In the past two weeks, Hong Kong publisher Raymond Yeung has hastily made changes to a draft paper copy of a book entitled To Freedom (), replacing the word revolution with protests, tweaking a banned slogan and cutting passages that advocate independence for the Chinese territory.

The changes were hard to make, he said, but impossible to avoid since China passed a National Security Law on June 30, making the broadly defined crimes of secession, subversion, terrorism and collusion with foreign forces punishable by up to life in prison.

This is really painful, Yeung said, as he flipped through pages of the collection of essays by 50 protesters, lawyers, social workers and other participants in the pro-democracy demonstrations that shook Hong Kong last year.

This is history. This is the truth, he said, holding up the book with blue sticky flags on many pages to mark changes made because of the new law.

Just as demand for political books was surging in Hong Kong after a year of protests, the territorys once unbridled and prolific independent publishers are now censoring themselves in the face of the new law.

Hong Kong authorities say freedom of speech remains intact, but in the past two weeks public libraries have taken some books off the shelves, shops have removed protest-related decorations and the slogan Liberate Hong Kong! Revolution of our times has been declared illegal.

To Freedom is the first political book Yeung has taken on as a part-time publisher.

After Beijing introduced the security law, the books original printer bailed, and two other printers declined, he said.

Another printer agreed to take it anonymously, but wants to get a better sense of how the law is implemented first.

The Hong Kong Trade Development Council, which organizes the annual Hong Kong Book Fair, told exhibitors not to display what it called unlawful books at this weeks planned fair.

The council postponed the fair at the last minute on Monday due to a recent spike in COVID-19 cases. It did not specify a new date for the event.

Three non-governmental pro-Beijing groups had teamed up to urge people to report stalls at the fair selling material promoting Hong Kong independence, a subject that is anathema to the Chinese government.

Every citizen has a duty to report crime, said Innes Tang (), chairman of PolitiHK Social Strategic, one group behind the campaign. We are not the police. We are not the ones to say where the red line is.

Jimmy Pang (), a veteran local publisher who has participated in every fair since it began in 1990, called this year the most terrifying year because of the security law and the economic downturn that was already hurting publishers.

He said the law has prompted publishing houses and writers to halt projects while printers, distributors and bookstores have turned down sensitive books.

For example, Breakazine, a local Christian publication, said it suspended the distribution of its mid-July issue called Dangerous Reading while seeking legal advice for navigating the security law.

Everyone is avoiding risks by suffering in silence, said Pang, a spokesman for 50 exhibitors at the fair.

Last year, a unit of Pangs Sub-Culture Ltd published Chan Yun-chis () 6430 () a book of interviews with surviving pro-democracy protesters in the run-up to the 30th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, a subject heavily censored on the mainland.

In the future, there will be no sensitive books related to politics, he said.

Bao Pu (), the son of Bao Tong (), the most senior Chinese Communist Party official jailed for sympathizing with Tiananmen protesters, founded New Century Press in 2005 in Hong Kong to publish books based on memoirs and government documents and other sources that often differ from the official versions of events in China and could not be published on the mainland.

His customers were mostly mainland visitors, a lucrative niche in Hong Kong until China began to tighten border controls a decade ago, making it harder to bring back books to the mainland.

Given the drop off in demand, Bao Pu said he no longer plans to publish such books in Hong Kong. However, he urged other publishers to avoid self-censorship.

If everybody does that, then the law would have much more impact on freedom of speech, he said.

Comments will be moderated. Keep comments relevant to the article. Remarks containing abusive and obscene language, personal attacks of any kind or promotion will be removed and the user banned. Final decision will be at the discretion of the Taipei Times.

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Self-censorship on the rise in HK -

In recent years, there has been a marked and disquieting increase in the willingness of a raft of actors left, center, and right, both in government and in civil society, to engage in a practice and attitude of censorship and to abandon due process, presumption of innocence, and other core civil liberties.

There have been some attempts from different quarters at a pushback against this, but the most recent such effort at a course correction is an open letter decrying the phenomenon appearing in Harpers magazine. The letter, signed by some 150 public intellectuals, writers, and academics including figures like Noam Chomsky, Margaret Atwood, and Salman Rushdie, has provoked a polarizing response.

Current Affairs editor Nathan Robinson, for example, argues that all this is a right-wing myth, slander against the Left, that those perpetrating the alleged acts of censorship are in fact relatively powerless, and that when incidents of alleged cancel-culture censorship are investigated, one finds that the targets are doing just fine after all.

Because the Harpers letter was fairly anodyne and declined to mention any specific incidents, Robinson cherry-picks a small sample of occurrences that he imagines must be what the signatories are talking about and tries to demonstrate that these incidents were really nothing-burgers of no consequence, distracting us from real issues.

What is true is that to limit this discussion to the acts of the extremely online mob, to, say, British author Jon Ronsons concerns about Twitter public shaming, or to the ill-defined term cancel culture, entirely misses the far wider atmosphere of an aggressive and accelerating threat to civil liberties.

It is understandable that a brief open letter would not offer a catalog of episodes, but this is nevertheless unfortunate, as it allows Robinson and others to maintain a nothing to see here, please move along stance.

When we do in fact consider such a catalog, we find that to deny that this is happening, or to diminish it as inconsequential is untenable. There are simply too many examples.

Consider efforts to ban Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) activists, other opponents of the current Israeli government, and critics of Zionism tout court from campuses. Since 2016, the Ontario legislature has been the site of multiple efforts to condemn or criminalize BDS activity and pressing campus administrations to cancel Israeli Apartheid Weeks.

In 2014, the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign withdrew an offer of employment to English professor Steven Salaita after some faculty, students, and donors asserted that his tweets critical of the Netanyahu administration during the Gaza war were antisemitic. Due to the controversy, hes been driven out of academic employment and now works as a bus driver. Political scientist Norman Finkelstein, another critic of the Israeli occupation, was denied tenure at DePaul University in 2007 after a successful campaign by the Anti-Defamation League and lawyer Alan Dershowitz. He likewise has difficulty finding employment and says he struggles to pay the rent.

When appeals to academic freedom and due process are raised in all these cases, the response from the pro-Likudnik right has echoed the no platform rhetoric from the Left, arguing that criticism of the Israeli government is hate speech and thus should not be protected (and indeed, in Canada, unlike in the United States, hate speech is not constitutionally protected). They also copy the liberal-lefts demand for stay in your lane identitarian deference (in which only the oppressed group concerned may speak to an issue), asserting that non-Jews cannot comprehend Jewish suffering and so must shut up and listen.

Despite his cancellation, Salaita does not support the Harpers letter. This is perhaps understandable given that English professor Cary Nelson is a signatory but was also among those who led the charge against hiring Salaita. It must be equally galling to him that New York Times opinion writer Bari Weiss, another Harpers signatory, spent her Columbia University days campaigning against pro-Palestinian professors for alleged intimidation of Jewish students under the Orwellian guise of Columbians for Academic Freedom.

But while Nelson and Weiss may be guilty of egregious hypocrisy, hypocrisy does not undermine the letters argument for freedom of speech. Despite Finkelsteins cancellation, or indeed precisely because he knows his cancellation to be a breach of academic freedom, he remains an adamant defender of freedom of speech. He knows that the solution to his own censorship comes not from censorship of those who censor him, but from an end to censorship entirely.

The upturning of lives and livelihoods comes not just in the arena of the Israel-Palestine conflict with respect to Salaita and Finkelstein. In some cases, the religious rights efforts to de-platform is actively defended by the Left, such as when Iranian feminist Maryam Namazie was shouted down in 2015 by Islamic conservatives at Goldsmiths University and the universitys feminist society defended their use of the hecklers veto.

There are those who deny that the current chilly climate amounts to censorship, as censorship is only something that can be imposed by the state. Some concede that it is also something that elites can impose. But both positions deny that censorship is something that the crowd can impose. Yet there are many cases that involve independent schools, so this plainly cannot be the action of a state, even as this is quite clearly censorship. And the Islamic conservatives at Goldsmiths could in no way be described as elites. So to suggest that ordinary people cannot participate in censorship or inculcation of an illiberal environment is to be blind to the ways that such attitudes can operate at multiple levels in society.

Campuses are in any case far from the only sites of struggle. Over the past two decades, conservative governments such as those of George W. Bush, Canadas Stephen Harper, Australias Tony Abbott, and now Donald Trump have repeatedly muzzled climate scientists and other earth science and conservation biology researchers.

Conservatives who historically tended to oppose free speech and held the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) as chief in its pantheon of villains have suddenly rebranded themselves as free expressions greatest defenders. But while they were happy to defend alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopouloss right to express xenophobic and misogynist comments, when he began talking about the messy complications of the age of consent among gay men, they threw him under the bus.

Donald Trump has worked to clamp down on trade unions salting workplaces, that is, the century-old practice of getting a trade-union-friendly person hired at a workplace that is targeted for unionization. And perhaps most notoriously, the same man who at Mount Rushmore denounced a far-left fascist [sic] cultural revolution, calling for free and open debate instead, only weeks before used the National Guard to teargas and clear nonviolent protesters from the streets of Washington for the sake of a cheap photo-op.

One might expect the liberal-left to be among the strongest defenders of free speech at work, and of the right of workers to say what they wish, but too many have enthusiastically called upon employers to fire workers for alleged reactionary speech outside of the workplace, in effect cheering on at-will termination of employment, and embraced the multibillion-dollar human resources departmentorganized and employer-supervised sensitivity training industry, imposing top-down workshops, where workers are petrified they might say the wrong thing.

How this enhancement of the semifeudal powers of bosses to deliver 24/7 monitoring of workers speech is going to advance the trade union movement is a mystery. Instead, they should join efforts to organize unions both as the greatest bulwark against workplace censorship and the greatest weapon we have in delivering sexual, racial, and economic equality, and, if anything, pushing for the extension of First Amendment protection to the workplace.

Authoritarian governments such as the Islamic conservative administration of Turkeys Recep Tayyip Erdoan have demanded that comedians who make fun of them be censored by other governments. Germany acceded to the request for prosecution. In a similar fashion, China has convinced tech giants and even the NBA to censor discussion of human rights domestically and overseas. Hollywood is no less acquiescent, deleting from movies anything that Beijing objects to, from references to torture by Chinese police to appearances of Winnie-the-Pooh (a symbol of democratic opposition).

Meanwhile, too many on the liberal-left, like turkeys voting for Christmas, urge ever-greater de-platforming of hate speech from these tech companies, only to discover how easily their own expression gets categorized as hate speech and taken down (as when various left-wing groups were kicked off Reddit along with pro-Trump ones).

Liberal governments have been little better. Former president Barack Obama may have given a salutary address criticizing cancel culture, but he also used the 1917 Espionage Act to prosecute more leakers and whistleblowers such as Chelsea Manning and Ed Snowden than all previous administrations combined.

Secularists in France and Quebec have produced a raft of laws banning burkas or the veil in various forms, thus engaging in the same practice of telling women what they can and cannot wear as those who elsewhere force women to wear burkas or the veil.

Similarly, the French government of center-left President Franois Hollande marched alongside millions in the streets in defense of free speech after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, but then proceeded to prosecute school students for expressing their sympathy for the attackers.

Libertarian groups, to their credit, have criticized much of this, but when it comes to censorship by the likes of Facebook, Google, YouTube, Twitter, and Reddit, there is a sudden quiescence. Despite such social media platforms becoming a de facto public square, these are private companies, note libertarians. This is simply the workings of the market. Their stance is simply, If you dont like what they are doing, then dont sign their Terms of Service agreements.

The galloping advance of censorship and restriction of civil liberties is not restricted to high politics and Silicon Valley. Local conservative politicians in some two-thirds of European Union member state Poland have declared their regions LGBT-free zones and tried to ban Pride parades as far-right thugs violently attack them. In the UK there have been regular efforts by municipalities of every political flavor, police, and private security firms to restrict leafleting by NGOs, campaigners, arts groups, and businesses, as well as ever stricter constraints on busking, homeless people begging, ball games, inappropriate dress, and other annoyances under such vehicles as Public Space Protection Orders and antisocial behavior laws. And whenever there are major international meetings, cities now regularly restrict protests to designated free speech zones.

And as any journalists rights organization such as Reporters Sans Frontires or the Committee to Protect Journalists will tell you, there has been a radical change in the terrain of war in the last couple of decades where both state and non-state actors increasingly view journalists as legitimate targets, from Western bombing of TV stations in Iraq through Turkish imprisonment of reporters to Russian arrest of those exposing Kremlin autocracy to Mexican cartels silencing news crews investigating missing women. Trump meanwhile takes every opportunity to attack the media as an enemy of the people, even encouraging physical assaults on reporters by his supporters. Some activists on our side seem to be of a similar opinion that the media are fair game, too.

In short, there is an epidemic of censorship and a retreat from an ethos of civil liberties across the board, in almost every country, by those of almost every political persuasion, and at all levels of society. And if the liberal-left denies that illiberalism is occurring when we are the ones perpetrating it, as Robinson does, then we have no leg to stand on when it comes to all these other, innumerable examples. Civil liberties are for everyone, and above all for those we oppose.

Some of these examples are plainly worse than others, but we do not win or lose our right to free speech at the advent of the most extreme and obvious cases of censorship. It is already lost with the smallest of infringements, at the edge cases, and the ones where all reasonable people would agree that the speech is indeed hateful.

David Goldberger, the Jewish ACLU lawyer so committed to free speech that he represented a group of Chicago Nazis in court in 1977 to defend their right to march through Skokie, Illinois, recognized that it was even or rather precisely in these sort of cases where the struggle for liberty is won or lost.

It is a particular shame when it comes to the Left, historically the first champion of civil liberties. Many progressives today are not aware that the struggle for free speech was a central project of the Left and something that was historically resisted by the Right. We know of Thomas Paines and John Stuart Mills pioneering articulation of these freedoms, but Karl Marxs entire philosophy grew in part out of his fury at Prussian official press censorship as a young man; Frederick Douglass recognized that there could be no struggle for abolition without a defense of freedom of speech, and that abridgment of that freedom is a double wrong, for it violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker; Eugene Debs was tried and convicted for sedition, and his trial and those of his comrades would set in play the crystallization of American free speech legal protections that are the envy of the world entire; and the New Left and counterculture of the Sixties that in many ways gave birth to the current left began with the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley in 1964 under the leadership of giants like Mario Savio.

As a result, too many modern progressives, particularly younger ones, have become indifferent to free speech, or, worse, come to view the defense of free speech as something foreign to the Left and a weapon of oppression.

This is a historic disaster. Throughout the twentieth century, from Stalins purges to the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the Killing Fields of Cambodia, it was precisely when the Left abandoned civil liberties and embraced groupthink supposedly in the service of some greater good, that those who claimed the mantle of emancipation perpetrated their greatest evils.

Robinson decries such comparisons to Maoism or what Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi has critiqued as Twitter Robespierres, saying that it requires guns and concentration camps for something to count as totalitarianism. Yet if you read the heartrending personal accounts of those such as Victor Serge who experienced the purges and the show trials, or Gao Yuan who participated in the struggle sessions of the Red Guards, or Dith Pran who experienced the collective indoctrination of the Khmer Rouge, you notice a pattern of pathological interpersonal relations that repeats itself over and over: a fear of speaking out, peer pressure, status-seeking through denunciation, a rush to denounce before one can be denounced oneself, self-criticism, public humiliation, a hunt for heretics, ostentatious displays of piety, and assertions that certain identities (petty bourgeois, kulaks, those who wear glasses, etc.) are inherently epistemically untrustworthy. These terrors of the past of course required material, economic conditions for them to emerge, but they were also built upon a foundation of morbid intragroup psychological dynamics.

The executions, torture, and imprisonment of these events were not simply the product of an external, alien force imposed upon its victims as in the case of an invasion by a foreign army or a coup, but perhaps even more terrifyingly, they were also a horizontal process that involved a breakdown of trust between friends, old comrades, coworkers, students and teachers, husbands and wives, even between parents and children.

Of course, intragroup illiberalism is something common to all humans rather than unique to the Left. We also see similar group dynamics when we explore historical events not directed by our political camp. The witch hunts of sixteenth-century Salem was another notorious instance of intragroup terror, the dynamics of which were famously dramatized by Arthur Miller as an allegory for McCarthyism and the associated blacklist. Here again we might note, contra the arguments that non-state actors cannot engage in censorship or illiberalism, that neither Hollywood studios that fired or no longer hired left-wing actors, screenwriters, and directors, nor the trade union bureaucracy that purged alleged Communists as part of that process, were agents of the state.

Yet because the Left is the cradle of civil liberties, we have a special responsibility to guard against illiberalism. After the experiences of the twentieth century, we will forever have a solemn task to constantly be on our guard against any recurrence of the morbid group dynamics that helped give rise to them, and within our own movements before anywhere else.

There is a need to let progressives who support free speech know that they are not alone and to give them confidence to speak out against censorship and illiberalism on their campuses, in their organizations, in their communities, or wherever someone imposes it, whether this comes from the right, center, or left, from the state or civil society.

But beyond the need for the Left to recognize that freedom of speech and civil liberties are the prerequisite for our own ability to organize, we cannot leave the discussion at the level of liberal principle.

As necessary as liberal freedoms are, socialists have always known that they cannot be fully realized within a class society. Liberalism contradicted itself by insisting on free markets and the right to own property, which undermine the equal exercise of all other liberal freedoms. Neither a poor man nor a rich man in liberal society have any legal restriction on the ownership of a printing press, but only one of these men materially has the ability, the freedom, to make use of that press. There is no true equality before the law so long as there remains class inequality outside the law.

In Karl Marxs first printed article, published in 1842, a report on the debates on freedom of the press in the Rhenish Diet, he attacks censorship of the press and then also the defenders of the bourgeois conception of freedom of the press as suffering from pseudo-liberalism and half-liberalism:

The French press is not too free; it is not free enough. It is not under an intellectual censorship, to be sure, but it is under a material censorship Therefore the French press is concentrated in a few places; and if material power concentrated in few places has a diabolical effect, how can it be otherwise with intellectual power?

That is, as mid-twentieth century democratic socialist and Berkeley Free Speech Movement militant Hal Draper explains in his 1977 exposition of what pushed Marx to go beyond the radical liberal conceptions of his youth: Tying the exercise of a freedom, then, to possession of enough money to operate it is a form of censorship too, and not to be borne.

Put another way, civil liberties may be the necessary condition for the Left to be able to argue for and to organize the building of an egalitarian society, but the building of an egalitarian society is the necessary condition for the realization of civil liberties.

Thus the limitations of the Harpers letter are certainly not that it decries censorship, or that it is anodyne liberal centrism, but that it does not take its professed values seriously enough. In the fight for civil liberties, Marx was right: neither censorship nor half-liberalism will do.

Originally posted here:

The Threat to Civil Liberties Goes Way Beyond Cancel Culture - Jacobin magazine

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TOMS RIVER, NJ After declaring that Toms River Township is not racially diverse enough for her liking, Toms River Councilwoman Laurie Huryk, a Democrat on Tuesday said she had received a threat in the mail. She waved a piece of paper in front of her, but did not read the letter. She did not say whether or not she reported the alleged threatening letter to the Toms River Police Department.

Huryk claimed the threat was in response to social media postings online after she told the township at the last council meeting that Toms River needs to do a better job at making the community more inviting to a greater diversity of individuals. Huryk has yet to explain how her plan to make the community more diverse would work and didnt explain how the current demographics of the community negatively impact the township.

According to census.gov, Toms River is 82% white, 3% black. As compared to the United States on whole which is 60% white and 13% black. New Jersey is 55% white and 15% black, Huryk said. We need to take a look at ourselves to examine what we can do as a community to make Toms River more inviting to a greater diversity of individuals and that of our state and the United States.

Huryk noted that the townships 82% white population is much higher than the state and national average.

Now, she claims she is being threatened and that her statement was twisted and misrepresented.

At our last meeting, I quoted U.S. Census data followed by self reflection inclusion, diversity and unity, Huryks said. My words were twisted and my meaning misrepresented on social media, resulting in escalating hateful and divisive commentary messages, voice mails, culminating in this disgustingly racist, threatening letter sent to my home. Im not going to read it, its extremely offensive and threatening.

Its where I live, with my family. As leaders in the community, it is our responsibility to be part of the solution, to work towards unity and condemn deceitful, divisive and hateful behavior. For the most part, this council and the previous have been shining examples of bi-partisanship, save one, she said, referring to Councilman Daniel Rodrick who has been working overtime to expose political corruption in Toms River government. Weve demonstrated that we can disagree but come to compromise and present civil for the most part.

Rodrick has been a key detractor in the townships plans to turn downtown Toms River into a fledgling city and has been speaking out against political corruption by other members of the council in Toms River.

Huryk said she also fully supports the organization Stop Hate for Profit which has organized a financial advertising boycott against Facebook to financially harm the social media companys business until it increases censorship on Facebook contributing to the dissent against the Black Lives Matter movement.

Whatever weve done is not enough, we must be ever determined in our efforts to stop the seeding and division and continuously work towards equality, inclusion and diversity and unity, Huryk said. Hate for profit has real consequences for real people. It is our job to return our world to civility and to quell the divisiveness and deception all day and every day.

Stop Hate for Profit seeks to remove public and private groups focused on white supremacy, antisemitism, violent conspiracies and Holocaust denialism, which is a very noble object.

The group also wants anyone on Facebook who talks about vaccine misinformation or climate denialism to also be banned from the social media platform.

According to the National Review, Huryks plan for forcing an unnatural demographic change in Toms River is part of her Democrat partys national platform to abolish the suburbs.

A story published by the National Review, entitled Biden and Dems Are Set to Abolish the Suburbs investigated Democrat Presidential Candidate Joe Bidens housing plan for America that seeks to eliminate single family zoning, as evidenced by the townships plan to build 7 story buildings through the Toms River downtown area.

Biden has embraced Cory Bookers strategy for ending single-family zoning in the suburbs and creating what you might call little downtowns in the suburbs, said Stanley Kurtz of the National Review. Combine the Obama-Biden administrations radical AFFH regulation with Bookers new strategy, and I dont see how the suburbs can retain their ability to govern themselves.

Kurtz said that the Democrats latest platform attacking the predominantly white suburbs is geared towards winning elections for the party, not a plan for the greater good of the people who already live there.

They will lose control of their own zoning and development, they will be pressured into a kind of de facto regional-revenue redistribution, and they will even be forced to start building high-density low-income housing, Kurtz said. [That], of course, will require the elimination of single-family zoning. With that, the basic character of the suburbs will disappear. At the very moment when the pandemic has made people rethink the advantages of dense urban living, the choice of an alternative will be taken away.

Is Huryk concerned about diversity in Toms River or is she now just towing the Democrat political party line for Joe Biden heading in the 2020 Presidential election?

This week, in Oregon, a politician was caught writing himself a hate letter he claimed was sent to him online.

Read more from the original source:

Democrat Councilwoman Who Said Toms River Too White, Claims She Received Threats, Calls for Facebook Censorship - Shore News Magazine

It's all about protecting children, don't you know. And who could oppose that?

So said those behind a Senate bill called the Eliminating Abusive and Rampant Neglect of Interactive Technologies -- EARN IT -- Act.

And so persuasive were they that the Judiciary Committee voted unanimously, 22-0, to move the bill to the full Senate. When something can pass out of committee without a single dissenting vote in our hyper-partisan era, you know it's either completely noncontroversial or an obviously great idea.

This bill, though, is neither.

To read the bill, and to hear its supporters talk it up, you'd think that the bill would end the scourge of online child pornography. And if that were true, then one could understand why it passed in committee unanimously.

Trouble is, the bill, by most rational estimates, would actually do next to nothing about child pornography. It would, however, chill speech by making those who monitor Web postings increasingly skittish, and, as a result, prone to added censorship.

Specifically, the bill amends Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996. It's that section that shields Internet companies from legal liability for postings made by others. Simply put: Website X isn't legally responsible for something posted by User Y.

Such has allowed both the good and the bad that has made the Internet balloon over these decades.

Though the Senate bill that had been proposed contained sweeping anti-encryption provisions that made it toxic to civil libertarians and a broad swath of tech advocates, the bill was successfully amended on Thursday to kill those proposals. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., the bill's sponsor, called the encryption debate "a separate issue." Further, he said, "My goal is not to outlaw encryption."

Sadly, that may well be Attorney General Bill Barr's goal, so don't be surprised to see the encryption discussion bubbling up again soon enough. When it does, it'll be fundamentally important to remember one central point: We don't make the people safer by making their personal devices and their data less secure.

That discussion, thankfully, can be put on hold for the moment. Sadly, though, everyone should anticipate lots of yapping about child pornography and exploitation as essential elements of the new Senate bill. Thats a cover for the real aim of the law -- to add government control and increase censorship on the net.

Originally posted here:

Censorship is the real aim of internet Senate bill (Editorial) - masslive.com

The practice of suppressing information

Censorship is the suppression of speech, public communication, or other information, on the basis that such material is considered objectionable, harmful, sensitive, or "inconvenient."[2][3][4] Censorship can be conducted by governments,[5] private institutions, and other controlling bodies.

Governments[5] and private organizations may engage in censorship. Other groups or institutions may propose and petition for censorship.[6] When an individual such as an author or other creator engages in censorship of their own works or speech, it is referred to as self-censorship. General censorship occurs in a variety of different media, including speech, books, music, films, and other arts, the press, radio, television, and the Internet for a variety of claimed reasons including national security, to control obscenity, child pornography, and hate speech, to protect children or other vulnerable groups, to promote or restrict political or religious views, and to prevent slander and libel.

Direct censorship may or may not be legal, depending on the type, location, and content. Many countries provide strong protections against censorship by law, but none of these protections are absolute and frequently a claim of necessity to balance conflicting rights is made, in order to determine what could and could not be censored. There are no laws against self-censorship.

In 399 BC, Greek philosopher, Socrates, while defying attempts by the Greek state to censor his philosophical teachings, was accused of collateral charges related to the corruption of Athenian youth and sentenced to death by drinking a poison, hemlock.

The details of Socrates's conviction are recorded by Plato as follows. In 399BC, Socrates went on trial[9] and was subsequently found guilty of both corrupting the minds of the youth of Athens and of impiety (asebeia,[10] "not believing in the gods of the state"),[11] and as a punishment sentenced to death, caused by the drinking of a mixture containing hemlock.[12][13][14][15]

Socrates' student, Plato, is said to have advocated censorship in his essay on The Republic, which opposed the existence of democracy. In contrast to Plato, Greek playwright Euripides (480406BC) defended the true liberty of freeborn men, including the right to speak freely. In 1766, Sweden became the first country to abolish censorship by law.[16]

Censorship has been criticized throughout history for being unfair and hindering progress. In a 1997 essay on Internet censorship, social commentator Michael Landier claims that censorship is counterproductive as it prevents the censored topic from being discussed. Landier expands his argument by claiming that those who impose censorship must consider what they censor to be true, as individuals believing themselves to be correct would welcome the opportunity to disprove those with opposing views.[17]

Censorship is often used to impose moral values on society, as in the censorship of material considered obscene. English novelist E. M. Forster was a staunch opponent of censoring material on the grounds that it was obscene or immoral, raising the issue of moral subjectivity and the constant changing of moral values. When the novel Lady Chatterley's Lover was put on trial in 1960, Forster wrote:[18]

Lady Chatterley's Lover is a literary work of importance...I do not think that it could be held obscene, but am in a difficulty here, for the reason that I have never been able to follow the legal definition of obscenity. The law tells me that obscenity may deprave and corrupt, but as far as I know, it offers no definition of depravity or corruption.

Proponents have sought to justify it using different rationales for various types of information censored:

In wartime, explicit censorship is carried out with the intent of preventing the release of information that might be useful to an enemy. Typically it involves keeping times or locations secret, or delaying the release of information (e.g., an operational objective) until it is of no possible use to enemy forces. The moral issues here are often seen as somewhat different, as the proponents of this form of censorship argues that release of tactical information usually presents a greater risk of casualties among one's own forces and could possibly lead to loss of the overall conflict.

During World War I letters written by British soldiers would have to go through censorship. This consisted of officers going through letters with a black marker and crossing out anything which might compromise operational secrecy before the letter was sent.[24] The World War II catchphrase "Loose lips sink ships" was used as a common justification to exercise official wartime censorship and encourage individual restraint when sharing potentially sensitive information.

An example of "sanitization" policies comes from the USSR under Joseph Stalin, where publicly used photographs were often altered to remove people whom Stalin had condemned to execution. Though past photographs may have been remembered or kept, this deliberate and systematic alteration to all of history in the public mind is seen as one of the central themes of Stalinism and totalitarianism.

Censorship is occasionally carried out to aid authorities or to protect an individual, as with some kidnappings when attention and media coverage of the victim can sometimes be seen as unhelpful.[25][26]

Censorship by religion is a form of censorship where freedom of expression is controlled or limited using religious authority or on the basis of the teachings of the religion.[27] This form of censorship has a long history and is practiced in many societies and by many religions. Examples include the Galileo affair, Edict of Compigne, the Index Librorum Prohibitorum (list of prohibited books) and the condemnation of Salman Rushdie's novel The Satanic Verses by Iranian leader Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. Images of the Islamic figure Muhammad are also regularly censored. In some secular countries, this is sometimes done to prevent hurting religious sentiments.[28]

The content of school textbooks is often an issue of debate, since their target audience is young people. The term whitewashing is commonly used to refer to revisionism aimed at glossing over difficult or questionable historical events, or a biased presentation thereof. The reporting of military atrocities in history is extremely controversial, as in the case of The Holocaust (or Holocaust denial), Bombing of Dresden, the Nanking Massacre as found with Japanese history textbook controversies, the Armenian Genocide, the Tiananmen Square protests of 1989, and the Winter Soldier Investigation of the Vietnam War.

In the context of secondary school education, the way facts and history are presented greatly influences the interpretation of contemporary thought, opinion and socialization. One argument for censoring the type of information disseminated is based on the inappropriate quality of such material for the younger public. The use of the "inappropriate" distinction is in itself controversial, as it changed heavily. A Ballantine Books version of the book Fahrenheit 451 which is the version used by most school classes[29] contained approximately 75 separate edits, omissions, and changes from the original Bradbury manuscript.

In February 2006, a National Geographic cover was censored by the Nashravaran Journalistic Institute. The offending cover was about the subject of love and a picture of an embracing couple was hidden beneath a white sticker.[30][30]

Economic induced censorship, is a type of censorship enacted by economic markets, to favor, and disregard types of information. Economic induced censorship, is also caused, by market forces which privatize and establish commodification of certain information that is not accessible by the general public, primarily because of the cost associated with commodified information such as academic journals, industry reports and pay to use repositories.[31]

The concept was illustrated as a censorship pyramid[32] that was conceptualized by primarily Julian Assange, along with Andy Mller-Maguhn, Jacob Appelbaum and Jrmie Zimmermann, in the Cypherpunks (book).

Self-censorship is the act of censoring or classifying one's own discourse. This is done out of fear of, or deference to, the sensibilities or preferences (actual or perceived) of others and without overt pressure from any specific party or institution of authority. Self-censorship is often practiced by film producers, film directors, publishers, news anchors, journalists, musicians, and other kinds of authors including individuals who use social media.[34]

According to a Pew Research Center and the Columbia Journalism Review survey, "About one-quarter of the local and national journalists say they have purposely avoided newsworthy stories, while nearly as many acknowledge they have softened the tone of stories to benefit the interests of their news organizations. Fully four-in-ten (41%) admit they have engaged in either or both of these practices."[35]

Threats to media freedom have shown a significant increase in Europe in recent years, according to a study published in April 2017 by the Council of Europe.This results in a fear of physical or psychological violence, and the ultimate result is self-censorship by journalists.[36]

Copy approval is the right to read and amend an article, usually an interview, before publication. Many publications refuse to give copy approval but it is increasingly becoming common practice when dealing with publicity anxious celebrities.[37] Picture approval is the right given to an individual to choose which photos will be published and which will not. Robert Redford is well known for insisting upon picture approval.[38] Writer approval is when writers are chosen based on whether they will write flattering articles or not. Hollywood publicist Pat Kingsley is known for banning certain writers who wrote undesirably about one of her clients from interviewing any of her other clients.[citation needed]

Flooding the public, often through online social networks, with false or misleading information is sometimes called "reverse censorship." American legal scholar Tim Wu has explained that this type of information control, sometimes by state actors, can "distort or drown out disfavored speech through the creation and dissemination of fake news, the payment of fake commentators, and the deployment of propaganda robots."[39]

Book censorship can be enacted at the national or sub-national level, and can carry legal penalties for their infraction. Books may also be challenged at a local, community level. As a result, books can be removed from schools or libraries, although these bans do not extend outside of that area.

Aside from the usual justifications of pornography and obscenity, some films are censored due to changing racial attitudes or political correctness in order to avoid ethnic stereotyping and/or ethnic offense despite its historical or artistic value. One example is the still withdrawn "Censored Eleven" series of animated cartoons, which may have been innocent then, but are "incorrect" now.[citation needed]

Film censorship is carried out by various countries to differing degrees. For example, only 34 foreign films a year are approved for official distribution in China's strictly controlled film market.[40]

Music censorship has been implemented by states, religions, educational systems, families, retailers and lobbying groups and in most cases they violate international conventions of human rights.[41]

Censorship of maps is often employed for military purposes. For example, the technique was used in former East Germany, especially for the areas near the border to West Germany in order to make attempts of defection more difficult. Censorship of maps is also applied by Google Maps, where certain areas are grayed out or blacked or areas are purposely left outdated with old imagery.[42]

Art is loved and feared because of its evocative power. Destroying or oppressing art can potentially justify its meaning even more.[43]

British photographer and visual artist Graham Ovenden's photos and paintings were ordered to be destroyed by a London's magistrate court in 2015 for being "indecent"[44] and their copies had been removed from the online Tate gallery.[45]

A 1980 Israeli law forbade banned artwork composed of the four colours of the Palestinian flag,[46] and Palestinians were arrested for displaying such artwork or even for carrying sliced melons with the same pattern.[47][48][49]

Moath al-Alwi is a Guantanamo Bay Prisoner who creates model ships as an expression of art. Alwi does so with the few tools he has at his disposal such as floss and shampoo bottles, and he is also allowed to use a small pair of scissors with rounded edges. A few of Alwi's pieces are on display at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. There are also other artworks on display at the College that were created by other inmates. The artwork that is being displayed might be the only way for some of the inmates to communicate with the outside. Recently things have changed though. The military has come up with a new policy that won't allow the artwork at Guantanamo Bay Military Prison to leave the prison. The art work created by Alwi and other prisoners is now government property and can be destroyed by them or disposed in whatever way they choose, making it no longer the artist's property. [50]

Around 300 artists in Cuba are fighting for their artistic freedom due to new censorship rules Cuba's government has in place for artists. Recently, Tania Bruguera, a musician was detained upon arriving to Havana and released after four days because of these new censorships restrains Cuba has on artists there.[51]

An example of extreme state censorship was the Nazis requirements of using art as propaganda. Art was only allowed to be used as a political instrument to control people and failure to act in accordance with the censors was punishable by law, even fatal. The Degenerate Art Exhibition is a historical instance that's goal was to advertise Nazi values and slander others.[52]

Internet censorship is control or suppression of the publishing or accessing of information on the Internet. It may be carried out by governments or by private organizations either at the behest of government or on their own initiative. Individuals and organizations may engage in self-censorship on their own or due to intimidation and fear.

The issues associated with Internet censorship are similar to those for offline censorship of more traditional media. One difference is that national borders are more permeable online: residents of a country that bans certain information can find it on websites hosted outside the country. Thus censors must work to prevent access to information even though they lack physical or legal control over the websites themselves. This in turn requires the use of technical censorship methods that are unique to the Internet, such as site blocking and content filtering.[58]

Furthermore, the Domain Name System (DNS) a critical component of the Internet is dominated by centralized and few entities. The most widely used DNS root is administered by the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN).[59][60] As an administrator they have rights to shut down and seize domain names when they deem necessary to do so and at most times the direction is from governments. This has been the case with Wikileaks shutdowns[61] and name seizure events such as the ones executed by the National Intellectual Property Rights Coordination Center (IPR Center) managed by the Homeland Security Investigations (HSI).[62] This makes it easy for internet censorship by authorities as they have control over what should or should not be on the Internet. Some activists and researchers have started opting for alternative DNS roots, though the Internet Architecture Board[63] (IAB) does not support these DNS root providers.

Unless the censor has total control over all Internet-connected computers, such as in North Korea or Cuba, total censorship of information is very difficult or impossible to achieve due to the underlying distributed technology of the Internet. Pseudonymity and data havens (such as Freenet) protect free speech using technologies that guarantee material cannot be removed and prevents the identification of authors. Technologically savvy users can often find ways to access blocked content. Nevertheless, blocking remains an effective means of limiting access to sensitive information for most users when censors, such as those in China, are able to devote significant resources to building and maintaining a comprehensive censorship system.[58]

Views about the feasibility and effectiveness of Internet censorship have evolved in parallel with the development of the Internet and censorship technologies:

A BBC World Service poll of 27,973 adults in 26 countries, including 14,306 Internet users,[67] was conducted between 30 November 2009 and 7 February 2010. The head of the polling organization felt, overall, that the poll showed that:

The poll found that nearly four in five (78%) Internet users felt that the Internet had brought them greater freedom, that most Internet users (53%) felt that "the internet should never be regulated by any level of government anywhere", and almost four in five Internet users and non-users around the world felt that access to the Internet was a fundamental right (50% strongly agreed, 29% somewhat agreed, 9% somewhat disagreed, 6% strongly disagreed, and 6% gave no opinion).[69]

The rising usages of social media in many nations has led to the emergence of citizens organizing protests through social media, sometimes called "Twitter Revolutions". The most notable of these social media led protests were parts Arab Spring uprisings, starting in 2010. In response to the use of social media in these protests, the Tunisian government began a hack of Tunisian citizens' Facebook accounts, and reports arose of accounts being deleted.[70]

Automated systems can be used to censor social media posts, and therefore limit what citizens can say online. This most notably occurs in China, where social media posts are automatically censored depending on content. In 2013, Harvard political science professor Gary King led a study to determine what caused social media posts to be censored and found that posts mentioning the government were not more or less likely to be deleted if they were supportive or critical of the government. Posts mentioning collective action were more likely to be deleted than those that had not mentioned collective action.[71] Currently, social media censorship appears primarily as a way to restrict Internet users' ability to organize protests. For the Chinese government, seeing citizens unhappy with local governance is beneficial as state and national leaders can replace unpopular officials. King and his researchers were able to predict when certain officials would be removed based on the number of unfavorable social media posts.[72]

Research has proved that criticism is tolerable on social media sites, therefore it is not censored unless it has a higher chance of collective action. It isn't important whether the criticism is supportive or unsupportive of the states' leaders, the main priority of censoring certain social media posts is to make sure that no big actions are being made due to something that was said on the internet. Posts that challenge the Party's political leading role in the Chinese government are more likely to be censored due to the challenges it poses to the Chinese Communist Party.[73]

Since the early 1980s, advocates of video games have emphasized their use as an expressive medium, arguing for their protection under the laws governing freedom of speech and also as an educational tool. Detractors argue that video games are harmful and therefore should be subject to legislative oversight and restrictions. Many video games have certain elements removed or edited due to regional rating standards.[74][75]For example, in the Japanese and PAL Versions of No More Heroes, blood splatter and gore is removed from the gameplay. Decapitation scenes are implied, but not shown. Scenes of missing body parts after having been cut off, are replaced with the same scene, but showing the body parts fully intact.[76]

Surveillance and censorship are different. Surveillance can be performed without censorship, but it is harder to engage in censorship without some form of surveillance.[77] Even when surveillance does not lead directly to censorship, the widespread knowledge or belief that a person, their computer, or their use of the Internet is under surveillance can have a "chilling effect" and lead to self-censorship.[78]

The former Soviet Union maintained a particularly extensive program of state-imposed censorship. The main organ for official censorship in the Soviet Union was the Chief Agency for Protection of Military and State Secrets generally known as the Glavlit, its Russian acronym. The Glavlit handled censorship matters arising from domestic writings of just about any kind even beer and vodka labels. Glavlit censorship personnel were present in every large Soviet publishing house or newspaper; the agency employed some 70,000 censors to review information before it was disseminated by publishing houses, editorial offices, and broadcasting studios. No mass medium escaped Glavlit's control. All press agencies and radio and television stations had Glavlit representatives on their editorial staffs.[79]

Sometimes, public knowledge of the existence of a specific document is subtly suppressed, a situation resembling censorship. The authorities taking such action will justify it by declaring the work to be "subversive" or "inconvenient". An example is Michel Foucault's 1978 text Sexual Morality and the Law (later republished as The Danger of Child Sexuality), originally published as La loi de la pudeur [literally, "the law of decency"]. This work defends the decriminalization of statutory rape and the abolition of age of consent laws.[citation needed]

When a publisher comes under pressure to suppress a book, but has already entered into a contract with the author, they will sometimes effectively censor the book by deliberately ordering a small print run and making minimal, if any, attempts to publicize it. This practice became known in the early 2000s as privishing (private publishing).[80]

Censorship by country collects information on censorship, internet censorship, press freedom, freedom of speech, and human rights by country and presents it in a sortable table, together with links to articles with more information. In addition to countries, the table includes information on former countries, disputed countries, political sub-units within countries, and regional organizations.

Cuban media used to be operated under the supervision of the Communist Party's Department of Revolutionary Orientation, which "develops and coordinates propaganda strategies".[81] Connection to the Internet is restricted and censored.[82]

The People's Republic of China employs sophisticated censorship mechanisms, referred to as the Golden Shield Project, to monitor the internet. Popular search engines such as Baidu also remove politically sensitive search results.[83][84][85]

Strict censorship existed in the Eastern Bloc.[86] Throughout the bloc, the various ministries of culture held a tight rein on their writers.[87] Cultural products there reflected the propaganda needs of the state.[87] Party-approved censors exercised strict control in the early years.[88] In the Stalinist period, even the weather forecasts were changed if they suggested that the sun might not shine on May Day.[88] Under Nicolae Ceauescu in Romania, weather reports were doctored so that the temperatures were not seen to rise above or fall below the levels which dictated that work must stop.[88]

Possession and use of copying machines was tightly controlled in order to hinder production and distribution of samizdat, illegal self-published books and magazines. Possession of even a single samizdat manuscript such as a book by Andrei Sinyavsky was a serious crime which might involve a visit from the KGB. Another outlet for works which did not find favor with the authorities was publishing abroad.

Amid declining car sales in 2020, France banned a television ad by a Dutch bike company, saying the ad "unfairly discredited the automobile industry".[89]

The Constitution of India guarantees freedom of expression, but places certain restrictions on content, with a view towards maintaining communal and religious harmony, given the history of communal tension in the nation.[90] According to the Information Technology Rules 2011, objectionable content includes anything that "threatens the unity, integrity, defence, security or sovereignty of India, friendly relations with foreign states or public order".[91]

Iraq under Baathist Saddam Hussein had much the same techniques of press censorship as did Romania under Nicolae Ceauescu but with greater potential violence.[92]

Under subsection 48(3) and (4) of the Penang Islamic Religious Administration Enactment 2004, non-Muslims in Malaysia are penalized for using the following words, or to write or publish them, in any form, version or translation in any language or for use in any publicity material in any medium:"Allah", "Firman Allah", "Ulama", "Hadith", "Ibadah", "Kaabah", "Qadhi'", "Illahi", "Wahyu", "Mubaligh", "Syariah", "Qiblat", "Haji", "Mufti", "Rasul", "Iman", "Dakwah", "Wali", "Fatwa", "Imam", "Nabi", "Sheikh", "Khutbah", "Tabligh", "Akhirat", "Azan", "Al Quran", "As Sunnah", "Auliya'", "Karamah", "False Moon God", "Syahadah", "Baitullah", "Musolla", "Zakat Fitrah", "Hajjah", "Taqwa" and "Soleh".[93][94][95]

According to Christian Mihr, executive director of Reporters Without Borders, "censorship in Serbia is neither direct nor transparent, but is easy to prove." [96] According to Mihr there are numerous examples of censorship and self-censorship in Serbia [97] According to Mihr, Serbian prime minister Aleksandar Vui has proved "very sensitive to criticism, even on critical questions," as was the case with Natalija Miletic, correspondent for Deutsche Welle Radio, who questioned him in Berlin about the media situation in Serbia and about allegations that some ministers in the Serbian government had plagiarized their diplomas, and who later received threats and offensive articles on the Serbian press.[97]

Multiple news outlets have accused Vui of anti-democratic strongman tendencies.[98][99][100][101][102] In July 2014, journalists associations were concerned about the freedom of the media in Serbia, in which Vui came under criticism.[103][104]

In September 2015 five members of United States Congress (Edie Bernice Johnson, Carlos Curbelo, Scott Perry, Adam Kinzinger, and Zoe Lofgren) have informed Vice President of the United States Joseph Biden that Aleksandar's brother, Andrej Vui, is leading a group responsible for deteriorating media freedom in Serbia.[105]

In the Republic of Singapore, Section 33 of the Films Act originally banned the making, distribution and exhibition of "party political films", at pain of a fine not exceeding $100,000 or to imprisonment for a term not exceeding 2 years. The Act further defines a "party political film" as any film or video

In 2001, the short documentary called A Vision of Persistence on opposition politician J. B. Jeyaretnam was also banned for being a "party political film". The makers of the documentary, all lecturers at the Ngee Ann Polytechnic, later submitted written apologies and withdrew the documentary from being screened at the 2001 Singapore International Film Festival in April, having been told they could be charged in court. Another short documentary called Singapore Rebel by Martyn See, which documented Singapore Democratic Party leader Dr Chee Soon Juan's acts of civil disobedience, was banned from the 2005 Singapore International Film Festival on the same grounds and See is being investigated for possible violations of the Films Act.

This law, however, is often disregarded when such political films are made supporting the ruling People's Action Party (PAP). Channel NewsAsia's five-part documentary series on Singapore's PAP ministers in 2005, for example, was not considered a party political film.

Exceptions are also made when political films are made concerning political parties of other nations. Films such as Michael Moore's Fahrenheit 911 are thus allowed to screen regardless of the law.

Since March 2009, the Films Act has been amended to allow party political films as long as they were deemed factual and objective by a consultative committee. Some months later, this committee lifted the ban on Singapore Rebel.

Independent journalism did not exist in the Soviet Union until Mikhail Gorbachev became its leader; all reporting was directed by the Communist Party or related organizations. Pravda, the predominant newspaper in the Soviet Union, had a monopoly. Foreign newspapers were available only if they were published by communist parties sympathetic to the Soviet Union.

Online access to all language versions of Wikipedia was blocked in Turkey on 29 April 2017 by Erdoan's government.[106]

In the United States, censorship occurs through books, film festivals, politics, and public schools.[107] See banned books for more information. Additionally, critics of campaign finance reform in the United States say this reform imposes widespread restrictions on political speech.[108][109]

Censorship also takes place in capitalist nations, such as Uruguay. In 1973, a military coup took power in Uruguay, and the State practiced censorship. For example, writer Eduardo Galeano was imprisoned and later was forced to flee. His book Open Veins of Latin America was banned by the right-wing military government, not only in Uruguay, but also in Chile and Argentina.[110]

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Censorship - Wikipedia

Censorship, the suppression of words, images, or ideas that are "offensive," happens whenever some people succeed in imposing their personal political or moral values on others. Censorship can be carried out by the government as well as private pressure groups. Censorship by the government is unconstitutional.

In contrast, when private individuals or groups organize boycotts against stores that sell magazines of which they disapprove, their actions are protected by the First Amendment, although they can become dangerous in the extreme. Private pressure groups, not the government, promulgated and enforced the infamous Hollywood blacklists during the McCarthy period. But these private censorship campaigns are best countered by groups and individuals speaking out and organizing in defense of the threatened expression.

American society has always been deeply ambivalent about these questions. On the one hand, our history is filled with examples of overt government censorship, from the 1873 Comstock Law to the 1996 Communications Decency Act. On the other hand, the commitment to freedom of imagination and expression is deeply embedded in our national psyche, buttressed by the First Amendment, and supported by a long line of Supreme Court decisions.

The Supreme Court has interpreted the First Amendment's protection of artistic expression very broadly. It extends not only to books, theatrical works and paintings, but also to posters, television, music videos and comic books -- whatever the human creative impulse produces.

Two fundamental principles come into play whenever a court must decide a case involving freedom of expression. The first is "content neutrality"-- the government cannot limit expression just because any listener, or even the majority of a community, is offended by its content. In the context of art and entertainment, this means tolerating some works that we might find offensive, insulting, outrageous -- or just plain bad.

The second principle is that expression may be restricted only if it will clearly cause direct and imminent harm to an important societal interest. The classic example is falsely shouting fire in a crowded theater and causing a stampede. Even then, the speech may be silenced or punished only if there is no other way to avert the harm.

SEXSEXUAL SPEECHSex in art and entertainment is the most frequent target of censorship crusades. Many examples come to mind. A painting of the classical statue of Venus de Milo was removed from a store because the managers of the shopping mall found its semi-nudity "too shocking." Hundreds of works of literature, from Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings to John Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath, have been banned from public schools based on their sexual content.

A museum director was charged with a crime for including sexually explicit photographs by Robert Mapplethorpe in an art exhibit.

American law is, on the whole, the most speech-protective in the world -- but sexual expression is treated as a second-class citizen. No causal link between exposure to sexually explicit material and anti-social or violent behavior has ever been scientifically established, in spite of many efforts to do so. Rather, the Supreme Court has allowed censorship of sexual speech on moral grounds -- a remnant of our nation's Puritan heritage.

This does not mean that all sexual expression can be censored, however. Only a narrow range of "obscene" material can be suppressed; a term like "pornography" has no legal meaning . Nevertheless, even the relatively narrow obscenity exception serves as a vehicle for abuse by government authorities as well as pressure groups who want to impose their personal moral views on other people.

PORNOGRAPHIC! INDECENT! OBSCENE!Justice John Marshall Harlan's line, "one man's vulgarity is another's lyric," sums up the impossibility of developing a definition of obscenity that isn't hopelessly vague and subjective. And Justice Potter Stewart's famous assurance, "I know it when I see it," is of small comfort to artists, writers, movie directors and lyricists who must navigate the murky waters of obscenity law trying to figure out what police, prosecutors, judges and juries will think.

The Supreme Court's current definition of constitutionally unprotected Obscenity, first announced in a 1973 case called Miller v. California, has three requirements. The work must 1) appeal to the average person's prurient (shameful, morbid) interest in sex; 2) depict sexual conduct in a "patently offensive way" as defined by community standards; and 3) taken as a whole, lack serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value.

The Supreme Court has held that Indecent expression -- in contrast with "obscenity" -- is entitled to some constitutional protection, but that indecency in some media (broadcasting, cable, and telephone) may be regulated. In its 1978 decision in Federal Communications Commission v. Pacifica, the Court ruled that the government could require radio and television stations to air "indecent" material only during those hours when children would be unlikely listeners or viewers. Broadcast indecency was defined as: "language that describes, in terms patently offensive as measured by contemporary community standards for the broadcast medium, sexual or excretory activities or organs." This vague concept continues to baffle both the public and the courts.

PORNOGRAPHY is not a legal term at all. Its dictionary definition is "writing or pictures intended to arouse sexual desire." Pornography comes in as many varieties as the human sexual impulse and is protected by the First Amendment unless it meets the definition for illegal obscenity.

VIOLENCEIS MEDIA VIOLENCE A THREAT TO SOCIETY?Today's calls for censorship are not motivated solely by morality and taste, but also by the widespread belief that exposure to images of violence causes people to act in destructive ways. Pro-censorship forces, including many politicians, often cite a multitude of "scientific studies" that allegedly prove fictional violence leads to real-life violence.

There is, in fact, virtually no evidence that fictional violence causes otherwise stable people to become violent. And if we suppressed material based on the actions of unstable people, no work of fiction or art would be safe from censorship. Serial killer Theodore Bundy collected cheerleading magazines. And the work most often cited by psychopaths as justification for their acts of violence is the Bible.

But what about the rest of us? Does exposure to media violence actually lead to criminal or anti-social conduct by otherwise stable people, including children, who spend an average of 28 hours watching television each week? These are important questions. If there really were a clear cause-and-effect relationship between what normal children see on TV and harmful actions, then limits on such expression might arguably be warranted.

WHAT THE STUDIES SHOWStudies on the relationship between media violence and real violence are the subject of considerable debate. Children have been shown TV programs with violent episodes in a laboratory setting and then tested for "aggressive" behavior. Some of these studies suggest that watching TV violence may temporarily induce "object aggression" in some children (such as popping balloons or hitting dolls or playing sports more aggressively) but not actual criminal violence against another person.

CORRELATIONAL STUDIES that seek to explain why some aggressive people have a history of watching a lot of violent TV suffer from the chicken-and-egg dilemma: does violent TV cause such people to behave aggressively, or do aggressive people simply prefer more violent entertainment? There is no definitive answer. But all scientists agree that statistical correlations between two phenomena do not mean that one causes the other.

INTERNATIONAL COMPARISONS are no more helpful. Japanese TV and movies are famous for their extreme, graphic violence, but Japan has a very low crime rate -- much lower than many societies in which television watching is relatively rare. What the sudies reveal on the issue of fictional violence and real world aggression is -- not much.

The only clear assertion that can be made is that the relationship between art and human behavior is a very complex one. Violent and sexually explicit art and entertainment have been a staple of human cultures from time immemorial. Many human behavioralists believe that these themes have a useful and constructive societal role, serving as a vicarious outlet for individual aggression.

WHERE DO THE EXPERTS AGREE?Whatever influence fictional violence has on behavior, most expert believe its effects are marginal compared to other factors. Even small children know the difference between fiction and reality, and their attitudes and behavior are shaped more by their life circumstances than by the books they read or the TV they watch. In 1972, the U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory Committee on Television and Social Behavior released a 200-page report, "Television and Growing Up: The Impact of Televised Violence," which concluded, "The effect [of television] is small compared with many other possible causes, such as parental attitudes or knowledge of and experience with the real violence of our society." Twenty-one years later, the American Psychological Association published its 1993 report, "Violence & Youth," and concluded, "The greatest predictor of future violent behavior is a previous history of violence." In 1995, the Center for Communication Policy at UCLA, which monitors TV violence, came to a similar conclusion in its yearly report: "It is known that television does not have a simple, direct stimulus-response effect on its audiences."

Blaming the media does not get us very far, and, to the extent that diverts the public's attention from the real causes of violence in society, it may do more harm than good.

WHICH MEDIA VIOLENCE WOULD YOU BAN?A pro-censorship member of Congress once attacked the following shows for being too violent: The Miracle Worker, Civil War Journal, Star Trek 9, The Untouchables, and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. What would be left if all these kinds of programs were purged from the airwaves? Is there good violence and bad violence? If so, who decides? Sports and the news are at least as violent as fiction, from the fights that erupt during every televised hockey game, to the videotaped beating of Rodney King by the LA Police Department, shown over and over gain on prime time TV. If we accept censorship of violence in the media, we will have to censor sports and news programs.

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What Is Censorship? | American Civil Liberties Union

Postal censorship is the inspection or examination of mail, most often by governments. It can include opening, reading and total or selective obliteration of letters and their contents, as well as covers, postcards, parcels and other postal packets. Postal censorship takes place primarily but not exclusively during wartime (even though the nation concerned may not be at war, e.g. Ireland during 19391945) and periods of unrest, and occasionally at other times, such as periods of civil disorder or of a state of emergency. Both covert and overt postal censorship have occurred.

Historically, postal censorship is an ancient practice; it is usually linked to espionage and intelligence gathering. Both civilian mail and military mail may be subject to censorship, and often different organisations perform censorship of these types of mail. In 20th-century wars the objectives of postal censorship encompassed economic warfare, security and intelligence.

The study of postal censorship is a philatelic topic of postal history.

Military mail is not always censored by opening or reading the mail, but this is much more likely during wartime and military campaigns. The military postal service is usually separate from civilian mail and is usually totally controlled by the military. However, both civilian and military mail can be of interest to military intelligence, which has different requirements from civilian intelligence gathering. During wartime, mail from the front is often opened and offending parts blanked or cut out, and civilian mail may be subject to much the same treatment.

Prisoner-of-war and internee mail is also subject to postal censorship, which is permitted under Articles 70 and 71 of the Third Geneva Convention (19291949). It is frequently subjected to both military and civil postal censorship because it passes through both postal systems.

Until recent years, the monopoly for carrying civilian mails has usually been vested in governments,[1][2] and that has facilitated their control of postal censorship. The type of information obtained from civilian mail is different from that likely to be found in military mail.[citation needed]

Throughout modern history, various governments, usually during times of war, would inspect mail coming into or leaving the country so as to prevent an enemy from corresponding with unfriendly entities within that country.[3]:22 There exist also many examples of prisoner of war mail from these countries which was also inspected or censored. Censored mail can usually be identified by various postmarks, dates, postage stamps and other markings found on the front and reverse side of the cover (envelope). These covers often have an adhesive seal, usually bearing special ID markings, which were applied to close and seal the envelope after inspection.[3]:5556

During the years leading up to the American Revolution, the British monarchy in the American colonies manipulated the mail and newspapers sent between the various colonies in an effort to prevent them from being informed and from organizing with each other. Often mail would be outright destroyed.[4][5]

During the American Civil War both the Union and Confederate governments enacted postal censorship. The number of Union and Confederate soldiers in prisoner of war camps would reach an astonishing one and a half million men. The prison population at the Andersonville Confederate POW camp alone reached 45,000 men by the war's end. Consequently, there was much mail sent to and from soldiers held in POW installations. Mail going to or leaving prison camps in the North and South was inspected both before and after delivery. Mail crossing enemy lines was only allowed at two specific locations.[6][7][8]

In Britain, the General Post Office was formed in 1657, and soon evolved a "Secret Office" for the purpose of intercepting, reading and deciphering coded correspondence from abroad. The existence of the Secret Office was made public in 1742 when it was found that in the preceding 10 years the sum of 45,675 (equivalent to 6,332,000 in 2016[9]) had been secretly transferred from the Treasury to the General Post Office to fund the censorship activities.[10] In 1782 responsibility for administering the Secret Office was transferred to the Foreign Secretary and it was finally abolished by Lord Palmerston in 1847.

During the Second Boer War a well planned censorship was implemented by the British that left them well experienced when The Great War started less than two decades later.[11] Initially offices were in Pretoria and Durban and later throughout much of the Cape Colony as well a POW censorship[12] with camps in Bloemfontein, St Helena, Ceylon, India and Bermuda.[13]

The British Post Office Act 1908 allowed censorship upon issue of warrants by a secretary of state in both Great Britain and in the Channel Islands.[14]

Censorship played an important role in the First World War.[15] Each country involved utilized some form of censorship. This was a way to sustain an atmosphere of ignorance and give propaganda a chance to succeed.[15] In response to the war, the United States Congress passed the Espionage Act of 1917 and Sedition Act of 1918. These gave broad powers to the government to censor the press through the use of fines, and later any criticism of the government, army, or sale of war bonds.[15] The Espionage Act laid the groundwork for the establishment of a Central Censorship Board which oversaw censorship of communications including cable and mail.[15]

Postal control was eventually introduced in all of the armies, to find the disclosure of military secrets and test the morale of soldiers.[15] In Allied countries, civilians were also subjected to censorship.[15] French censorship was modest and more targeted compared to the sweeping efforts made by the British and Americans.[15] In Great Britain, all mail was sent to censorship offices in London or Liverpool.[15] The United States sent mail to several centralized post offices as directed by the Central Censorship Board.[15] American censors would only open mail related to Spain, Latin America or Asia--as their British allies were handling other countries.[15] In one week alone, the San Antonio post office processed more than 75,000 letters, of which they controlled 77 percent (and held 20 percent for the following week).[15]

Soldiers on the front developed strategies to circumvent censors.[16] Some would go on "home leave" and take messages with them to post from a remote location.[16] Those writing postcards in the field knew they were being censored, and deliberately held back controversial content and personal matters.[16] Those writing home had a few options including free, government-issued field postcards, cheap, picture postcards, and embroidered cards meant as keepsakes.[17] Unfortunately, censors often disapproved of picture postcards.[17] In one case, French censors reviewed 23,000 letters and destroyed only 156 (although 149 of those were illustrated postcards).[17] Censors in all warring countries also filtered out propaganda that disparaged the enemy or approved of atrocities.[15] For example, German censors prevented postcards with hostile slogans such as "Jeder Sto ein Franzos" ("Every hit a Frenchman") among others.[15]

Following the end of World War I, there were some places where postal censorship was practiced. During 1919 it was operating in Austria, Belgium, Canada, German Weimar Republic and the Soviet Union as well as other territories.[18]:126139 The Irish Civil War saw mail raided by the IRA that was marked as censored and sometimes opened in the newly independent state. The National Army also opened mail and censorship of irregulars' mail in prisons took place.[19]

Other conflicts during which censorship existed included the Third Anglo-Afghan War, Chaco War,[18]:138 were the Italian occupation of Ethiopia (193536)[20] and especially during the Spanish Civil War of 19361939.[18]:141[21]

During World War II, both the Allies and Axis instituted postal censorship of civil mail. The largest organisations were those of the United States, though the United Kingdom employed about 10,000 censor staff while Ireland, a small neutral country, only employed about 160 censors.[22]

Both blacklists and whitelists were employed to observe suspicious mail or listed those whose mail was exempt from censorship.[22]

British censorship was primarily based in the Littlewoods football pools building in Liverpool with nearly 20 other censor stations around the country.[23] Additionally the British censored colonial and dominion mail at censor stations in the following places:

In the United States censorship was under the control of the Office of Censorship whose staff count rose to 14,462 by February 1943 in the censor stations they opened in New York, Miami, New Orleans, San Antonio, Laredo, Brownsville, El Paso, Nogales, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, San Juan, Charlotte Amalie, Balboa, Cristbal, David, Panama and Honolulu.

The United States blacklist, known as U.S. Censorship Watch List, contained 16,117 names.[24]

Neutral countries such as Ireland,[22] Portugal and Switzerland also censored mail even though they were not directly involved in the conflict.

Following the end of hostilities in Europe, Germany was occupied by the Allied Powers in zones of control. Censorship of mail that had been impounded during the Allies advances, when postal services were suspended, took place in each zone though by far the least commonly seen mail is from the French Zone.[25]:78 When most the backlog had been cleared regular mail was controlled as well as in occupied Austria.[25]:101107 Soviet zone mail is considered scarce.[25]:92, 109

In the German Democratic Republic, the Stasi, established in 1950, were responsible for the control of incoming and outgoing mail; at their height of operations, their postal monitoring department controlled about 90,000 pieces of mail daily.[26]

Several small conflicts saw periods of postal censorship, such as the 1948 Palestine war,[27] Korean War (19501953), Poland (1980s), or even the 44-day Costa Rican Civil War in 1948.[28]

Notes

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Postal censorship - Wikipedia

BANGKOK In Conflicted Visions Again, six artists are gathered to give one message: urging the viewers to question the state of freedom in Thailand.

The exhibition, held at WTF Gallery and Caf, is a tour on issues considered by many to be sensitive in Thai society issues that the media is often discouraged from asking bold questions about from censorship of discussions about the Royal Family to the mysterious disappearances of anti-monarchy activists.

Inside the gallery, there is a TV showing nothing except an English text saying, program will resume shortly, the same words used in real life to black out foreign news broadcasts that may touch on the monarchy.

I think its strange. It makes me feel that they want to hide the truth, artist Manit Sriwanichpoom said. It makes issues about the monarchy sound scary.

Another installation, called Thailands New Normal, questioned the balance of public safety and civil liberties during the coronavirus pandemic, an era that the government and its regime of revered doctors can impose any policy on the public without any debates.

Do you want health or freedom seems to be the choice given to the public by the authorities, without anything in the middle, said Prakit Kobkjwattana, the artist responsible for the piece.

I think this new normal thing is a coup, Prakit said. Do I really have to really choose?

Abduction and murders of anti-monarchy activists who fled overseas is discussed at Iconoclastor Stickers & Military Track Down, by Pisitakun Kuantalaeng.

Images of political dissidents who disappeared in neighboring countries of Laos and Cambodia are represented as colorful stickers at the exhibit. It seems to imply someone out there is making a collection of those individuals.

The latest victim in the string of unexplained disappearance was Wanchalearm Satsaksit, seen smiling in his yellow sticker here. The bespectacled activist was kidnapped on June 4 in front of his residence in Phnom Penh, where he had lived in exile since 2014.

Although the tone of the exhibition may slant toward anti-government activism, curator Somrak Sila said the artists were picked from different political factions. Somrak said she did it once just before the May 2014 coup, and she succeeded again.

She lamented that Thailands political division over the past decade means many artists have refused to participate in productive and civil debate, not to mention holding a joint art exhibit. The gallery wants to show its time to move beyond colors and sides.

It no longer works for them to mud sling one another. The approach should be changed, Somrak said. If we do not unite. We cant fight the powers that be.

Conflicted Visions Again exhibition runs until August 23. It opens everyday except Monday from 4pm to 10pm at WTF Gallery and Caf, Sukhumvit 51. Call 02-662-6246 for details.

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Art Exhibit Hits Back at Censorship, Abductions of Dissidents - Khaosod English

Welcome to The Queue your daily distraction of curated video content sourced from across the web.

Its ultimately a programmers job to manage and interpret art. And some pieces of art require more management and interpretation than others. Which brings us to Gone With the Wind. Its one of the most enduringly popular films of all time. But its derogatory slave stereotypes and romantic view of the Antebellum South are uncomfortable. For some, even painful. But to edit or deny access on the basis of that discomfort whitewashes what the film represents as a historical and cultural document.

HBO Maxs removal of Gone With the Wind in June was not an attempt to re-write history. Quite the opposite. Time Warner removed the film with the intention of returning it to its library with added historical context. That context took the shape of a supplementary video recording of a panel discussion moderated by author and historian Donald Bogle and an introductory video, which now plays before the movie starts. The film itself is unaltered because in Time Warners words: To do otherwise would be the same as claiming these prejudices never existed.

In the intro, linked below, Turner Classic Movies host and film scholar Jacqueline Stewart sets the stage for Gone With the Wind.Stewart describes the films cultural significance and controversies, advocating for the importance of preserving Old Hollywood films for viewing and discussion.

You can watch What to Know When Watching Gone With the Wind here:

This clip comes courtesy of the fine folks at Turner Classic Movies. TCM is a two-time Peabody award-winning network and trusted source for all things Golden Age. You can follow them on their YouTube account here.

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Gone With the Wind and the Difference Between Censorship and Context - Film School Rejects

A look at some of the events over the past 30 days that have made history in Kentucky. Louisville Courier Journal

Famed Kentucky writer Wendell Berry has joined a lawsuit attempting to stop the University of Kentucky from removing a longtime controversial mural on campus depicting slavery.

The suit, filed electronically Monday,seeks to stop UK President Eli Capilouto from removing a 1934 fresco in Memorial Hall, arguing that the rare piece of art is publicly owned and exists to"promote education, the arts, and governmental purposes."

Removing the fresco, the lawsuit argues, can't be done safely.

"The completed OHanlon Mural is an actual part of the building itself," the lawsuit states. "The plaster is an inherent part of the lobby walls on which it is painted. The completed Mural leaves a brilliant, nearly indestructible glass-like surface.

"The fresco cannot be removed without removing the entire wall itself. Any attempt to remove the wall with the OHanlon Mural puts the physical integrity of this unique work of public art at risk of shattering and being destroyed."

Wendell Berry at home in 2006.(Photo: Courier Journal file photo)

The suit, which names the university and Capilouto, also calls for protection of the response mural named "Witness."

Along with the lawsuit, theNational Coalition Against Censorship wrote aletter to Capilouto on July 1, arguing that the removal of a controversial mural on campuswould invalidate the work of aBlack artist's response.

"This is the first instance we are aware of in which the removal of a mural by a white artist will have the simultaneous effect of silencing the work of a Black artist," the letter stated.

Background: A timeline of the controversies surrounding UK's Memorial Hall mural

UK spokesman Jay Blanton said in a statement that "Our respect for Wendell Berry is deep and abiding. His contributions to our state and literature are profound. Moving art, however, is not erasing history. It is, rather, creating context to further dialogue as well as space for healing."

Ann Rice OHanlon paintedthe original 1934 fresco for the Public Works of Art Project, part of President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal,in the foyer of Memorial Hall.

It depicts slavery in Americaand has long been the subject of campus protests and discussions between the student body andUK administration.

It is one of 42 frescoes amid the15,000 pieces of art commissioned under the Public Works of Art Project, according to the Berry complaint.

The mural inside Memorial Hall on the University of Kentucky campus.(Photo: Mark Cornelison | UK photo)

In 2018, UK commissionedPhiladelphia artist Karyn Olivierto create a new piece of art in Memorial Hall, called "Witness," which was meant to create a dialogue between the two.

"My piece could be consideredcorrective, but for me it's really about providing a space for discourse," Olivier said at the time. The National Coalition Against Censorship's concern is that if O'Hanlon's fresco is removed, Olivier's work will be for naught.

Last month, Capilouto announced he'd remove the mural amid national protests against systemic racism. In a letter to the campus community, he wrote that the university's prior solutions to the mural problem "for many of our students, have been a roadblock to reconciliation, rather than a path toward healing."

The frescowas previously covered in 2015 and later was unveiled with added information for context in 2017.

Neither of these moves stopped a 2019 overnight sit-in in UK's Main Building as students protested the mural and food insecurities among disadvantaged students.

Amid those protests, Olivier wrote an open letter to the campus community, introducing herself as "the black immigrant female gay artist" who took on the "problematic" mural.

Previously: Campus issues that led to UK protest were simmering for a while, students say

More coverage: UK adds artwork next to mural with racial images to deepen the dialogue

"When I first thought of what to do, my initial instinct was 'why not remove the black and brown figures from the mural, leaving only ghost-like shapes?'" she wrote. "However, erasing and (in effect) defacing a work of art is a less powerful gesture than confronting what is there."

More recently, the National Coalition Against Censorship letter to Capilouto includes support from Olivier: "The Universitys decision to remove the OHanlon mural also renders my workWitnessblind and mute," she is quoted as saying in the letter.

"It cannot exist without the past it sought to confront. And it is ironic that the decision to censor the original artwork has, in one fell swoop, censored my installation, too.

The Black Student Advisory Council, whose members have been outspoken against the O'Hanlon mural in the past, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Reach breaking news reporter Sarah Ladd at sladd@courier-journal.com. Follow her on Twitter at@ladd_sarah.Support strong local journalism by subscribing today: courier-journal.com/subscribe.

Read or Share this story: https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/education/2020/07/06/wendell-berry-joins-lawsuit-keep-university-kentucky-racist-mural/5384495002/

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Wendell Berry joins lawsuit to stop University of Kentucky from removing controversial mural - Courier Journal