
routine aspects of life—from communicating with distant family to applying for
a job—next to impossible.
The Kashmir shutdown was aimed
at quelling opposition to the illegal abrogation of the semi-autonomous status
of India’s lone Muslim-majority state. This constitutional coup has been enforced
by the deployment of tens of thousands of additional security forces and the
detention without charge of thousands.
In its latest annual report,
Access Now pointed out that governments routinely lie about their motives in
carrying out internet shutdowns. “[W]hen governments shut down the internet
citing ‘public safety,’ it is often evident to observers that, in reality,
authorities may fear protests and cut off access to the internet to limit
people’s ability to organize and express themselves, whether online or off.”
It adds, “When authorities
cite ‘fake news,’ rumors, or hate speech,” they are in fact most often seeking
to curtail protests and control elections. “Using these threats as scapegoats,
it appears that governments are leveraging shutdowns to shape the political
narrative and control the flow of information.”
While outright internet
shutoffs have remained rare in the major capitalist powers, many of the same
false arguments—like protecting “public safety” and suppressing “fake
news”—have been used to establish an apparatus of mass censorship by major
corporations acting on behalf of state intelligence agencies.
In 2017, Google announced a
series of changes to its search algorithm, internally dubbed “Project Owl,”
that drastically reduced search traffic to left-wing, antiwar and progressive
websites, in the guise of fighting “fake news.”
An investigation by the Wall
Street Journal this year confirmed the allegations made by the World
Socialist Web Site that Google operated internal blacklists of websites
that it sought to keep users from accessing in search results. Facebook and
Twitter followed Google’s actions, removing left-wing political accounts and
pages with millions of followers on the grounds that they were “inauthentic.”
The Trump administration’s
Federal Communications Commission has moved ahead with the gutting of net
neutrality, giving private corporations a legal cover to censor and tamper with
political speech at will.
Last year, Germany passed the
so-called NetzDG law, which threatens to fine internet companies that fail to
remove “illegal content,” turning, as Human Rights Watch wrote, “private
companies into overzealous censors.”
The Spanish government is
pushing through a law that allows the state to shut down at will digital
communications, internet infrastructure and apps without a court order. The law
follows a similar measure passed in France last year, spelling out massive
fines for disseminating “any allegation or implying of a fact without providing
verifiable information.”
The efforts to curtail the
distribution of critical political viewpoints go beyond even these draconian
censorship measures.
The British government has, at
the direction of the Trump administration and with the full support of the
Democratic Party, detained and isolated WikiLeaks publisher Julian Assange,
under conditions that UN human rights expert Nils Melzer has called tantamount
to torture.
The US has also imprisoned
whistleblower Chelsea Manning without charge. Both of these courageous individuals
are being persecuted for nothing other than telling the truth about criminal
wrongdoing by the US government.
All these measures represent
the vindictive actions of vastly unpopular capitalist governments that feel
besieged by a global upsurge of political opposition. This year, this latent
opposition has erupted in a series of mass demonstrations, which the Center for
Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) think tank dubbed an “Age of
Leaderless Revolution.”
CSIS analyst Samuel Brannen
wrote: “This awakening has been amplified by the digital information age with
more than half of the planet—4 billion people—now connected to the internet.
Facebook alone counts 2.4 billion active users. And among the most popular
topics for users is politics…. And the ways in which people can connect locally
and globally and draw comparisons and inspiration from events elsewhere is
unmatched. The ability for individuals to connect, to inspire and coordinate
millions onto the streets is without precedent.”
Capitalist governments all
over the world see this communications revolution, which holds immeasurable
promise for human society, as an existential threat. One recent survey
observed, “There is now a geopolitical operating premise that the ills of the
internet are potentially more consequential than its benefits.”
While the cliques of corrupt
capitalist oligarchs that dominate society all over the world, from Washington
to New Delhi to Madrid, recoil in fear at the growing interconnectedness of
society, the freedom of speech, including internet communication, is vital to
workers and young people seeking to express their grievances and organize
politically.
As workers and young people
enter into social struggle all over the world, they must take up the defense of
the freedom of expression and the freedom of political prisoners like Assange
and Manning as inseparable from the fight to defend their social rights,
abolish inequality, and overthrow the capitalist system.
Andre Damon
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