Online Social Networking Disruptions in Egypt, Morocco

Over at Global Voices Advocacy, Ramy Raoof draws attention to the recent disruption in Skype connectivity for Egyptians using USB modems. According to an exchange Raoof had with Vodaphone, a large internet service provider in Egypt, the government’s National Telecommunications Regulatory Authority (NTRA) decided to block Skype for USB modem users after three telecommunication companies complained about revenue losses incurred from customers using Skype’s free service. Egyptian law mandates that all international calls be filtered through majority state-owned Telecom Egypt — one of the companies reporting lower-then-anticipated earnings — and the NTRA noted that it is only targeting what it considers illegal voice traffic on mobile Internet, not fixed traffic. “This is due to the fact it is against the law since it bypasses the legal gateway,” said an NTRA official.

Elsewhere, a Moroccan Facebook group advocating for the separation of religion and education was administratively deleted from the website without warning. Official inquiries by Kacem El Ghazzali, a Moroccan activist and founder of the group, to ascertain the reason for the shut-down went unanswered. Alluding to previous examples of inconsistent, suspicious, and unexplained Terms of Service (TOS) enforcement by Facebook officials, Jillian York from Harvard’s Berkman Center for Internet and Society suspects the Moroccan government may have pressured Facebook into removing the group from its server. “It seems that Facebook is now policing speech, possibly at the behest of a foreign government.” York also penned a separate piece commenting on an Issandr El Amrani post last week exploring the role of Facebook in Middle Eastern politics (covered here). Though agreeing that Facebook is certainly being used for political purposes, she contends that “The downfall, of course, is Facebook itself, which has garnered a reputation for selectively enforcing its own TOS.”