Gabon is Taking an Unprecedented Step in Internet Censorship

On August 31, President Ali Bongo was reelected to his second term as the president of Gabon, a small central African country.  Following the election were protests due to the contested result of the election in which several people died.  In response, the government of Gabon shut down the internet for four days.  When the internet finally did come back up, a strict curfew of 6 am to 6 pm of permitted use was installed.  The government of Gabon has denied all accusations of censorship.  Activist Julie Owono has stated that the UN declared blockage of internet access a violation of human rights back in 2011.  Owono believes the outages to be an attempt to keep unrest over the election irregularities low.  She said that prior to the outages social media was a common platform the citizens used to show election fraud and anti government comments.  Due to the small country only having one telecommunication provider, the government very easily shut down and has kept control over the bandwidth provided to the nation.

Chris Buechner

http://money.cnn.com/2016/09/16/technology/internet-censorship-blackouts-gabon/index.html