Threatened Voices' home page

Global Voices Advocacy has launched a new tool to track and map oppression of voices online. Threatened Voices, as the initiative is called, launched on November 3 and provides detailed information on bloggers and social media users who have been arrested or otherwise threatened for their online activities.

In a press release, founder Sami Ben Gharbia stated:

As activists and ordinary citizens have increasingly made use of the internet to express their opinions and connect with others, many governments have also increased surveillance, filtering, legal actions and harassment. The harshest consequence for many has been the politically motivated arrest of bloggers and online writers for their online and/or offline activities, in some tragic cases even leading to death. Online journalists and bloggers now represent 45% of all media workers in prison worldwide.

According to the site, there are currently 191 “threatened voices” around the world.

[disclaimer: I'm involved in editing the site]

Last month, award-winning Cuban blogger Yoani Sanchez was once again denied permission to leave the island, this time to receive the Maria Moors Cabot award for journalism. Less than three weeks later, Sanchez was arrested along with fellow blogger Orlando Luis Pardo as they neared an anti-violence demonstration.

Reuters reports that Sanchez and Pardo were both release shortly afterward, Sanchez with minor injuries, and that another blogger, Claudio Cadelo, was separately arrested and released. Sanchez has written about the incident (in Spanish) on her blog, Generacion Y. The blog Uncommon Sense has more information in English.

Update: Global Voices has translated a number of posts related to the incident. According to Yoani Sanchez and Claudia Cadelo, both bloggers were beaten during their detention.

Tal Pavel at Global Voices has written an analyis of microblogging in the Middle East:

“The massive, sustained protests in Iran this past month against the regime‚Äôs apparent falsification of the presidential election results was enabled by widespread employment of new communication technologies. “

And

“Women‚Äôs advocacy groups make good use of Twitter: for example, the Egyptian group ‚ÄòAll of Us are Laila’ has fought against the inequality in women‚Äôs daily lives, in Egypt and the Arab world in general, for the last three years. So does Queen Rania of Jordan, who writes about diverse subjects on an almost daily basis, to a readership of about 125,000.”

Read The Power of 140 Characters: Twitter in the Middle East.