Martin Moore, Senior Research Fellow at King's College London, asks readers to imagine if on June 23 this year British citizens looking at google.co.uk found the words '#VoteIn' towards the bottom of the search page. Moore claims that most of us still think of Google...

This paper offers examples of soft censorship in 30 countries and summarises in-depth soft censorship reports on four countries - Hungary, Malaysia, Mexico, and Serbia. Executive summary Soft Censorship is growing alarmingly as a global phenomenon. Official “soft censorship” (or “indirect government censorship”) describes an...

With the Greens now in control of the Australian Senate, is the Gillard Government's plans for Internet censorship dead?

This inquiry is the first major review of the National Classification Scheme since it was introduced over 15 years ago. The inquiry presented the committee with an opportunity to examine a range of important issues relating to the National Classification Scheme and to assess the...

Australia's decision to implement Internet censorship using technological means creates a natural experiment: the first Western democracy to mandate filtering legislatively, and to retrofit it to a decentralized network architecture. But are the proposed restrictions legitimate? The new restraints derive from the Labor Party's pro-filtering...

This paper outlines the current debate over the Commonwealth Government's filtering scheme for internet content and the practice of governments in other countries. It concludes: 'With the limited exceptions of Germany and Italy, mandatory ISP level filtering is not a feature of any of the...

This paper outlines the current debate over the Commonwealth Government's filtering scheme for internet content and the practice of governments in other countries. It concludes: 'With the limited exceptions of Germany and Italy, mandatory ISP level filtering is not a feature of any of the...

This is the 2008 edition of the Alliance's annual report into the state of press freedom in Australia, and reports some promising developments over the past twelve months.

New tighter classification rules for publications, films and computer games are before parliament. The government says increased censorship is needed to counter terrorism and federal Labor has given its broad support, but the Australian Press Council says the new laws are dangerous.

DCITA has been working with the Australian Library and Information Association with the aim of ensuring the filtering needs of libraries are adequately addressed. The survey, conducted in May of this year, is the third to have been conducted by the sssociation since 2002. The...

Malalai Joya is described by the BBC as the most famous woman in Afghanistan and at 28 years of age is the youngest member of the Afghani Parliament. Joya is a controversial figure, reviled by many Afghani fundamentalists yet viewed by others as a freedom...

Media commentators, satirists, artists and activists should be safe from controversial sedition laws, even if their ideas are unpopular and confronting, as long as they don't urge the use of violence, under changes to federal law proposed by the Australian Law Reform Commission (ALRC).

Reflecting on the recent decision to ban two Islamist books, Norm Abjorensen is critical of how censorship has been used in the war on terror to pursue political rather than security goals. In July 2006 the Australian Government took the unusual step of banning two...

The Minister, the ARC and rejected grants, Gideon Haigh looks at the new censorship of research funding. Article published in The Monthly