Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Filfan.com joins Egypt’s Blocked sites : Even Showbiz is not spared

Earlier Tuesday , many Egyptians were shocked to know that popular entertainment and showbiz website “Filfan.com” has been blocked in Egypt joining a long list of blocked websites that has been getting longer since May 2017.

Interestingly Filfan.com is owned and ran by digital publishing Sarmady , which is a Vodafone subsidiary.
Yes, Filfan.com is officially Egypt’s first website to be owned by a major ISP to be blocked in that wave.
There is no official explanation on why the famous non-political website has been blocked and Sarmday has not issued anything so far.

A better guess that Vodafone is working to lift that sudden block that hit its popular website.
People are referring to a small news that it published on Monday abut how Egyptian singer Amal Maher allegedly reported the head of General Sports Authority  in Saudi Arabia Turki al-Sheikh to the police in Cairo for assaulting her in front of her house in Maadi earlier that day. 
Allegedly al-Sheikh was Maher’s ex-fiancé an they had some sort of fight.
Turki Al-Sheikh
Turki Al-Sheikh 
The Saudi official who is officially Crown Prince Mohamed Bin Salman “MBS” ‘s special adviser for sports issues as well childhood friend has been causing controversy in Egypt for the past two weeks mostly in the world of sports.
Earlier Tuesday , the famous singer issued a statement denying that she had a fight with him or that he had assaulted.
Few hours later, Filfan.com was completely blocked.
To be honest I am completely amazed because we are speaking about a new low in censorship.
In the past , most of the blocked websites were blocked because of politics. Most of the blocked websites presented content critical to the current regime but FilFan.com is blocked because Amal Maher-Turki al-Sheikh’s feud that did not happen !?

This is censorship for the sake of foreign officials !!!

Speaking about online censorship and football in Egypt, last week popular Cairo-based Koorabia announced that it was going to close down as it was blocked for the second time for no official or even logic reason. Koorabia is a football news website and nobody understands why it would be blocked in the country like that.

The Huffington Post’s main website in the United States is also blocked now Egypt as well.

Last week , the telecommunications committee in Egypt’s House of Representatives passed 21 articles out of 45 articles in the new counter e-crimes bill drafted by the government. Those articles legalize the ban and censorship of websites inside Egypt for the sake of national security.
“The National security concept” in the bill includes “all what is related to the independence , stability and security of nation as well what is related to presidency, National Defense council , National security council , Egyptian armed forces and the ministries of defense and military production as well ministry of interior.
The Egyptian General intelligence service and military intelligence as well The Administrative Control Authority are also under the umbrella of that concept of National security.

If you want to prove that there is a true freedom of expression in your country to the world then you should not censor websites online like that.
It is better to let people vent online than to vent offline.
Some people do not learn from history for sure. 

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