(CNSNews.com) – An Australian group campaigning against government Internet filtering proposals has been ordered by the government to remove a link to a U.S.-hosted Web site showing graphic pictures of aborted babies. Electronic Frontiers Australia (EFA) says the government order to remove a link to a page on the AbortionTV Web site reinforces its concerns that Internet filtering will lead to the blocking of political content. But some supporters of the government proposals, which aim to prevent access to child pornography sites, view the censorship argument as a smokescreen and part of a misinformation campaign.

The Chinese authorities continue to be among the world’s most repressive when it comes to press freedom. What may come as a surprise, however, is the growing commercialization of censorship in the country, where the Chinese Communist Party's (CCP) is creating a 21st century media model that relies on the market to muzzle free expression. The irony is that the dominant Western narrative on China has it that market-oriented development would inevitably lead to liberalization, including, presumably, for the news media. This narrative’s assumptions look increasingly flawed, however. Instead, the Chinese authorities are working out a recipe for CCP media values—“watch what you can watch, and don't watch what you cannot watch" as a Chinese foreign ministry spokesperson recently explained—to trump genuine market values of open competition, transparency, and rule of law.

AMMAN, Jordan--Even by the extremes of the Middle East, Jordan is an unusual place. Unlike its neighbors to the south and east, it enjoys no vast oil wealth. It shares the region's longest border with Israel, about 150 miles, and signed a peace treaty with its neighbor in 1994. Although the northern third of the country benefits from a Mediterranean climate, the rest is largely desert. That leaves outsourcing and other businesses as one obvious bright spot, and Jordan is hoping to enlist computer technology and the Internet to fight an unemployment rate that probably hovers around 30 percent, thanks in part to the hundreds of thousands of Iraqi and Palestinian refugees the country has taken in. Embracing the Internet also means trying to reconcile its rollicking, unruly culture of free expression with a population that's about 92 percent Muslim and a society that's far from as strict as neighboring Saudi Arabia -- but nevertheless conservative enough to prompt most women to follow the dictates of the hijab by wearing head scarves.

May 3, 2009 — Last year, in advance of World Press Freedom Day, the Center for International Media Assistance (CIMA), an initiative of the National Endowment for Democracy (NED), convened a media conference in collaboration with US Congressional Caucus for the Freedom of the Press. The event brought experts to the US capital to discuss challenges and opportunities to secure press freedom through the new media in this new world order. The discussions focused mainly on the role Internet plays in empowering citizens to freely express views and effectively participate in democratic process, in addition to how authoritarian regimes censor citizens’ access to information by blocking Internet contents and monitoring its usage.