Syria, Like Much Of The Arab World, Inflicts Country-wide Internet Blackouts During Exams
In an ill-fated attempt to prevent cheating in school tests, governments across the Middle East and north Africa have, for years, enforced nationwide internet blackouts during exam season. The practice has been condemned by human-rights activists and wreaks havoc on the economy. Bowing to pressure, Syria’s government said it would stop cutting access to the internet in 2022. But as the school year came to an end, and some 317,000 students made their way to exam centres, the blackouts resumed. A research team at the Georgia Institute of Technology recorded outages lasting several hours on May 30th, June 2nd and June 6th—all coinciding with national secondary-school tests.
There is no evidence that internet shutdowns have reduced cheating in exams. The problem remains rampant in the Arab world, not least because students have a big incentive to do well. University admissions are based almost entirely on test results; last year only 60% of students in Syria passed. In 2016 an anonymous Facebook page published several questions ten minutes before the exams began, claiming it was promoting equity by offering poor students the same advantages that rich ones had paid for. Cheating has become so widespread in Algeria that the government ordered 500,000 students to retake their exams in 2016. And unscrupulous types find a way around outages. In Iraq education officials were accused of selling exam questions in 2018.
Instead internet blackouts create a headache for the economy. Traders are blocked from the market, businesses cannot process electronic payments and hospitals are unable to search for patient records. Since May 30th Syria’s economy has forfeited over $7m from the three outages, according to Simon Migliano of Top10VPN, a site that tracks the losses. Mr Migliano pools costs calculated by NetBlocks, a digital research firm, which estimates the economic impact using data from the World Bank, the International Telecommunications Union and Eurostat. Since 2019 blackouts have cost Syria some $88m. In Algeria, Ethiopia, India, Iraq, Jordan, Sudan and Syria a total of over $370m has been lost in the past three years owing to internet outages. (These costs do not include the damage done to investors’ confidence in the countries’ economies—even short connectivity hiccups are harmful.)
A fourth internet blackout is scheduled in Syria for June 12th. More are expected as its exam season stretches on through the summer to early autumn. Cutting off access to the internet for the whole country is “ineffective, violent and far-reaching”, says Marwa Fatafta of Access Now, a digital-rights organisation. Although countries seem to be resorting to these tactics less over time, Ms Fatafta has little hope the blackouts will end completely. As in Syria, plans to change appear to be nothing more than empty promises.
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