#3 Afghanistan

The Law: All the social networking sites including Facebook, Twitter and all the matching and dating sites like match.com is banned in the country. It is not a big wonder in Afghanistan, considering the country had even strict speech regulation laws. The internet penetration is less than five percent. But recently, the government had started relaxing the laws to make internet more accessible to the people.

Publishing offensive writings in the websites including gambling, alcohol and sex related contents are completely banned in the country. Also the websites which promote women’s rights are against the country laws.

Penalties: Parwez Kambakhsh, a young journalism student who circulated materials downloaded from the Internet on women’s rights, was arrested in 2007 and condemned to death. The sentence was later commuted to 20 years in prison. Recently, Afghanistan is seeing some relaxations in the internet laws from government as a part of increasing the literacy level of people. But, it is still under strict controls.