After majoring in Biomedical Engineering in October 2010, he switched careers to work as a Social Media manager for Al-Masry Al-Youm newspaper until October 2011, when he joined Global Voices contracts managing Lingua until the end of 2021.
Free speech, for me, freedom of expression, means the ability for people to govern themselves.
It means to me that the real meaning of democracy cannot happen without freedom of speech, without people expressing their needs in different spectrums.
The idea of civic space, the idea of people basically living their lives and using different means of communication for getting things done right through freedom of speech.
Which is, again, going back to freedom of expression.
I think there are ways that are unchartered territories in terms of activism, in terms of platforms online and offline, to maybe reinvent the wheel in a way for people to have a better democratic process in terms of freedom of expression.
There's good civil society and there's bad civil society, in terms of their relationship with both governments and companies.
So it goes back to freedom of expression as a collective and in an individual manner.
It comes to people and freedom of assembly in terms of absolute right and in terms of practice, to reinvent the democratic process.
It turns out it's not just freedom of expression.
Freedom of expression has an important role, and the democratic process can't be reinvented without looking at freedom of expression.
The whole system, democracy, Western democracy and how different countries apply it in ways that affects and creates the power of the rich and powerful while the rest of the population just loses their hope in different ways.
Different governments try to always work together to establish their power structures, while the resources governments have is not always available to civil society.
So it's important for civil society organizations-and IFEX is an example of collaboration between a large number of organizations around the world-in all scales, in all directions, that these kinds of collaborations happen in different organizations while still encouraging every organization in itself to look at itself, to look at itself as an organization, to look at how it's working.
There needs to be the other side of the coin in terms of, again, reinventing the democratic process.
My only frustration is where organizations work as if it is a job, and they only do the minimum, for example.
A bad case scenario is when a civil society organization is working for the government or for private companies-where organizations can be a burden more than a resource.
There is a very small number of people and organizations who would be willing to even think about paying the price of being an inconvenience to organizations that are burdening entities.
There are not a lot of people who would be this kind of inconvenience.
There are many people who appear like they are an inconvenience, but they aren't really.
This Cyber News was published on www.eff.org. Publication date: Tue, 14 May 2024 18:43:08 +0000