Freedom of Press and Communication
Speech, the press and other forms of communicative media, including television and radio broadcasting and Internet reception, are actively censored by the government to prevent political dissident and anything deemed, by the government, to be offensive to the Arab culture or Islamic morality.
In 2008, a prominent Saudi blogger and reformist Fouad al-Farhan was jailed for posting comments online that were critical of Saudi business, religious and media figures, signifying a move by the government to step up its censorship polices of the Internet within its borders. He was released on April 26, 2008.
Online social media has increasingly come under government scrutiny for dealing with the "forbidden" topics. In 2010 a Saudi man was fined and given jail time for his sexually suggestive YouTube video production. That same year another man was also jailed and ordered to pay a fine for boasting about his sex life on television .
D+Z, a magazine focused on development, reports that hundreds were arrested in order to limit freedom of expression. Many of these individuals were held without trial and in secret. The torture of these prisoners was also found to be prevalent.
Read more about this topic: Human Rights In Saudi Arabia
Famous quotes containing the words freedom of, freedom and/or press:
“In the life of the human spirit, words are action, much more so than many of us may realize who live in countries where freedom of expression is taken for granted. The leaders of totalitarian nations understand this very well. The proof is that words are precisely the action for which dissidents in those countries are being persecuted.”
—Jimmy Carter (James Earl Carter, Jr.)
“All of women’s aspirations—whether for education, work, or any form of self-determination—ultimately rest on their ability to decide whether and when to bear children. For this reason, reproductive freedom has always been the most popular item in each of the successive feminist agendas—and the most heavily assaulted target of each backlash.”
—Susan Faludi (20th century)
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)