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Freedom Collection

Interviews with Zied Mhirsi

Interviewed October 3, 2024

At the end of the 2007 era, we saw the first blogs being censored by [Former Tunisian President Zine el Abidine] Ben Ali. And that increased more and more and more. And at some point he managed to kill the blogosphere. But we kept this connection going. And I can recall people meeting and gathering now in real life and trying to go and occupy the space– the real space. And organize some actions to protest against the Internet censorship.

And in 2009 we could see or hear in Habib Bourguiba Avenue, the largest boulevard in Tunisia, a lot of Tunisian bloggers coming wearing white and gathering here to protest against the censorship of the internet. And two bloggers ended up in jail. And a lot were harassed and got their ID checked and kicked out of the café. And it was funny in 2009 to see Tunisian police looking for people just wearing white and arresting them randomly. Because they couldn´t tell who was who, you know? It was fun. I think we would see sometimes some bloggers who are speaking more openly being censored. I think that´s for us an alarm that, “Oh, you crossed the red line you shouldn´t cross.”

You know, and people go back at that blog and read what they wrote. So know the new guidelines, you know. And the more blogs get censored, the more we realize that those decisions were taken so randomly. Like, you really can´t tell why this blog would be censored and why that other blog wouldn´t be censored. Which puts people even in more and more self-censorship. And then at some point, people say, “Oh man, come on. We can´t keep going like this. We just got to do something against the Internet censorship.”

Especially it reached a level that really was a nightmare, I think, in terms of not knowing exactly what you could write about, you know. YouTube was censored. You can´t even share videos. There was not a single video platform where you could share pictures. So that really pushed everyone to basically start questioning how wise this is. And why would somebody who is writing about flowers be censored? And the fact that the number of user boomed, basically did not allow the government to really monitor effectively what was happening. And it was too much, I think, for them and they started banning and censoring websites randomly.