Nearly half the 1,000 respondents in the research by the digital security firm Norton had experienced some form of abuse or harassment online. Among women under 30, the incidence was 76%.
Harassment ranged from unwanted contact, trolling, and cyberbullying to sexual harassment and threats of rape and death. Women under 30 were overrepresented in every category.
One in seven – and one in four women aged under 30 – had received general threats of physical violence. Almost one in ten women under 30 had experienced revenge porn and/or “sextortion”.
Bangladeshi authorities should immediately investigate the murder today of a secular blogger who was hacked to death by six assailants with sharp weapons in his home in the capital, Dhaka, the Committee to Protect Journalists said today. The blogger, who is known as Niloy Neel, frequently criticized religious extremism in the Muslim majority country and advocated for minority rights and secular ideas, according to news reports. Neel is the fourth blogger to be hacked to death in Bangladesh in six months.
“How many more bloggers must be murdered before the government of Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina acts decisively to stem the violence and impunity?” said CPJ Asia Program Research Associate Sumit Galhotra. “We call on the Hasina government to take urgent steps to bring the perpetrators of this barbaric murder to justice and protect all journalists under threat.”
Source: cpj.org
By analyzing the daily documented killings by the government in the Syrian civil war in conjunction with available data on country-wide Internet outages between March 2011 and September 2013, Gohdes found that state violence spiked just before and during periods where connectivity was shut down. She argues that the regime has used the shutdowns as a tactical advantage in the midst of conflict with opposition groups, breaking down opposition communications networks to weaken their ability to respond effectively to attacks.
While these findings draw only from the Syrian conflict, they indicate that Internet outages have a human rights impact that exceeds the deprivation of speech: they can be used to aid state violence.
Source: eff.org