Last month we wrote about Frances hate speech law, and noted that it followed in the footsteps of the earlier German law known as NetzDG (short for Netzwerkdurchsetzungsgesetz, or network enforcement law). NetzDG was bad news not just for German freedom of speech, but for human rights around the world, because of its knock-on effects. Once Germany had set a precedent for censoring the Internet, it was much easier for other countries to do the same. When people complained, governments could say that if it was acceptable for a liberal democracy like Germany, it was good enough for them. A report from Justitia, a think tank in Denmark, shows just how pernicious the influence of the NetzDG has been:

at least 13 countries have adopted or proposed models similar to the NetzDG matrix. According to Freedom Houses Freedom on the Net (2019), five of those countries are ranked not free (Honduras, Venezuela, Vietnam, Russia and Belarus), five are ranked partly free (Kenya, India, Singapore, Malaysia and Philippines), and only three ranked free (France, UK and Australia). Most of these countries have explicitly referred to the NetzDG as a justification for restricting online speech. Moreover, several of these countries, including Venezuela, Vietnam, India, Russia, Malaysia, and Kenya, require intermediaries to remove vague categories of content that include fake news, defamation of religions, anti-government propaganda and hate speech that can be abused to target political dissent.

One more can now be added to the list. Turkey has just passed what the Electronic Frontier Foundation calls the worst version of Germanys NetzDG yet. Although its unfortunate that a regional leader like Turkey has brought in this law, its hardly a surprise. Turkey has a terrible record for freedom of speech: it is ranked 154th out of 180 countries in the RSF 2020 World Press Freedom Index. In 2018, its courts blocked access to around 3000 articles, including those on political corruption and human rights violations. Turkey has a track record of repeatedly blocking online companies like Facebook, YouTube and Twitter. Its government also brought in a VPN ban, and blocked the whole of Wikipedia.

One reason for these continuing attacks on freedom of speech is that Turkeys President, Recep Tayyip Erdogan, is notoriously thin-skinned. For example, a Turkish citizen who simply shared a meme comparing Erdogans facial expressions with Gollum from Lord of the Rings was not only hit with a suspended sentence, but lost custody of his children. The new censorship law also seems to have been brought in partly for personal reasons, as Al Jazeera reports:

President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, who has greatly concentrated powers into his own hands during 17 years in office, pledged this month to bring social media platforms under control following a series of tweets that allegedly insulted his daughter and son-in-law after they announced the birth of their fourth child on Twitter. At least 11 people were detained for questioning over the tweets.

The new law was passed extremely quickly: barely a month passed from its announcement to its approval.

The EFF has provided a good summary of its main features. They include requiring social media platforms that have more than two million daily users to appoint a local representative in Turkey. This is similar to the approach taken by Brazil in its new fake news law, discussed by Privacy News Online a few weeks ago. The penalties for failing to do so can be steep: they include advertisement bans, heavy financial penalties, and bandwidth reductions. The legislation allows Turkish courts to order Internet providers to throttle social media platforms bandwidth by up to 90%, in effect blocking access to those sites. Once local representatives are in place, they are responsible for blocking or taking down content when ordered to do so by the Turkish government.

Social media companies will also be required to remove content that allegedly violates personal rights and the privacy of personal life within 48 hours of receiving a court order, or face steep fines. Measures to protect privacy are to be welcomed, generally; however, these sound dangerously vague. Its easy to imagine them being abused by the rich and powerful who want true but embarrassing material removed. Another requirement is for social media platforms to store user data locally. It is likely that Turkish authorities will use this to demand details about people posting items that displease Erdogan, for example. In order to avoid that risk, many Turkish social media users will probably prefer to engage in self-censorship, which is doubtless the outcome the authorities want here.

Freedom of speech in Turkey has been under attack for years, and the new law is likely to exacerbate the existing problems. Given Erdogans grip on power, theres not much that can be done about that for the moment. The worry has to be that if these new measures choke off online dissent in Turkey, as seems likely, it will encourage other repressive governments to adopt a similar approach elsewhere.

Featured image by Mstyslav Chernov.

Originally posted here:

Turkey takes German's hate speech law, and makes it much worse with its own censorship and data localization rules - Privacy News Online

On Aug. 5, PEN America published an explosive report that may put Hollywood on the defensive. Titled "Made in Hollywood, Censored by Beijing," the 94-page study details how the major studios and A-list directors increasingly are making decisions including cast, plot, dialogue and settings "based on an effort to avoid antagonizing Chinese officials."

The nonprofit that champions free expression cites examples of the studios inviting Chinese government regulators onto their film sets to advise "on how to avoid tripping the censors' wires," including on Marvel's 2013 film Iron Man 3. (The studios did not respond to PEN America when asked about claims in its report.)

The report which chronicles creative choices on such films as Dr. Strange, World War Z and the upcoming Top Gun: Maverick coincides with criticism from the White House that the studios routinely "kowtow" to the authoritarian government's censorship demands. In addition, Richard Gere the most high-profile actor to feel China's wrath because of his pro-Tibet statements appeared before a Senate committee June 30.

In his testimony, Gere suggested that economic interests drive studios to avoid social issues that Hollywood once addressed, including Tibet. "Imagine Marty Scorsese's Kundun, about the life of the Dalai Lama, or my own film Red Corner, which is highly critical of the Chinese legal system," Gere said. "Imagine them being made today. It wouldn't happen."

Back in 1998, then-Disney chief Michael Eisner apologized for Kundun, which depicted Chinese oppression of the Tibetan people, calling it "a form of insult to our friends," and the studio hired former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger to help with the fallout of the movie. To this day, the film remains radioactive for the studio. (Kundun is not available on Disney+, and the studio did not respond when asked if it plans to add it to the platform.)

Appeasement means profits. American movies earned $2.6 billion in China in 2019, with Disney's Avengers: Endgame pulling in $614 million there alone. Perhaps considering the stakes, Disney stayed silent when Mulan star Liu Yifei drew fire last August for posting on social media during the Hong Kong protests: "I support Hong Kong's police, you can beat me up now."

The Trump administration also has been on the attack. In a July 16 policy speech, U.S. Attorney General William Barr took aim at studios, saying they have provided "a massive propaganda coup for the Chinese Communist Party." Barr added that Paramount told producers of 2013's World War Z to remove a scene in which characters speculate that a virus, which triggered a zombie apocalypse, may have originated in China. The film, which grossed $540 million globally, never received a release in China, likely because the government frowns upon themes of the undead, ghosts or time travel. (A knowledgeable source says China's zombie film ban is the biggest reason that Paramount wouldn't greenlight a $200 million David Fincher-Brad Pitt pairing for a sequel.)

Though PEN and Barr fall on the same side of the fence on China's influence on Hollywood, the nonprofit is no friend of the Trump administration. In 2018, PEN sued President Trump in federal court in an effort to prevent him from using the machinery of the government to retaliate or threaten reprisals against journalists and media outlets for coverage he dislikes (a federal judge in New York ruled in March that the suit can proceed). In a 2017 open letter written by PEN, 65 writers and artists blasted Trumps visa ban covering seven Muslim-majority countries.

The report lays out the growing phenomenon of self-censorship among the studios, fearful of having their films denied entry in the lucrative market and the ways in which flattering the government has become a powerful incentive as it can lead to better release dates, preferential advertising arrangements and a more friendly relationship with Chinese investors and regulators.

"Our biggest concern is that Hollywood is increasingly normalizing preemptive self-censorship in anticipation of what the Beijing censor is looking for," says James Tager, PEN deputy director of free expression policy and research and the report's author. USC professor Stan Rosen, an expert on China's film industry, calls the censorship criticism "a perfect storm" that will put a spotlight on the entertainment industry. "It's going to get harder and harder for Hollywood to not respond," Rosen notes.

For those working to raise awareness about human rights abuses when it comes to China's 61-year occupation of Tibet, Hollywood was once a friend and is now a foe. Films like the 1997 Brad Pitt starrer Seven Years in Tibet have been replaced by movies like DreamWorks Animation's 2019 film Abominable, which reinforces Beijing's territorial claims to the South China Sea. For 2016's Doctor Strange, Disney's Marvel was willing to face criticism for whitewashing an Asian character played by Tilda Swinton, and in the process avoided featuring a character who was Tibetan in the comic books. And Skydance/Paramount's Top Gun: Maverick was criticized, as the PEN report notes, for the "mysterious disappearance of the Taiwanese flag" on a flight jacket that was seen in the 1986 original.

"If Hollywood is siding with the money, sooner or later they will be on the wrong side and lose money because the general public will stop watching [all] movies," says Washington-based activist Tenzing Barshee, who is president of the Capital Area Tibetan Association.

Even more immediate, the industry could be stuck with a damning label when it comes to its relationship with China: hypocritical. Says Tager: "Hollywood enjoys a reputation as being willing to speak truth to power with its own government, which we applaud. We just want that standard to be applied to the rest of the world."

This story first appeared in the Aug. 5 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.

Originally posted here:

Hollywood Is "Increasingly Normalizing" Self-Censorship for China, Report Finds - Hollywood Reporter

Amid escalating tensions between the U.S. and China, Hollywood has recently taken heat from politicians for its willingness to alter its movies to appease the Chinese government. Now PEN America, a free expression advocacy group, is also calling out the American film industry for self-censorship.

The New York-based nonprofit on Wednesday published a 94-page report detailing the ways Chinas power has influenced not only what movies are shown in the worlds most populous country, but also what kinds of stories are told to a global audience.

PEN America, known for defending persecuted writers and journalists, called on Hollywood studios to adopt strategies and practices to govern their interactions with the Chinese government that affirm and protect artistic freedom to the fullest possible extent.

Among the many recommendations in the report titled Made in Hollywood, Censored by Beijing: The U.S. Film Industry and Chinese Government Influence PEN America asked the major studios to commit that, if a film is altered to satisfy the demands of censors in China, those changes will be made only to the version released in China and not to the cut released globally. The group also asked studios to commit to publicly share requests for changes made by foreign governments. Additionally, it called on the Motion Picture Assn., which lobbies for the five major studios and Netflix, to issue an annual report on the industrys relationship with China.

Filmmakers cannot reduce their work to the lowest common denominator of only content that is deemed acceptable by one of the worlds most censorious regimes, the report said.

The MPA declined to comment.

Industry insiders who spoke to The Times about these issues have largely dismissed such recommendations as unworkable and potentially counterproductive. Chinas censorship regime is famously opaque, and officials there do not tell studios why a movie has been rejected. Publicly proclaiming when their movies are being censored would likely damage studios standing in China, setting back years of work spent opening up the market.

But PEN America argues that Chinas lack of transparency is a feature, not a bug, forcing studios to avoid content and themes that might be offensive to government interests. James Tager, the PEN America researcher who authored the report, said openness about censorship is a first step to fighting it.

The kid-gloves and hands-off approach that Hollywood is normalizing gives China a free pass to continue these policies when it comes to the global community, Tager said in an interview. If this phenomenon remains invisible, or semi-visible at best, no solution will ever emerge.

PEN Americas document on the relationship between China and Hollywood has been in the works for more than a year. It comes after several weeks of attacks against Hollywood by Trump administration officials and their political allies accusing executives of kowtowing to Beijings demands while vocally supporting social justice causes at home. U.S. Atty. General William Barr last month railed against the film industry for making changes to movies including Doctor Strange and World War Z to placate Chinas desire to project a positive global image.

Studio executives have brushed off criticism from Washington Republicans as political posturing at a time when the administration is trying to shift attention away from its handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Industry leaders say they are simply making smart business decisions in order to show movies in the worlds second-largest box office market. Getting movies seen in China is key for the bottom line of many big-budget productions.

Tager, however, argues that Hollywoods self-censorship has negative consequences because it means studios wont produce films touching on topics such as Tibet, Taiwan and the Tiananmen Square protests that would surely provoke retaliation from the Chinese government. PEN America has previously spoken out against the imprisoning of Chinese journalists, the persecution of Uighurs and the arrest of pro-democracy leaders in Hong Kong.

These are stories that need to be told, he said. If the Chinese film industry is unable to tell them, and if Hollywood is unable to tell them, who do we expect to tell them?

World War Z, the 2013 movie about a disease outbreak that causes a zombie apocalypse, is a particularly timely example of Chinas influence on global film content, Tager said. Paramount Pictures reportedly demanded the filmmakers change dialogue in which characters discuss China as the origin of the zombie outbreak. Despite the effort to avoid ruffling feathers, the film did not receive a release date in China.

Max Brooks, the author of 2006 novel World War Z, wrote in a recent Washington Post op-ed that he refused to edit the parts of his book that would probably prevent its release to readers in China. He chose China as the epicenter for a reason, he said, noting parallels with how Chinas government tried to control the narrative around the spread of the novel coronavirus.

I needed an authoritarian regime with strong control over the press, he wrote. Smothering public awareness would give my plague time to spread, first among the local population, then into other nations. By the time the rest of the world figured out what was going on, it would be too late.

Tager suggested it may be in studios best interest to address the issue independently before U.S. government officials try to interfere in Hollywoods business. Congressman Mike Gallagher (R-Wis.) has suggested requiring disclaimers for movies censored for China, a sort of geopolitical twist on the ubiquitous no animals were harmed disclosures. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) has proposed cutting off government resources for productions tweaked to suit Beijing.

Those proposals arent expected to gain traction in Washington or Hollywood. But Tager still thinks studios would be wise to take preemptive steps so that one form of government pressure isnt substituted for another.

We believe its better for the industry to take this action on its own rather than waiting for the federal government to do it, Tager said. We would not want any legislative action imposing government censorship in the name of freeing Hollywood from government censorship.

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PEN America urges Hollywood transparency on China censorship - Los Angeles Times

WASHINGTON - If I cant tell the truth, I will keep my mouth shut for a month, thats 720 hours.

Meet Beijing-based Chinese performance artist Brother Nut. Born in Shenzhen in 1981, hes internationally known only by his pseudonym.

From 4 p.m. June 1, until 4 p.m. July 1, he barely opened his mouth. Thats part of his project Shut Up for 30 Days, which is designed to spotlight Chinas shrinking space for freedom of speech, particularly regarding the coronavirus pandemic.

He sealed his lips in different ways, using metal clamps, gloves and a surgical face mask inscribed with shut up. He also wore packing tape marked with the characters Error 404, in reference to Chinas Great Internet Firewall.

During a telephone interview with VOA from Beijing, he said there were a few times when he slipped up and uttered a comment. On those rare occasions, he said he slapped himself 16 times and ate only white rice for all three meals after that.

Self-punishment, you know, he said, just like if the authority asks you to shut up and you fail to do so, you will be punished.

He named himself Brother Nut 10 years ago when he began his performance arts.

Nut, in English, it means someone whos weird and hard to deal with, the 39-year-old told VOA. I think it represents my attitude perfectly.

Living up to that name, he has done quite a few crazy and weird things over the past 10 years.

In 2015, he launched Project Dust, in which he created a brick made entirely from dust he vacuumed out of the heavily polluted Beijing city air over 100 days. The project highlighted Beijings air pollution problems at a time when China sought to recast itself as an environmentally aware nation.

In 2018, he made headlines with project Nongfu Spring Market, in which he filled 9,000 water bottles with cloudy and contaminated water from a village in Shaanxi, in northwestern China, and exhibited them in Beijings art district, 798 Art Zone, to showcase the countrys water problems.

In 2019, he collected 400 dolls from the children of migrant workers in Shenzhen in southeastern China, and he used an excavator to throw all the dolls into the air, advocating for the kids who lost the opportunity to get an education because of land seizures back home.

Brother Nut says that in a country like China, art is a symbol of resistance.

In the past two months, he has launched several projects regarding freedom of speech.

In addition to Shut Up for 30 Days, he has set up the truth award to salute journalists who dare to speak out during the countrys battle with COVID-19.

Brother Nut raised just short of $3,000 from 73 netizens, and he gave the award and money to Gong Jingqi, a journalist from Chinas People Magazine. She wrote a bombshell feature story on whistleblower doctor Ai Fen, the director of the emergency department at Wuhan Central Hospital, one of the hospitals most directly affected by COVID-19. The original piece was quickly deleted from Chinas tightly controlled social media, yet its copy was widely circulated online.

His project Error 404 invited netizens to list sensitive words banned on Chinas internet. More than 100 netizens participated, listing roughly 1,000 words as the most sensitive words in 2020. These included National Security Law, Soviet Union has died and raise your hand if you disagree.

Brother Nut said people are so used to Error 404 they feel indifferent when they see the words. These banned phrases are the epitaph of our time, he told VOA.

From air pollution, water pollution and migrant workers, to freedom of speech, he said hes inching closer to the dangerous red line.

But this red line can move, you know. Maybe instead of me moving closer to the red line, it is the red line drawing closer to everybody, he shrugged.

He was taken away by Chinas secret police for tea drinking, which is an unofficial way of interrogating and intimidating anyone who dares to voice different opinions. The first thing they told me were artists are garbage. I was pretty shocked, he said.

Last year, he was detained for 10 days for a project he undertook on financial fraud.

After his release from prison, Brother Nut continued his performance art. Im on this land, so Im focusing on the things happening here, he said.

Chinas shrinking creative space has made it hard for artists, but Brother Nut said he wants to do something to create change.

We have to believe theres a future for us.

See the rest here:

Brother Nut, the Artist, Taking Vow of Silence to Protest Chinas Censorship - VOA Asia

Amid geopolitical conflicts with China, India has banned TikTok. Its looking into banning more China-based apps like Alibaba. With the U.S. having similar conversations about TikTok, sources are becoming concerned that were facing an age of internet censorship.

Lets take a look at whats happening in India and globally surrounding new apps like TikTok. What should cause more concern, data mining, or censorship? Lets find out.

Indias official reason for banning TikTok has to do with privacy concerns. Like most apps, TikTok mines data from users to show targeted ads and to bring up content individual TikTok users want to see.

TikTok works quickly to parse out videos users want to interact with. From likes within the first hour of use, TikTok makes suggestions based on the videos you interact with. Like dancing? TikTok shows you more dance videos. Liking DIY instead? Your FYP (For You Page) scroll will be full of home improvement and craft projects.

Concerns stem from TikTok tracking macro-data on users all over the world. If an app is privy to viewing trends in a specific country, in theory they can use the information to sway elections. Many supporters of the ban point to possible Russia interference in the U.S. 2016 election that monitored user data to spread false information.

TikTok was banned in India amid privacy concerns, but is that the only reason? The two most populous countries have had negative relations with each other for decades. Deadly border clashes are escalating, including one last month that left twenty dead at the India/China border.

Also, the Indian government isnt the only force driving TikToks ban there. After rising tensions, the Indian population is calling for a ban on Chinese goods and services, especially technology like apps.

Current U.S. President Donald Trump is entertaining the idea of banning TikTok in the U.S. Like India, his reasoning has to do with national security. According to Secretary of state Mike Pompeo, American users shouldnt download the app unless they want their private information in the hands of the Chinese communist party.

A spokesperson for TikTok released a statement about the possible ban, denying that they have ever given information to the Chinese government, and they wouldnt do so if asked. The statement also pointed out that TikTok is owned by an American CEO.

Critics of Trump say the reason has more to do with wounded pride than national security. Thousands of teenagers sabotaged attendance at Trumps rally past month thanks to a TikTok campaign. TikTok users would claim tickets and wouldnt show up, driving down attendance.

Short answer: even with an executive order, it may not stick. Even if Trump directed the FCC to shut TikTok down, civil liberties groups like the ACLU are waiting in the wings to take him to court. Theyre ready to argue that banning an entire platform is a violation of The First Amendment safeguarding free speech.

However, thats not stopping Donald Trump and his administration from seriously looking into banning TikTok. One way theyre looking to weaken the platform is to have an American company like Microsoft buy the app. Trump was opposed to the plan at first, but now he supports it as long as the U.S. government gets a substantial cut.

Its unclear whether the U.S. Department of Treasury can actually take a cut if TikTok gets bought out by an American company. Trumps requirement that a portion of the deal goes to the U.S. has no basis in antitrust law according to financial experts.

See the rest here:

Censorship on the internet in 2020: The potential effects of TikTok - Film Daily

Italy is still in love with Diletta Leotta, the sexiest sports journalist in the transalpine country, who is also popular and known worldwide for her activity on Instagram, where she has more than seven million followers who in the last few hours has delighted with a suggestive bikini-clad posing the censorship of the aforementioned social network.

The first bath is never forgotten, wrote the DAZN reporter next to the photo, in which she appears in a bikini on a boat with the sunset in the background. Diletta Leotta begins her vacation after the end of Serie A, and celebrates it with her first dip in the Mediterranean Sea.

Diletta Leotta has been in focus for several years, but there was an episode that ended up catapulting her to fame. Surely, she does not remember it with a good taste in her mouth, because she must have had a bad time when some hackers stole videos and photos of sexual content from their mobile phone and published it on the Internet.

The hackers illegally accessed his phone and collected the necessary data to expose a sexual video with his partner, with whom he was in the kitchen house playing risqu games with cream, etc. At the moment, those responsible for this illegal act have not been found and the videos and photos have become so viral that it is still possible to find them online.

Follow this link:

The Italian journalist sets fire to Instagram bordering on censorship with her first bath - Explica

Were going to talk a bit about the organizations Facebook and Google, which as you must know, are two of the most powerful, influential and in our view, possibly dangerous groups that the world has ever produced. Imagine texting a message and having it blocked because an agent hired by your provider has determined that it is racist, homophobic, anti-feminist, too political, or just improper. But thats the way Facebook and Googlenow work with messages transmitted by their members. Countless members of Facebook have been punished and temporarily or even permanently barred for the contents of their communications. Joe Biden has gotten into the act by sending multiple letters to Facebook attacking the company for policies that allow politicians, Trump specifically, to freely make false claims on its site. If he becomes president, will he follow through with legislation banning what he considers false messages on any and all platforms?

The dangerous reality of asociety in which the expression of a certain opinion is turned into a crime has already been seen across Europe. Dutch citizens were reportedly visited by police and warned about posting anti-mass immigration sentiments on social posts. It can happen here. The sinister thing about what Facebook is now doing is that it is now removing speech that many may consider racist, along with speech that only some worker at Facebook decides is racist. Censorship is growing within these huge messaging platforms. What, if in the near future, racist speech appears to include anything critical of a black, brown or person of color, religion,politician, sports figure or any other media star? And that decision is made by a corporation controlling the messaging? Censorship?

Mark Zuckerberg, in recent Congressional hearings stated that his company aims to allow as much free expression as possible unless it causes imminent risk of specific harms or damage. We believe in values democracy, competition, inclusion and free expression. But he hires censors to go through our messages and are the judges and juries to determine if they are harmful to society. This doesnt sound right.

Rather than initiating and participating in violence, speech is one of the best ways for people to vent their feelings, anger, fear hate or frustrations. Put it down in words, rather than in hurtful physical actions. If the right to speak out about ones displeasures is banned, only violence is left. Free speech is at stake here. Every single dictatorship in recent memory Nazi Germany, Stalinist Russia, Castros Cuba, were all replete with hate-speech laws that were intended to limit free speech that the state disapproved of.

Extremism still grew and flourished. We cannot tolerate such a situation here in America. We stand for the freedom of expression, the right to speak out. Let society either accept, condemn or ignore what you say. But you have the right to voice your opinion without being censored, banished or punished. And corporations should not have the right to determine what is hate, racist or xenophobic speech. Were treading in dangerous waters.

Read more from the original source:

Is the Gov't Outsourcing Censorship Duties to FB & Google? - The Jewish Voice

GreatFire, an anonymous China-based organization dedicated to monitoring and circumventing Chinas internet censorship system known as the Great Firewall, has announced the release of an app creator for the Android market.

The GreatFire AppMaker is meant to allow third parties blocked in mainland China to build apps that will bypass those restrictions.

According to the announcement, one such organization, the Human Rights Foundation (HRF) has already made use of the GreatFire AppMaker to create its own app. This means that while the website of this group dedicated to human rights and freedoms remains inaccessible to users in China, they can now see that content by installing the app built using the GreatFire AppMaker.

Double your web browsing speed with today's sponsor. Get Brave.

GreatFire which says it has in the past directed Chinese internet users more than 13 million times to censored news stories about government corruption, politics, scandals and other sensitive issues explained how organizations, media outlets, and individual bloggers can make use of the new tool free of charge.

They are invited to visit the GreatFire AppMakers website and compile their app following a number of steps, such as naming it, providing the homepage of the website it will draw content from, etc. The app will be branded both with theirs and GreatFires logo and downloadable as an APK file.

As for how it works GreatFire said a censorship-circumventing browser is included in it, while this evasion of Chinas restrictions is happening using multiple strategies, including machine learning.

The app creator and the apps it builds are not limited to the Chinese market, the organization said, and can be used anywhere where internet restrictions similar to those in China have been put in place.

GreatFire offers several products and services, such as FreeBrowser, FreeWeChat, FreeWeibo, GreatFire Analyzer, among others, aimed at providing access to blocked pages and restoring deleted content.

GreatFire said the appmaker project was inspired by its FreeBrowser app that allows users in China access to censored stories.

The organization said that it appeared on the scene in 2014 with the support and funding of the Open Technology Fund (OTF), including to develop AppleCensorship.com, which is tracking Apples censorship of app stores around the world, including Hong Kong.

See the original post here:

GreatFire introduces app maker to bypass Chinas censorship - Reclaim The Net

A very interesting article in Foreign Affairs by my UCLA School of Law colleague Kal Raustiala; here's an excerpt:

What sets the United States apart from the rest of the world is and has always been its soft power. The Soviets may have equaled the Americans in nuclear capability, but they could never rival the appeal of the "American way of life." And even as China tries to spread its culture across the globe, its rise tends to inspire more trepidation than admiration.

Many ingredients combine to give U.S. soft power its strength and reach, but entertainment and culture have always been central to the mix. Film and television have shaped how the world sees the United Statesand how it perceives the country's adversaries. Yet that unique advantage seems to be slipping away. When it comes to some of the great questions of global power politics today, Hollywood has become remarkably timid. On some issues, it has gone silent altogether.

The most glaring example is the growing wariness of U.S. studios to do anything that might imperil their standing with the Chinese government. China's box office is as large as the American one, and entertainment is above all a business. So Hollywood sanitizes or censors topics that Beijing doesn't like. But the phenomenon is not limited to China, nor is it all about revenue. Studios, writers, and producers increasingly fear they will be hacked or harmed if they portray any foreign autocrats in a negative light, be it Russian President Vladimir Putin or North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un.

It wasn't always this way. In the 1930s, Charlie Chaplin'sThe Great Dictatortook on Adolf Hitler. Later, Martin Scorsese'sKundunshone a light on the fate of Tibet, andThe Unbearable Lightness of BeingandThe Hunt for Red Octobermade the Cold War come alive. Today,the market power of Chinaand the cyberpower of some rogue statesis making studios and creatives think twice about producing such daring, overtly political films. And as the retreat from the kind of films that once bolstered American soft power accelerates, Hollywood is running out of real-life antagonists.

View post:

"Fear of Authoritarian Regimes Is Pushing the Film Industry to Self-Censor" - Reason

Vice President Mike Pence said Tuesday the Trump administration is continuing to "lean into"investigatingthe claimsocial media and other tech companies are censoring content and opinions contrary to liberal doctrine, promising to preserve the freedom of speech and freedom of press on the Internet.

Speaking with Breitbart News Editor-in-Chief Alex Marlow on SiriusXM's "Breitbart News Daily," Pence addressed in broad terms the actions of tech companies such as Facebook, Google and particularly Twitter.

Last week, Twitter removed a Breitbart's livestream news conference of the medical group America's Frontline Doctors held on the steps of the U.S. Supreme Court regarding what it said was misinformation on the novel coronavirus.

It was also removed from YouTube.

Twitter claimed the livestream was a violation of its "COVID-19 misinformation policy," Breitbart News reported. Among the claims made by some of the participants of the event was the promotion of the half-century old anti-malaria drug hydroxychloroquine as possible treatment for the novel coronavirus.

The group's website has been removed by the tech company squarespace.com.

"We're going to do our very best every day between now and election day and for four more years after that to make sure that we preserve the freedom of speech and freedom of the press on the Internet," Pence said.

Marlow also said one of Breitbart News' Twitter accounts was "shuttered" until the video of the press conference was deleted.

Pence said the Trump administration was working to ensure freedom of opinion on social media platforms, which have enjoyed liability protection under the 1996 Communications Decency Act by claiming they are merely "passive bulleting boards" of information.

He referred to last week's action by President Donald Trump, which formally requested the Federal Communication Commission reinterpret the law particularly in regard to social media companies which selectively choose which user content to allow and which to block, edit or censor.

"Well, freedom of speech is the bedrock of American democracy, that's why our founding fathers enshrined the freedom of speech, freedom of the press, in the first amendment of the constitution and I want all your listeners to know as they've seen this president and our administration take action to prevent online censorship in the past, that we're going to continue to lean into this effort," Pence said.

"As you know, last summer the Department of Justice launched a broad antitrust review of big tech, that's ongoing. The president this summer signed an executive order that set into motion a series of actions that launched a tech bias reporting tool at the White House and called on the FTC to consider action whenever is appropriate to prohibit unfair or deceptive acts affecting commerce, etc."

2020 Newsmax. All rights reserved.

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Pence Says Administration Will 'Lean Into' Issue of Tech Censorship - Newsmax