Speaking Freely: Benjamin Ismail

Interviewer: Jillian York

Benjamin Ismail is the Campaign and Advocacy Director for GreatFire, where he leads efforts to expose the censorship apparatus of authoritarian regimes worldwide. He also runs/oversees the App Censorship Project, including the AppleCensorship.com and GoogleCensorship.org platforms, which track mobile app censorship globally. From 2011 to 2017, Benjamin headed the Asia-Pacific desk at Reporters Without Borders (RSF).

Jillian York: Hi Benjamin, it's great to chat with you. We got to meet at the Global Gathering recently and we did a short video there and it was wonderful to get to know you a little bit. I'm going to start by asking you my first basic question: What does free speech or free expression mean to you?

Benjamin Ismail: Well, it starts with a very, very big question. What I have in mind is a cliche answer, but it's what I genuinely believe. I think about all freedoms. So when you say free expression, free speech, or freedom of information or Article 19, all of those concepts are linked together, I immediately think of all human rights at once. Because what I have seen during my current or past work is how that freedom is really the cornerstone of all freedom. If you don’t have that, you can’t have any other freedom. If you don’t have freedom of expression, if you don't have journalism, you don't have pluralism of opinions—you have self-censorship.

You have realities, violations, that exist but are not talked about, and are not exposed, not revealed, not tackled, and nothing is really improved without that first freedom. I also think about Myanmar because I remember going there in 2012, when the country had just opened after the democratic revolution. We got the chance to meet with many officials, ministers, and we got to tell them that they should start with that because their speech was “don’t worry, don’t raise freedom of speech, freedom of the press will come in due time.”

And we were saying “no, that’s not how it works!” It doesn’t come in due time when other things are being worked on. It starts with that so you can work on other things. And so I remember very well those meetings and how actually, unfortunately, the key issues that re-emerged afterwards in the country were precisely due to the fact that they failed to truly implement free speech protections when the country started opening.

JY: What was your path to this work?

BI: This is a multi-faceted answer. So, I was studying Chinese language and civilization at the National Institute of Oriental Languages and Civilizations in Paris along with political science and international law. When I started that line of study, I considered maybe becoming a diplomat…that program led to preparing for the exams required to enter the diplomatic corps in France.

But I also heard negative feedback on the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and, notably, first-hand testimonies from friends and fellow students who had done internships there. I already knew that I had a little bit of an issue with authority. My experience as an assistant at Reporters Without Borders challenged the preconceptions I had about NGOs and civil society organizations in general. I was a bit lucky to come at a time when the organization was really trying to find its new direction, its new inspiration. So it a brief phase where the organization itself was hungry for new ideas.

Being young and not very experienced, I was invited to share my inputs, my views—among many others of course. I saw that you can influence an organization’s direction, actions, and strategy, and see the materialization of those strategic choices. Such as launching a campaign, setting priorities, and deciding how to tackle issues like freedom of information, and the protection of journalists in various contexts.

That really motivated me and I realized that I would have much less to say if I had joined an institution such as the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Instead, I was part of a human-sized group, about thirty-plus employees working together in one big open space in Paris.

After that experience I set my mind on joining the civil society sector, focusing on freedom of the press. on journalistic issues, you get to touch on many different issues in many different regions, and I really like that. So even though it’s kind of monothematic, it's a single topic that's encompassing everything at the same time.

I was dealing with safety issues for Pakistani journalists threatened by the Taliban. At the same time I followed journalists pressured by corporations such as