Wrote. Commented out. To jail.

I came across on the Internet a rather sad, but still interesting statistics. It turns out that in recent years the number of criminal prosecutions for network activities, in particular for blogging, has greatly increased in the world. For the majority of habra-people, for sure, the Terentyev’s case , which caused a rather strong resonance in the RU- net, will not be news .
Now, let’s take a look at the global statistics on persecution of public comments on blogs and comments on them.


According to WIAP(World Information Access Project at the University of Washington), whose goal is to collect, analyze and publish the most significant global trends, over the past 5 years (from 2003 to 2008), the number of punishments for statements that are objectionable to the authorities or certain social groups has increased several times. Using a search on sites, project participants find information about the arrest of a blogger, investigate the reasons for the arrest and group the data. For example, it was revealed that the majority of arrested bloggers are men aged 21 to 45 years, and the most dangerous countries for dissatisfied public online statements for this period are Egypt, China and Iran.



On the diagram, which I, as I could, tried to localize for clarity (an enlarged version is available by click), the dynamics of the persecution of bloggers by year and country is clearly visible. As can be seen from the data, in addition to countries with censorship at the state level. apparatus, among the countries appears Russia, which in article 29 of article 2 of the chapter of the Constitution in the first and fifth paragraphs states the following:
1. Everyone is guaranteed freedom of thought and speech.
5. Guaranteed freedom of the media. Censorship is prohibited.


Of course, on a country-wide scale, these figures (the number of arrests) look insignificant, but the dynamics of their growth make us nevertheless think about the causes and effects. By the way, this diagram captures only independent bloggers who are not associated with the media, i.e. people expressing a personal opinion, not relying on the authority of any publication.

According to the WIAP, usually the rise in arrests is caused by political instability. In Egypt, for example, out of 14 arrests, 9 were in 2007, the year of the election. At the same time, arrest does not always mean long years in prison. Sometimes detainees are released after a few hours, explaining the essence of the claims and warning them for the future (or fined), although there are known cases of up to 8 years of conviction for calls to overthrow the existing regime and form a discussion group on this issue (China).

In general, I would just like to say: be careful in expressing your thoughts. The Internet has long been unsafe.

PS honestly, this is my first post on Habré. If something is wrong - please explain.