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:
“Freedom of the press is essential to the preservation of a democracy; but there is a difference between freedom and license. Editorialists who tell downright lies in order to advance their own agendas do more to discredit the press than all the censors in the world.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“Freedom of the press is essential to the preservation of a democracy; but there is a difference between freedom and license. Editorialists who tell downright lies in order to advance their own agendas do more to discredit the press than all the censors in the world.”
—Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)