Meduzas editorial office received a notice from Russias federal censorship agency, Roskomnadzor, ordering the removal of an article about the flashlight protest Alexey Navalnys supporters are planning to conduct on Sunday, February 14.

The notice says specifically that the article contained information with calls for citizens to participate in mass (public) events on February 14, 2021, in Moscow and other Russian cities, conducted in support of A.A. Navalny in violation of the established procedures.

Roskomnadzor added that there wasnt any information confirming that the protests in question had been approved by the competent authorities in the manner prescribed by law.

Meduza deleted the article at the departments request.

The article that drew Roskomnadzors attention was titled Many made fun of flashlights as a new form of protest. But not the Russian government. It saw it as a NATO scheme and is even scaring [people] with terrorist attacks. The text didnt mention the exact time that the demonstration is scheduled to begin.

The article reported that Russias Investigative Committee, police officials, andAttorney Generals Office had issued warnings about the inadmissibility of violating the law in connection with the calls for mass demonstrations. It also cited reports from the state news agencies TASS and RIA Novosti, which said that according to anonymous sources, terrorist attacks were being planned during the protests in different Russian cities.

The text also cited the opinions of Russian lawmakers and the Foreign Ministrys spokeswoman, Maria Zakharova. In addition, it cited segments from state television channels, which have covered the upcoming demonstration in great detail one channel even aired a segment that included the tweet announcing the demonstrations posted by Navalnys chief of staff, Leonid Volkov.

In late 2020, the Russian State Duma adopted amendments to article 7 of the federal law On assemblies, demonstrations, rallies, marches, and picketing. These changes allow the courts to recognize nearly any gathering as a public event that can be deemed illegal unless it was sanctioned by the relevant authorities in advance.

No court decisions recognizing the demonstration planned for February 14 as a public event have been reported as of yet.

The rest is here:

Russias censorship agency orders Meduza to delete article about the official reaction to planned pro-Navalny demonstration - Meduza

Launched in 2017, Filecoin is an open-source decentralized storage network that uses blockchain to implement a cooperative digital storage and data retrieval solution.

Filecoin is based on IPFS and allows its users to rent any unused storage space they have on their hard drives in exchange for filecoins, Filecoin's own cryptocurrency. Filecoin uses blockchain to register deals between storage providers and consumers and claims the use of blockchain as a data replication mechanism will makeits solution resilient to censorship:

Filecoin resists censorship because there is no central provider that can be coerced into deleting files or withholding service. The network is made up of many different computers run by many different people and organizations. Faulty or malicious actors are noticed by the network and removed automatically.

Filecoin employs a storage proof algorithm to ensure that data has been stored as a replica of some original data stored somewhere else. This proof is actually implemented in Rust, while the rest of the system is written in Go.

InfoQ has spoken with Filecoin software engineer Aayush Rajasekaran, who built Filecoin's Lotus implementation.

InfoQ: What is Filecoin?

Aayush Rajasekaran: Filecoin is a decentralized storage network designed to store humanitys most valuable information. The Filecoin project encompasses the protocol that facilitates reliable storage, the online marketplace where storage clients and providers interact, and the cryptocurrency that provides the economic incentives to power the network.

At the heart of Filecoin is the concept of provable storage. Simply put, to "prove" storage is to convince any listener that you have a unique replica of a certain piece of data stored somewhere. It is important that the data stored be uniquely replicated, for if not anyone can claim to have stored a long string of zeros (or some other junk data).

The completely naive proof of storage would be to simply furnish the entirety of the stored data to someone demanding to see the proof. This is infeasible when the size of the data grows large. The Filecoin protocol specifies a secure cryptographic approach to proving storage. Storage providers submit such proofs once a day, which are validated by every node on the Filecoin network. The upshot is that someone storing data with a Filecoin storage provider does not have to worry about the data being secretly lost or corrupted. If that happens, it will be automatically detected by the network within a day, and the storage provider will be penalized appropriately.

The Filecoin marketplace provides a platform for storage clients and providers to meet and negotiate storage deals. A storage client is any entity that has some valuable data they would like to pay to store, while storage providers are entities with spare storage that they would like to leverage for financial reward. Clients transfer their data to providers, and pay them in Filecoin, the native cryptocurrency of the network.

The cryptocurrency itself is managed on a distributed ledger, a blockchain, akin to that used by Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies. Blocks produced on the Filecoin network are valid if they contain a valid Proof of Storage. This is an easily computed piece of data that can only be produced by providers who have pledged storage to the network. Producing blocks earns the storage provider a block reward, which is an additional incentive to pledge storage to the network. Storage providers functioning in this capacity are called storage miners.

InfoQ: How does it differ from other blockchain-based solutions available today?

Rajasekaran: The key difference is that producing blocks on the Filecoin network isn't wasteful. "Mining" on the Filecoin network is based on useful storage. This is in sharp contrast to the wasteful computation required in Proof of Work blockchains like Bitcoin -- producing a block on such a network requires expensive hardware and high energy costs, but yields no benefit to any of the parties involved.

There is also large scope for Filecoin to interact with other blockchain-based solutions. Much of dApp development on networks like Ethereum today gets blocked by the problem of scaling storage: any information a dApp needs to persist winds up on-chain, and thus in the storage of every single node operator. Filecoin can provide the verified storage functionality that such dApps need. While Filecoin doesnt currently support native Smart Contracts, adding such functionality would be fairly easy.

InfoQ: While promising, decentralized storage has its own challenges. Most users will be concerned by, say, the privacy of their data, or the security of their systems. How does Filecoin address such concerns?

Rajasekaran: Fortunately, there's a lot of easy stuff that can protect user privacy without having to become core to the protocol itself, making innovation easy. Users can encrypt their data before sending it to a storage provider, and we can build clients that perform this encryption automatically. The Files project is an example of an application on Filecoin that automatically preserves privacy.

The reliability of the storage, on the other hand, is core to the protocol itself. A crucial aspect of the security guarantee is that the onus of detecting data loss is not solely on the storage client. As discussed, any corruption of the data is quickly noticed, and automatically penalized, by the network on the whole.

Further, the Filecoin marketplace allows storage clients to estimate the worth of their data. Clients can request storage providers put up collateral when they agree to a deal. The collateral is returned at deal expiration, but is lost by the provider if the deal fails. Clients who are willing to pay more for the storage of their data may find providers willing to accept larger collateral requirements.

InfoQ: Filecoin is not the only player in the decentralized storage arena. What makes it unique and gives it a competitive advantage over its competitors from your point of view?

Rajasekaran: Filecoin doesn't view other participants in the decentralized storage as "competitors". Filecoin is completely open source, so anyone is free to use or improve on our software. Filecoin is, however, the only project providing verifiable storage, where data corruption is automatically detected and penalized.

There's also the sheer level of interest in and support for the project. We're nearing 3 exabytes of storage currently dedicated to the network, despite being only a few months into the life of the network. This has in turn attracted significant developers, applications, infrastructure, and ecosystem funds, which makes this an awesome community to be a part of!

InfoQ: What kind of development do you envision for Filecoin and decentralized storage in general in the near future?

Rajasekaran: There are tons of opportunities - from preserving large culturally relevant datasets, decentralized video applications, apps that verify data integrity, consumer apps that make it easy to store & retrieve data, DeFi use cases, decentralized data markets, browser support, and many many more. Over 250 projects are entering the ecosystem through hackathons and accelerators, all of which are developing extremely creative use cases on top of Filecoin and IPFS.

Filecoin is not the only existing solution for cooperative storage. Other players in this arena include MIT's Chord, Sia, and Storj.

Originally posted here:

Filecoin Aims to Use Blockchain to Make Decentralized Storage Resilient and Hard to Censor - InfoQ.com

But on Monday night, social media app Clubhouse appeared to have been blocked in China just days after it became the go-to app for uncensored conversations on a host of sensitive issues banned on other platforms.

By Monday evening, many Clubhouse users in mainland China reported that when they tried to log onto the app, they received a red error message showing "a secure connection to the server cannot be made."

On Tuesday, the hashtag "Clubhouse" was also censored on Chinese social media platform Weibo, where it had been trending. People with mainland phone numbers reported no longer being able to receive text messages from Clubhouse, in effect blocking them from joining as invitation and verification codes are sent to a mobile phone to register a new account.

On Clubhouse, several chat rooms soon sprang up to discuss the blocking of the app. They were joined by hundreds of users, including some who said they were based in mainland China. Greatfire.org, a group which monitors internet censorship in China, also confirmed that the app had been blocked.

The ban, however, came as little surprise. With its political discussions drawing so much interest from mainland China, many users and observers expected it was only a matter of time before the app was blocked. While the censorship might deter new users, it is unclear how many existing users will be kept off the platform.

Susan Liang, a 31-year-old from Shenzhen, said she would continue to join Clubhouse chats on sensitive topics via a VPN because she didn't want to give up the frank and open discussions.

"It is too rare an opportunity. Everyone has lived under the Great Firewall for so long, but on this platform, we can talk about anything," she said. "It's like someone drowning, and can finally breathe in a large gulp of air."

But Liang expects some other users might be discouraged by having to use a VPN, as that technology has been increasingly targeted by Chinese government crackdowns. Any VPN not approved by the government is illegal.

Benjamin Ismail, an expert with Apple Censorship a project run by GreatFire.org said some users would be discouraged by the block but "it might not kill the app immediately" in China.

Popular political chat rooms

While the app first became popular in China among tech industry circles, its political chat rooms quickly drew newcomers eager for release from the tight censorship at home. As it grew in popularity, many Chinese also joined to discuss topics such as culture, lifestyle and celebrity gossip. But the space for free, inclusive political discussions was one of the rarest qualities of the app for Chinese-speaking communities.

One chat room hosted by Taiwan-based blogger Zola was running non-stop for almost 120 hours, joined by Chinese speakers in different time zones.

Another popular chat room invited young people from both sides of the Taiwan Strait to share their views and personal stories. The discussions started with lighthearted subjects but soon turned to politics, with users comparing the political systems of China and Taiwan and debating the prospects of unification.

Started Friday evening, the room soon attracted hundreds of people, and reached the upper limit of 5,000 listeners around midnight, according to Tan.

Several Han Chinese from Xinjiang also shared their experience of the security crackdown. A number of overseas Chinese broke down in tears describing the sense of guilt they feel over the alleged human rights abuses in Xinjiang, while others defended Beijing's policies, and questioned accounts of abuse from the region.

Other users and outside observers expressed skepticism over how representative the groups engaging in these political discussions are of broad Chinese public opinion, pointing to the self-selecting nature of the participants, as well as the barriers to using Clubhouse itself which prevent it from being a completely public app.

"Political topics on the platform are not discussed as rationally as other topics like technology or culture," the paper said.

But even before the app was blocked, there were potential security concerns for users within mainland China. Accounts are also tied to users' mobile phone numbers, which in China are registered under owners' real names. Furthermore, it would be a relatively simple task for the Chinese authorities to infiltrate open chat groups on issues such as Xinjiang and record what is being said for future use.

Badiucao, a Chinese dissident artist based in Australia, said some Chinese users, especially those within China, might not have realized the potential risk before speaking out critically against the government's policies, even semi-anonymously.

"If they were typing their opinions out, they might have the time to think it over," he said. "But when they spoke in these real-time chat rooms, they might not be able to hold their tongue."

Read the rest here:

For a brief period, there was a platform for sensitive political debate in China. Then censors shut it down - CNN

Censorship is understood to be the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered inconvenient.

At the February 8, 2021 Clover Park School District Board meeting, Director Paul Wagemann asked his fellow board members to amend the December 21, 2020 meeting minutes to include his comments.

In response to Wagemanns request, Director and Board Vice-President Alyssa Anderson-Pearson stated, It is important to remember it (the December 21 minutes) was an overview that happened, not word for word.

The meeting minutes of that December 21 meeting clearly state that each director was given the opportunity to discuss how he or she felt about the choice of words used and to express what equity means to them.

The comments of Superintendent Banner are included.

The comments of Directors Schafer, Jacobs, Anderson-Pearson and Veliz are included.

But the comments of Director Wagemann are not included.

Why?

During the February 8, 2021 meeting, Schafer ironically stated, Objective and accurate these things are very important to me.

What has been objective and accurate about the censoring the suppression of speech of Paul Wagemanns comments during the December 21, 2020 CPSDB meeting?

Related

Read the rest here:

Letter: Censorship and the CPSDB - The Suburban Times

Letter to the editor

I would like to respond to Larry McDermott regarding freedom of speech and censorship.

It is a good idea to be aware of laws regarding slander and libel; one can get into a lot of financial trouble with careless or reckless speech. That being said I believe he should refresh his memory of the content of The Bill of Rights, First Amendment. Our Founders clearly valued freedom of religion and freedom of speech above all other Rights. It is also worth remembering that our Founders clearly understood that our Rights derived from our Creator.

We should write and speak as our founders intended, with courage, with forethought and intelligence. We should not look over our shoulders before we speak, being in fear of a government and a legal system that are more and more intimidating every day.

Censorship is always a tricky subject. Our nation has engaged in it during war time. It has been handled by the government and has always been regarded as a necessary evil to achieve our victory. Newspapers have used editorial discretion in publishing letters but there used to be newspapers of differing political viewpoints so that failure to be published in one did not necessarily preclude publishing in another.

Worth noting is that the phone company has never censored phone calls. The phone company has assisted law enforcement with wiretaps but has never on its own authority censored. Now we have communication giants, Facebook and Twitter deciding who can use their services and what their users are allowed to communicate. If FB and Twitter think individuals are a criminal threat, they should certainly contact appropriate law enforcement but otherwise it is not their business to control communication. My personal opinion is that they are monopolies which should be broken up as Bell Telephone was.

We Americans should remember that we are a free people, our problems come from an overbearing govt and people who value security over freedom.

Kim Lynch

Columbus

See the article here:

Response to Censorship, freedom of speech article - The Tryon Daily Bulletin - Tryon Daily Bulletin

By Ann Schockett, NFRW President

You know that internet censorship is a real problem when the President of the United States has his social media account cancelled while a Middle Eastern dictator can post whatever he likes. Or when an emerging social media company is de-platformed by its web hosting service. Or when a Big Tech executive must be hauled before a panel of United States senators and lambasted for not allowing a major publication to post an article on its social media account because its critical of a particular presidential candidate.

Countless conservatives have had their social media accounts suspended or canceled by the predominately left-wing employees who make up Americas high tech elite.

How is it that America, where the right to free speech is the first item enshrined in the Bill of Rights, has gotten to the point where internet oligarchs have the power to silence someone for their political beliefs, under the guise of hate speech? It seems as though conservatives are facing a David vs. Goliath battle with Big Tech.

Well, NFRWarrior Sisters, we all know who won that battle.

With your voice and your wallet, you can let the titans of Big Tech know that censorship is unacceptable in a free society. We live in a nation that has allowed people such as themselves to become enormously successful, but it should not be at the expense of our rights. We can make a difference. Heres how.

1. Use Social Media to Call Out Tech Executives When They Censor a Conservative These companies - and all businesses - monitor their social media accounts regularly for customer feedback and are often quick to respond to complaints.

2. Utilize Alternative Social Media Platforms Competition is good for business, and Big Tech companies need to know that their customers can go elsewhere if they find their business practices unacceptable.

3. Own Stock in a Big Tech Company? Participate in their Annual Shareholder Meeting Even just owning one share of company stock grants you a seat at their annual shareholder meetings where investors can submit questions to their executives about their policies and practices.

4. Engage Rather Than Boycott Its better to engage the company as a continuing customer. If youre not a customer, then youre not on their radar, and the company therefore has no incentive to change their policies.

5. Support Small Businesses and Shop Locally Big Tech retailers have made record earnings during the COVID-19 pandemic while small businesses are struggling to survive. Please consider that when shopping online.

6. Always Keep Your Comments Polite and to the Point Youre more likely to get a response if you maintain a calm and professional attitude.

Technology is an important part of all our lives. Like any consumer, we want value for our money. Lets send a reminder to Big Tech that the right to speak ones mind is the cornerstone of freedom and as such, we as a free people are willing to take our business elsewhere.

See more here:

Send a Big Message to Big Tech: Stop the Censorship - National Federation of Republican Women

TikTok, the video-sharing social network, drove a lot of interest from consumers last year. It also piqued their interest in Virtual Private Networks (VPNs), according to new research.

The research by Brooklyn, NY-based security advisors Security.org found that interest in VPNs was directly correlated with newsworthy events.

The company measured the amount of web traffic in a day compared to the average web traffic of a week prior to the date and correlated this with significant events during 2020.

VPN technology is used for various reasons. It can be used to create a secure channel to communicate with the workplace protecting sensitive business information, to bypass government restrictions, or to hide activity from Internet Service Providers amongst others.

Almost one in 10 US adult VPN users cite whistleblowing, activism, or bypassing government or organization restrictions as a reason for use of VPN technology.

Security.org's research showed that interest in VPN technology tends to increase significantly whenever there is a newsworthy event that impacts travel, or internet usage, or impacts working from home environments.

On March 22020, the first deaths due to COVID-19 were reported, leading to an increase in VPN interest of 99 percent compared with average web traffic the week before..

On March 24 2020 when the postponement of the Tokyo 2020 Olympics was announced, there was a 78 percent increase in consumers' VPN interest.

This was due to people looking to secure their at-home networks for the possibility of stay-at-home orders and working from home due to the pandemic.

On August 13, average consumer interest in VPNs increased by 74 percent when President Trump proposed a ban on TikTok in August 2020. Interest also spiked by 34% on September 20th - the day the TikTok ban was said to start.

When internet censorship is threatened, average consumer interest in VPNs increases, and consumers flock to buy routers like the GL.iNet Beryl router which has VPN software built in to the router.

A VPN will allow people to access the internet in countries where restrictions are in place. Countries with levels of internet censorship can bypass firewalls to get to otherwise-restricted content.

As restrictions on free content continue to grow, I think that more and more of us will switch to VPN technology. We can then ensure that we have the freedom to access the content we want to and to communicate as if there were no restrictions at all wherever we happen to live.

Continued here:

Government censorship threats over TikTok spiked interest in VPNs - ZDNet

At Substack, one of an increasing number of independent news and opinion sites, lawyer and civil rights activist Glenn Greenwald looks at a disturbing trend in journalism today. The rise of the journalist as tattletale and censor, rather than investigative reporter:

A new and rapidly growing journalistic beat has arisen over the last several years that can best be described as an unholy mix of junior high hall-monitor tattling and Stasi-like citizen surveillance. It is half adolescent and half malevolent. Its primary objectives are control, censorship, and the destruction of reputations for fun and power. Though its epicenter is the largest corporate media outlets, it is the very antithesis of journalism.

Whereas an investigative reporter succeeds by getting the story right, tattletales can succeed even if they get the story wrong. Censors can succeed even if their concerns are wholly misdirected quite apart from whether censorship is a valid enterprise anyway.

Greenwald (pictured) cites recent instances:

A star New York Times tech reporter, Taylor Lorenz, falsely accused tech entrepreneur Marc Andreessen of having used the slur world retarded in an online discussion of Reddit activities. In fact, a woman in the discussion room had used the wordit is a self-description on the part of some Redditors. Without offering any apology for failure to listen carefully, Lorenz lectured the world about insensitivity, then locked her Twitter account. She likely faces no consequences.

Update within the subsequent 24 hours: Taylor Lorenz has fully walked back her claim that Andreessen used a slur word. However, many consider her half-apology perfunctory, almost as though she has no sense of the moral implications of her careless, false accusation.

Forty-five-year veteran New York Times science reporter Donald McNeill, on a field trip with high school students in Peru, used the n-word while discussing with a student whether it was fair that one of her classmates was punished for using it in a video. Greenwald: McNeil used it not with malice or as a racist insult but to inquire about the facts of the video so he could answer the students question. New York Times management was inclined to issue only a reprimand but dozens of Times journalists insisted on much more serious punishment, so he was fired.

Update within the subsequent 24 hours: Other journalists, not part of the Woke group, are rallying behind McNeill but he is still fired.

Greenwald cautions that these widely publicized examples are by no means isolated ones:

These examples of journalism being abused to demand censorship of spaces they cannot control are too numerous to comprehensively chronicle. And they are not confined to those three outlets. That far more robust censorship is urgently needed is now a virtual consensus in mainstream corporate journalism: its an animating cause for them.

Indeed. One might also cite the recent, almost incomprehensibly vicious attack on Jordan Peterson, author the bestseller 12 Rules for Life, by Decca Aitkenhead of the Sunday Times of London. She interviewed Peterson and his daughter Mikhaila, who has seen her father through serious health problems over the past two years (her mother is recovering from a battle with cancer). Under the circumstances, the family would hardly seem appropriate subjects for a full-on assault. But thats what happened.

Mikhaila Peterson released the unedited transcript for the world to see how grievous the misrepresentation has been. But not everyone is so lucky and Aitkenhead likely faces few consequences other than the approval of like-minded colleagues.

Then there was the 2019 misrepresentation by George Eaton at New Statesman of British philosopher and writer Roger Scruton (19442020) as a racist as the result of an interview. The misrepresentation led to his being unceremoniously dumped from a government committee.

Author and commentator Douglas Murray, suspecting that Sir Roger would not really have said those things, began a search and eventually came into possession of the tape and transcript. He notes, What the tape showed beyond doubt is that George Eaton misled his readers to try to destroy the reputation of Britains foremost conservative thinker. Readers and listeners can listen to and read the interview themselves and find their favorite examples of Eatons dishonesty. He offers a few favorites of his own. (National Review, April 29, 2019)

Murray comments, To say that this is the sort of thing that has degraded public discourse is to wildly understate things.

Well, yes, but whats behind it? Greenwald offers, regarding the new breed of journalists,

They have insufficient talent or skill, and even less desire, to take on real power centers: the military-industrial complex, the CIA and FBI, the clandestine security state, Wall Street, Silicon Valley monopolies, the corrupted and lying corporate media outlets they serve. So settling on this penny-ante, trivial bullshit tattling, hall monitoring, speech policing: all in the most anti-intellectual, adolescent and primitive ways is all they have. Its all they are. Its why they have fully earned the contempt and distrust in which the public holds them.

How did we get here?

Ive been in the news business fifty years. Heres my view: The single biggest factor in all this is that traditional media are no longer a necessary institution.

In the 1970s, one needed a newspaper to find out the weather, the scores, and who had a bicycle for sale. Hit pieces sometimes appeared, of course. But generally speaking, the investigative journalist was, well, investigating, not plotting to take someone down just for the sake of it. There were plenty of bad landlords, corrupt officeholders, shoddy builders, etc., to focus on. It was difficult and sometimes dangerous work.

But we have specialty web sites and consumer groups for all that today. Its all online.

Today, the newspapers (along with generic TV and radio) are echo chambers for opinion for cultural reasons, that usually means progressive opinion. When an institution is no longer needed, its mission usually changes. The people attracted to it change too.

One suspects that Greenwald is right: The sort of people who would launch baseless attacks and refuse to apologize, destroy colleagues careers over misunderstood conversations, and ridicule or misrepresent old or sick men probably could not do an exhausting eight-month, on-the-ground investigation into corruption at the Municipal Housing Board. So, increasingly, they do what they can: Misrepresentation and speech policing.

One outcome of the increasing prevalence in media of the type of people Greenwald describes is a very great decline in the perceived value of freedom of speech and of the media. Twenty years ago, media people understood freedom of speech to mean, I want the right to report, with evidence, that the mayor fixes drunk driving tickets for upper class twits. Today, many in media understand it to mean I want the right to spout hate against visible and sexual minorities. Because that truly is all they do understand it to be. And they want a crackdown. Until then, they will act as police themselves.

Increasingly, the organizations many new journalists work for are owned by companies eyeing the Chinese market. That entails the need to get along with a totalitarian state. Perhaps it is best for them to get used to the mentality first. It is best for the rest of us to view their output with a skeptical eye and seek out smaller, alternative, independent sources of news.

You may also wish to read: Escaping the news filter bubble: Three simple tips. Spoiler: Reduce the amount of information big providers have about YOU. (Russ White)

Continue reading here:

In Big Tech world: The Journalist as Censor, Hit Man, and Snitch - Walter Bradley Center for Natural and Artificial Intelligence

Photo illustration: Yahoo News; photos: AP (3), Getty Images

Censorship online by Big Tech is a bad idea, in large part because its a distraction from the problem of how social media companies promote, spread and amplify harmful information, according to author Peter Pomerantsev.

Its ridiculous to think that you can regulate the billions of things people say every day, or that we should, or that its even feasible. So I dont think thats the way forward, Pomerantsev said in an interview on The Long Game, a Yahoo News podcast. Therell be a way to get out of the whole tricky thing of taking one comment down or leaving it up.

The way out, he said, is through forcing the tech companies to be transparent about how they are manipulating the spread of information, and holding them accountable to prevent public harms.

Pomerantsev is a Russian-born journalist now based in London whose parents were hounded by the KGB secret police in Soviet Russia. His book This Is Not Propaganda: Adventures in the War Against Reality argues that phrases like freedom of expression have been hacked by authoritarian leaders and governments like Vladimir Putin in Russia and Rodrigo Duterte in the Philippines.

Authoritarians use freedom of speech as an excuse to spread massive amounts of disinformation at the click of a button, while employing online mobs and troll farms to drown out and intimidate critical voices and obscure truth. This constitutes a sort of censorship through noise, Pomerantsev and two others wrote in a recent article for the London School of Economics Institute of Global Affairs, where he is a visiting senior fellow.

But countering autocrats doesnt have to mean removing the posts of ordinary people or taking them off their preferred social media platforms, he said, which has become a growing concern among many Republicans.

We thought that for a long time, the federal government is infuriating, Tucker Carlson said on Fox News Wednesday. The bigger threat to your family turned out to be huge publicly held corporations, particularly the tech monopolies.

Story continues

In fact, focus on censorship and cancel culture actually distracts from solving the problem of disinformation and all the chaos and confusion and real-world harm it brings with it in a way that preserves free speech, Pomerantsev said.

A lot of the virality is amplified artificially. Thats kind of how a lot of these platforms were designed, he said. That kind of artificial amplification I think really has to end.

Fake amplification everything from gaming algorithms and search engine optimization through to amplification through coordinated inauthentic activity I think that probably has to end if the internet is going to be a just reflection of society and not this kind of weird funhouse mirror that distorts everything, Pomerantsev said.

One of the first steps toward reducing disinformation is algorithm transparency: revealing how the social media and Big Tech companies engineer which information rises to the top and is seen by large numbers of people. Google, Facebook and TikTok have all taken some recent steps in this direction, Axios reported this week, but it was voluntary and most experts think this issue needs to be overseen by government regulators.

When Trumps people would say, Google pushes conservative views right down, liberal news up, we dont know because Google has not shown anyone its formulas that shape search results, Pomerantsev said. Thats ridiculous.

Carlson addressed the same root cause on his show. Twitter refuses to release data on who it bans, he said.

Rep. Tom Malinowski, D-N.J., and Rep. Anna Eshoo, D-Calif., sent letters to Facebook, YouTube and Twitter in late January urging the companies to address the fundamental design features of their social networks that facilitate the spread of extreme, radicalizing content to their users. The letters were co-signed by 38 other House Democrats.

The lawmakers drew a straight line between the focus of social media companies on maximizing user engagement and the assault on the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6 by Trump supporters who believed the former presidents lies about the 2020 election.

The rioters who attacked the Capitol earlier this month were radicalized in part in digital echo chambers that these platforms designed, built, and maintained, and that the platforms are partially responsible for undermining our shared sense of objective reality, for intensifying fringe political beliefs, for facilitating connections between extremists, leading some of them to commit real-world, physical violence, Malinowski and Eshoo wrote.

The lawmakers cited a Wall Street Journal investigation from last May that revealed Facebook knew in 2018 that its algorithms sometimes radicalized its users, but did not take action to reduce this because it would reduce profits. Our algorithms exploit the human brains attraction to divisiveness, a presentation created internally said, noting that the company was serving more and more divisive content in an effort to gain user attention and increase time on the platform.

Malinowski and Eshoo have proposed a change to Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act a law targeted for reform by conservatives as well that would hold tech companies accountable for content they proactively promote for business reasons, if doing so leads to specific offline harms.

Malinowski said in a hearing this week that this is a solution that Republicans and Democrats should be able to agree on. We can believe that the biggest problem is on the right, on the far right or on the far left it doesnt matter. We can debate that. Whichever of those things you believe you should be for this, because the mechanism works the same way. It pushes people on the left further left. It pushes people on the right further right, until they reach an extreme.

Pomerantsev pointed to the United Kingdoms approach, which says in his words that companies have to think about the harms they cause, and those harms could be around public health or some forms of personal abuse.

And the question is what are the companies doing almost like in a health and safety kind of regime to mitigate that? So are their algorithms making it too easy for people to bully others or to harass them? Pomerantsev said. Are the way their systems are designed making it too easy to spread this information thats dangerous to peoples health?

The British have said there needs to be a regulator thats making a judgment about whether theyre doing enough around those issues, and are working to set up a system in which Ofcom, its communications regulator, could issue fines if the companies are found at fault.

The tech companies have lobbied the British government against giving Ofcom punitive regulatory powers.

But as Pomerantsev wrote in his book and expounded on in his interview with Yahoo News, the Big Tech companies have acquired so much information about their users which is most people that there is a real question about whether they are infringing upon freedom of thought.

To some degree our private thoughts, creative impulses, and senses of self are shaped by information forces greater than ourselves, he wrote in This Is Not Propaganda.

Are they actually invading your freedom of thought? Are they actually crossing the line of you, and then using it against you? he said. What is that line of our unconscious that deserves to be protected?

____

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To avoid online censorship, government must force Big Tech to be more transparent, expert says - Yahoo Sports

The ongoing drive to impose online political censorship of the left has become clearer over the past week following remarks by Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg that the social media platform was being depoliticized.

Speaking during a fourth-quarter earnings call with investors on January 28, Zuckerberg said the company was working on methods to reduce the amount of political content in News Feed. He said that Facebook was continuing to fine-tune how this works and we plan to keep civic and political groups out of recommendations for the long term and we plan to expand that policy globally.

While individuals, pages and groups have been ostensibly blocked, banned or deleted for violating community standards in the past, Zuckerberg said the ongoing efforts to turn down the temperature and discourage divisive conversation and communities would include groups that we may not want to encourage people to join even if they dont violate our policies.

Zuckerbergs remarks were in part a response to a letter he received on January 21 from Democratic Representatives Tom Malinowski of New Jersey and Anna Eshoo of California that blamed Facebook for presenting users with content most likely to reinforce their existing political biases, especially those rooted in anger, anxiety, and fear, and for using algorithms that undermine our shared sense of objective reality, intensify fringe political beliefs, facilitate connections between extremist users.

Malinowski and Eshoo praised Facebooks decision before the 2020 elections to stop recommending that users join political and social issue groups and denounced the lifting of these restrictions before the Georgia run-off election, which caused a spike in partisan political content and a decline in authoritative news sources in users newsfeeds.

While it may appear that Zuckerberg and the Democrats are responding to the storming of the US Capitol on January 6 by a fascist mob incited by Donald Trump in a coup attempt aimed at overturning the results of the 2020 elections, their choice of words is significant. They do not refer to the far-right, fascists, neo-Nazis, militia groups and others who include in their ranks leading members of the Republican Party, law enforcement officers and active and retired US military representatives.

The reference to divisive conversation, turning down the temperature, fringe political beliefs and extremist users, make it clear that the effort to shut down political dialogue on social media is aimed at silencing left-wing and socialist politics and preventing the working class from using Facebook to organize its struggles against the capitalist system.

In comments to Politico on January 29, Rep. Malinowski elaborated on his vision of political censorship when he said did not care about how the depoliticization of Facebook would impact political organizing of progressive and left groups on the platform, as long as these new rules apply to everybody equally. He added, Access to Facebook for campaigns is a nice thing to have, but it's not necessary for democracy to function. There are a lot of ways to reach voters.

A similar line of argument was advanced by the right-wing Wall Street J ournal in a major article published on January 31 entitled, Facebook Knew Calls for Violence Plagued Groups, Now Plans Overhaul.

After the Journal makes the lying claim that the Capitol riot was the product of hyper-partisanship, the article goes on to say that the proliferation of extremist groups on Facebook was to blame. Instead of focusing on a defeated President seeking to overthrow the US constitution by mobilizing a fascist mob against Congress, the Journal presents the views of Nina Jankowicz, a social media researcher at the Woodrow Wilson Center in Washington, D.C., who wrote that Facebook groups were destroying American democracy.

That the real target of the effort to shut down Facebook groups is the political left comes out when the Journal says Facebook conducted an investigation in August 2020 of US groups tied to mercenary and hyperpartisan entities using platform tools to build large audiences. Most of the Groups were on the right end of the political spectrum, but Suburban Housewives Against Trump appeared near the top of the charts, too, the August presentation said. Conservative or liberal, the Groups shared a common thread: They had harnessed passionate super-users and Facebook recruitment tools to achieve viral growth.

Facebooks reduction of politics in the news feed policy has been identified as a far-reaching attack on democratic rights by free speech advocate Tim Karr, senior director of strategy and communications at the advocacy group Free Press. Karr told Politico that Facebook should be able to address concerns about amplification of the far-right without hurting civic-minded groups.

Facebook has the ability to fix its recommendation algorithm to exclude white supremacist, militia and conspiracy groups still in its midst, and to do it without harming well-intentioned organizations that are using its platform to organize, Karr said. This isnt rocket science.

It could not be clearer that the entire US ruling establishment is attempting to utilize the events of January 6 as justification for shutting down progressive, left-wing, anti-capitalist and socialist political organizations and publishers on social media platforms such as Facebook. The subsequent shutdown of groups, pages and accountsincluding the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (IYSSE) at the University of Michigan and leading members of the Socialist Equality Party in the USby Facebook that began on January 22 is part of this strategy.

Fear of growing opposition in the working class to government policiesespecially the response to the COVID-19 pandemicand against the rise of the fascist right is a critical aspect of the plans to shut down political discussion on social media and block algorithms from promoting left and socialist groups in the news feed of users.

Workers and young people must demand that socialist groups and political discussion about the threat of fascist dictatorship on social media be defended. No confidence can be placed in the Democratic Party to do anything about the danger to democratic rights represented by the January 6 attempted coup by Donald Trump and his supporters in the Republican Party.

The way to defeat the far right is not by shutting down political dialogue online but by utilizing these tools as instruments in the struggle to educate and organize the international working class in the struggle against the capitalist systemthe source of the fascist menaceand for socialism on a world scale.

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Facebook's depoliticization aimed at censorship of left-wing and socialist organizations - WSWS