Behind the superficial glamor, what can we see? Or rather, what shouldn’t we see?
Media filtering is not a foreign concept in UAE. Besides placing heavy filtering rules on mainstream media, the social media landscape also face similar restriction.
Quoting Opennet’s country studies on UAE:
“The UAE government extensively blocks content that it considers objectionable for religious and cultural reasons, though not, apparently, material related to political dissent.
…
The UAE uses the SmartFilter filtering software to block nearly all pornography, gambling, religious conversion, and illegal drugs sites tested. The state also blocks access to all sites in the Israeli top-level domain. ONI’s testing of the UAE filtering regime also found blocking of sites on the Bahai faith, Middle East-oriented gay and lesbian issues, and English-language (though not Arabic-language) dating sites. While our results did not indicate that UAE uses its filtering system to block political sites, or news and media sources, we conclude that the state’s broad content controls unintentionally block information unrelated to UAE’s stated goals. The imprecision of the UAE filtering regime underscores the difficulty of extensive technical filtering of Internet content.”
With these media filtering in place, we see the emergence of brave young revolutionist who insist on voicing out what they believe and are passionate about through blogs. Among them, popular blogs such as Sex and Dubai have been blocked by the country’s board of censorship but was later unblocked due to overwhelming negative responses from the blogosphere and the public.
Quoting part of the latest posting:
“With promiscuous behaviour rampant and in plain view in Dubai, it’s a sad state of affairs when the Government would rather clean up the blogosphere instead of the city’s streets.”
So what role does social media play in granting media freedom in UAE?
