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:
“Mine eye and heart are at a mortal war,
How to divide the conquest of thy sight;
Mine eye my heart thy picture’s sight would bar,
My heart mine eye the freedom of that right.”
—William Shakespeare (1564–1616)
“What we want is not freedom but its appearances. It is for these simulacra that man has always striven. And since freedom, as has been said, is no more than a sensation, what difference is there between being free and believing ourselves free?”
—E.M. Cioran (b. 1911)
“While it may not heighten our sympathy, wit widens our horizons by its flashes, revealing remote hidden affiliations and drawing laughter from far afield; humor, in contrast, strikes up fellow feeling, and though it does not leap so much across time and space, enriches our insight into the universal in familiar things, lending it a local habitation and a name.”
—Marie Collins Swabey. Comic Laughter, ch. 5, Yale University Press (1961)