Global Information Society Watch (GISWatch) is a space for collaborative monitoring of implementation of international (and national) commitments made by governments towards the creation of an inclusive information society.
It focuses on monitoring progress made towards implementing the World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) action agenda and other international and national commitments related to information and communications. It also provides analytical overviews of institutions involved in implementation. GISWatch aims to make governments and international organisations accountable for meeting the commitments they make through contributing to building a strong and sustainable global civil society policy advocacy network.
We're publishing some of editions and write-ups that are specific to gender and sexuality from GISWatch here.
Freedom of expression and opinion online is increasingly criminalised with the aid of penal and internet-specific legislation. With this report, we hope to bring to light the problematic trends in the use of laws against freedom of expression in online spaces in Asia.
In this special edition of GISWatch, Unshackling Expression, APC brings together analysis on the crim-inalisation of online expression from six Asian states: Cambodia, India, Malaysia, Myanmar, Pakistan and Thai-land.
Introduction. In spite of the fact that economic, social and cultural rights (ESCRs) in Armenia are guaranteed by the Armenian constitution 1 as well as by the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (ICESCR), which Armenia ratified in June 1993.
Telling our stories online
When it comes to the discussion of feminism in Russian society, some people speak about “natural feminism”: they say women will not be content with just staying at home with kids or not getting an education.
The internet as a tool for advocacy
The internet is increasingly used to monitor and advocate for the right to health. The Initiative for Social and Economic Rights (ISER) recruited volunteers from the community and trained them on the legal and policy framework on the right to health.
The organisation also provided them with smartphones and trained them on the effective use of social media. They serve as Community Health Advocates (CHAs), monitoring the realisation of the right to health in their communities.
The 47 country reports gathered in 2016 illustrate the link between the internet and economic, social and cultural rights (ESCRs). Some of the topics will be familiar to information and communications technology for development (ICT4D) activists: the right to health, education and culture; the socioeconomic empowerment of women using the internet; the inclusion of rural and indigenous communities in the information society; and the use of ICT to combat the marginalisation of local languages. Others deal with relatively new areas of exploration, such as using 3D printing technology to preserve cultural heritage, creating participatory community networks to capture an “inventory of things” that enables socioeconomic rights, crowdfunding to realise rights, or the negative impact of algorithms on calculating social benefits.
“For many, sexuality goes to the heart of who we are as human beings,” writes Alan Finlay, the editor of the 2015 Global information society watch (GISWatch) report and also the guest editor for this edition of GenderIT.org. The 2015 GISWatch brings stories on the politics of sex and sexual rights online from 52 countries worldwide.
#PornBan. It’s like a rash, this impulse to ban porn all over the world – despite protests that are going viral. The Twitter hashtag #pornban sprung up in July 2015 as the Indian government blocked 857 porn sites, 1 and then backtracked a bit, 2 asking internet service providers (ISPs) to unblock those that don’t contain child pornography. Which makes service providers the arbiters of our constitutionally guaranteed right to freedom of expression, deciding what we may or may not see. Seriously?
This edition of GISWatch presents stories from around the world on how the politics of sex and sexual rights activism takes place online. We want to research how generally accepted sexual identities, as well as marginalised sexualities, are expressed, regulated and moralised on the internet. We also want to show how this relates to the threats of surveillance, censorship and online violence.
The eight thematic reports introduce the theme from different perspectives, including the global policy landscape for sexual rights and the internet, the privatisation of spaces for free expression and engagement, the need to create a feminist internet, how to think about children and their vulnerabilities online, and consent and pornography online.
In the 2013 Global Information Society Watch’s institutional overview entitled Whose internet is it anyway? Shaping the internet – feminist voices in governance decision making, Heike Jensen calls the attention to the hegemonic framing of issues and agendas in the internet governance field. “Any mainstream political agenda of issues already represents the outcome of power struggles among groups of privileged men, and the outcome of the subsequent policy debate largely reflects which groups of men have achieved dominance, or in gendered terms, which groups of men now represent hegemonic masculinity.”
The internet, as a medium and as a milieu where people, information and modes of consumption connect, has achieved a paramount role for the exercise of sexuality. Online dating, matchmaking and casual encounters, porn, sexual health and education, online commerce for sexual goods, escort services, sex rights activism, and the manifestation of sexual identities and communities, all represent a fruition of interactions, stimuli and exchanges on the internet. That these activities are understood as “sexual” means that they are subject to regulation and disciplining. When it comes to sex and sexuality, the rules about what people can or cannot do, and the norms by which people learn when, where, how and with whom they should do it, respond to the logic of what Michel Foucault called the “sexuality device”.
The 2013 edition of GISWatch explores women’s rights and gender through the lens of information and communications technologies (ICTs). It includes a series of expert thematic reports on issues such as access to infrastructure, participation, online disobedience, and sexuality online, as well as 46 country reports on topics like the rights of domestic workers, trafficking in women, participation in governance, child brides, and the right to abortion.