TWEETING TO FREEDOM 6
Changing Legal and Regulatory Ecology Shaping the Internet” (Freedom, 2016).
In other projects, UNESCO has:
• supported the Press Council in Serbia to act against online copyright
infringements;
• set up training in online media ethics for press councils in Southeast
Europe and Turkey;
• engaged in discussions promoting a professional media in Libya;
• supported Yemeni media in promoting peace and dialogue, and rights to
free expression;
• championed freedom of expression with the Supreme Court of Justice of
Uruguay;
• opened a new Youth Information Centre in Al Mafraq; and
• met with media executives to support protection of journalists around the
world.
U.S. Support for Internet Activism
One nation taking the lead in such support is the United States, through its
Department of State. In America, the U.S. State Department has been doing
best to maintain open Internet communications around the world, so that its
activism can flourish as people around the world continue to press for greater
freedoms. However, until Hillary Clinton became Secretary of State, Internet
freedom was not a foreign policy issue. As the Brookings Institution noted in
2012, making it so has created challenges for the United States in its relations
with other nations:
Unsurprisingly, this is a hugely controversial foreign policy. It positions the United
States in direct opposition to important emerging powers like China as well as other
authoritarian states the United States more commonly treats as partners (such as
Vietnam and Bahrain). The policy also implies a call on all democratic societies to
join it in countering censorship and monitoring. However, even some very close
allies such as Australia and the United Kingdom have, at times, pursued inimical
policies—and even the United States has found it hard to live up to its own policy.
In many respects Congress and State were ahead of their time on this issue. The
Arab uprisings, which began at the end of 2010, revealed the extent of monitoring in
places like Libya (and the complicity of Western companies in providing surveillance
equipment). It also raised awareness among many authoritarian governments about
the power of connection technologies to facilitate revolt, fueling further demand for
monitoring and filtering technologies. (Hanson, 2012)
In 2010 and again in 2011, at George Washington University, former Secretary
of State Hillary Clinton delivered landmark addresses on Internet freedom and the
growing use of the Web and its social media as venues for worldwide activism.
