March 12 Online Free Expression day – support Amnesty’s campaign

I do of course support it.

Last year, Reporters without Borders launched the first Online Free Expression day on March 12. This year, Amnesty Norway has launched a huge freedom of speech-campaign (only Norwegian) and they give you a list of 12 different things you can do on March 12 (several of them social media related, but not only) to support the campaign (one of them is to try the Chinese version of Google).

Neat.

Their main focus is four international bloggers, Chinese Hu Jia (who received The European Parliament’s Sakharov Prize for Freedom of Thought, I’ve written about him before), Vietnamese Truong Quoc Huy, Egyptian Karim Amer, and Tunisian Mohammed Abbou.

It looks like a good campaign, but why isn’t it international? Why is not Amnesty International doing this as well? Why isn’t there info in English about this? To spread campaigns like these, you need to cross (language)borders.

Reporters Without Borders has today issued it’s annual report, Enemies of the internet, and they say that:

“The 12 ‘Enemies of the Internet’ – Burma, China, Cuba, Egypt, Iran, North Korea, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Tunisia, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan and Vietnam – have all transformed their Internet into an Intranet in order to prevent their population from accessing ‘undesirable’ online information.”

Another interesting freedom of speech-campaign is circulating. Italian bloggers have run into deep problems. As part of the Italian government’s attempt to control the internet (since rest of Italian media is controlled), there is now a proposal to force Italian bloggers to be licensed by the state. You can support the campaign by sending an image of yourself with the text “Free Blogger”.

Speaking of campaigns, the most visible campaing out there these days is the Red Nose Day. Incredible, those red noses are all over the place, especially on Twitter. The man-turned-into-broadcaster Stephen Fry (with 292,868 followers!) is all dressed up, of course. The campaign that gets him on-board is lucky, with all his followers. The official campaing day is tomorrow, March 13, and the idea is to combine funny famous people and fundraising to fight powerty  in the UK and abroad.