Type: Blog Post
By Elie Smith The Internet has been turned off for more than 80 days in parts of the West African country of Cameroon. And while this has garnered international condemnation, what most onlookers have not yet fully grasped is how the shutdown is related to long-simmering regional tensions within the ...

Type: Blog Post
By Lena Nitsche This post originally appeared on Deutsche Welle Akademie’s #Mediadev blog. According the 2015 Global Internet Report, increased mobile phone penetration isn’t just allowing hundreds of millions of people around the world access to the internet for the first time – users...

Type: Blog Post
So what will be the obstacles to getting just the next billion online? The question was debated at the annual U.S. Internet Governance Forum in Washington, and will be the subject of another round of debates at the Global Internet Governance Forum in Brazil later this year. There are  3 billion peo...

Type: Blog Post
Last year the editor of Abia Facts Newspaper, a small, local news platform in Nigeria was arrested at his home on charges of blackmail and criminal defamation. According to the state security officers who detained him, his crime was the reporting he had done on a local politician. More startling, ho...

Type: Blog Post
By Corinne Cath and Daniel O’Maley Sometimes a simple paragraph of computer code can help media developers fight online censorship. And this is important because such censorship is increasingly impeding the work of the media development community across the world. For many people from the medi...

Type: Blog Post
By Jeff Conroy-Krutz & Josephine Appiah-Nyamekye Sanny Media liberalization and the emergence of independent media outlets in many African countries over the past few decades has played a central role in democratization. Take, for example, the case of Senegal. Just thirty years ago, there was ju...

Type: Blog Post
By Andreas Reventlow Online surveillance, phishing, and content blocking is familiar territory for most journalists who uncover corruption, misuse of power, or who report on human rights abuses. Although their rights to freedom of expression and privacy online are challenged on a near-daily basis, h...

Type: Blog Post
By Daryna Sterina Twitter, Facebook, or YouTube: for many people, these platforms are an important gateway to news and information. And as access to the internet continues to grow exponentially in countries around the world, these platforms, and the internet more broadly, have become  vital tools i...

Type: Blog Post
As an Internet policy researcher I have closely followed the outcomes of the annual Internet Governance Forum (IGF), but this year was the first time I had the opportunity to participate in person when it was convened two weeks ago in Guadalajara, Mexico. I was there to coordinate CIMA’s new initi...

Type: Blog Post
By Xianhong Hu While the emerging digital environment offers new opportunities for journalists to investigate and report information in the public interest, it also poses particular challenges regarding privacy, access to information, source protection, freedom of expression and participation. In th...