Ahead of the 2016 United States elections, Global Citizen launched its “Show Up and Vote” campaign to encourage young Americans to vote. In addition to an online campaign, represented by the hashtag #ShowupVote, Global Citizen hosted a series of events and concerts with high-profile artists.  Psiphon #ShowupVote Promotion During Elections In the week ahead of the election, Psiphon promoted the #ShowupVote campaign to our US audience, showing a selection of images and a brief paragraph explaining the importance of the project.

The 2016 Toronto Reel Asian International Film Festival has come to a close after a successful run from 8th to 19th November, 2016. As the largest Asian film festival in Canada, Reel Asian has been bridging the Pan-Asian contemporary cinema and Canadian community through creating a platform for emerging and award-winning directors, actors and the local community to share their work and opinions on films. This year, over half of the film titles were directed by North American filmmakers.

Following the detainment of 12 pro-Kurdish lawmakers from the Peoples’ Democratic Party (HDP) in the early hours of November 4th, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, YouTube, WhatsApp and Skype were blocked in Turkey. There were reports that Turk Telekom internet provider completely disabled access to the internet or throttled the connection to the point that it was impossible to connect. Despite lack of official decision about the restrictions, and BTK’s explanation that there was a technical problem throughout Turkey, Prime Minister Binali Yildirim made a statement later in the day and said “For security reasons, these kinds of measures can be taken time to time.

On September 11th to 15th 2016, Psiphon attended the first Asia Pacific School of Internet Governance (APSIG) hosted in Bangkok, Thailand. The weeklong regional school took place at the Asian Institute of Technology (AIT), where more than 30 participants from various countries in Asia Pacific came together to share their experience and knowledge on the Regional Internet Governance issues. Organized by the Internet Education and Research Laboratory (inTERLab), the five-day workshop featured keynote speakers from various backgrounds such as international organizations, academic institutes, civil society, government and business sectors.