[Then last week, the Kazakh
government published what it said was a “joint statement” with Facebook “to
cooperate closely on harmful content.” The Kazakhstan statement further said
Facebook, now known as Meta, had given Kazakh authorities “direct and exclusive
access to Facebook’s ‘Content Reporting System’ which can help the government
report content that may violate Facebook’s global content policy and the local
laws of Kazakhstan.”]
The messaging app Telegram,
especially popular in former Soviet republics, was blocked along with Facebook,
Instagram, YouTube and others on Wednesday over a new law demanding local
storage of data.
Social media users were furious,
and the government quickly backtracked. In a message posted, fittingly on
Telegram, the president’s spokesman said the actions of the country’s Internet
regulator were “ill thought out.” Access to social networks was soon restored.
But the incident reflects a trend
among Central Asian countries testing how far they can go to restrict Internet
freedoms. Their fight with Big Tech comes as Central Asian governments
increasingly balk at Western influence and instead take their cues from powers
such as China, which is investing heavily in the region.
[Key
takeaway from the Facebook Papers]
Central Asia is also following the
playbook of traditional ally Russia on Internet controls.
Like Moscow — as its own censorship
efforts are ramping up — the Central Asian countries are having to tread
carefully for fear of public backlash. Russia has routinely fined tech giants
for refusing to remove what the country has branded banned content, but
officials have so far been hesitant to fully blacklist popular networks such
as YouTube.
One such Russian effort, an
attempted block of Telegram, ultimately ended in embarrassment for the Kremlin.
The service continued to work, and prominent government officials were among
the people still using it. In March, Russia’s Internet regulator opted for a
slowdown of Twitter, but the stakes were lower because Twitter isn’t popular in
Russia.
[How
the founder of the Telegram messaging app stood up to the Kremlin — and won]
According to the Internet
freedom scores
from Freedom House, a pro-democracy think tank, both Uzbekistan and
Kazakhstan are considered “not free.” Two other Central Asian countries,
Tajikistan and Turkmenistan, are not ranked at all, but Freedom House pointed
out that both have used “wholesale blackouts” of news portals and social media
platforms to suppress potential anti-government chatter. Only Kyrgyzstan, among
the former Soviet republics in Central Asia, is ranked “partly free” for
Internet openness.
“The rules of the game are largely
set by Moscow,” said Arkady Dubnov, a political analyst and expert on Central
Asia.
“The goals are also common: to
prevent the existing vertical of power from being shaken, which, as the Russian
leadership believes, can be achieved mainly among young people through the
extremely popular social networks and messengers,” he added.
In September, Apple and Google
removed an opposition voting app from their online stores in Russia, just as
balloting began in the parliamentary election.
The app, built by associates of
jailed opposition leader Alexei Navalny, was intended to help Russian voters opposed
to President Vladimir Putin cast ballots in a way that would prevent splitting
opposition support and handing victory to Putin. But Roskomnadzor, the Russian
censorship agency, accused Apple and Google of meddling in Russia’s political
affairs by allowing voters to download the app and demanded that it be removed
from their online stores
“Unfortunately, we are between two
Big Brothers,” said Ruslan Dairbekov, director of the Digital Rights Center in
Almaty, Kazakhstan.
“From one brother, China, there is
the export of technologies, like digital surveillance tools. And from the other
brother, Russia, which is a big, huge actor in our region, there is the export
of legal approaches. It’s like a model.”
More than 10,000 people have signed
a petition that said Kazakhstan’s law “would damage Kazakhstan’s international
reputation and undermine the country’s sociopolitical development.”
Then last week, the Kazakh
government published what it said was a “joint statement” with Facebook “to
cooperate closely on harmful content.” The Kazakhstan statement further said
Facebook, now known as Meta, had given Kazakh authorities “direct and exclusive
access to Facebook’s ‘Content Reporting System’ which can help the government
report content that may violate Facebook’s global content policy and the local
laws of Kazakhstan.”
But that statement was apparently
released independent of Facebook. Meta spokesman Ben McConaghy said in an email
that the company has “a dedicated online channel for governments around the
world to report content to us that they believe violates local law.”
“We follow a consistent global
process to assess individual requests — independent from any
government — in line with Facebook’s policies, local laws and international
human rights standards,” he added. “This process is the same in Kazakhstan as
it is for other countries around the world.”
Dairbekov said the public’s
negative reaction to the bill as well as the government hailing its deal with
Facebook — confusion notwithstanding — could doom the draft law.
In Uzbekistan, President Shavkat
Mirziyoyev in January approved legislation that mandated tech companies store
Uzbek users’ personal data in the country.
That prompted the country’s
Internet regulator to block Telegram last week. The law was a copycat from
Russia, which first used it as a basis for fining Google more than $40,000 in
July.
Though Uzbekistan previously
restricted access to Skype, Twitter, TikTok and Russian social media VKontakte,
blocking those sites didn’t spark the same outcry as the interruption to
Telegram’s service. In a country of about 34 million, Telegram is used by 18
million people, according to Madina Tursonova, a media lawyer.
Mirziyoyev’s press secretary said
in a statement on Telegram that the head of Uzbekistan’s Internet regulator was
fired for “erroneous and uncoordinated actions.”
But while Uzbekistan appeared to
enter an era of more openness in society after the death of totalitarian leader
Islam Karimov in 2016, Tursonova said that “the situation with freedom of
speech and media in Uzbekistan is assessed as difficult.”
“These actions by the authorities
have raised doubts about the truthfulness of the government and presidential
statements that the Internet and social networks will not be blocked,” she
added.
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