On the outskirts of this city in a poor, mountainous province in southwestern China, men in hard hats recently put the finishing touches on a white building a quarter-mile long with few windows and a tall surrounding wall. There was little sign of its purpose, apart from the flags of Apple and China flying out front, side by side. Inside, Apple was preparing to store the personal data of its Chinese customers on computer servers run by a state-owned Chinese firm.

Tim Cook, Apples chief executive, has said the data is safe. But at the data center in Guiyang, which Apple hoped would be completed by next month, and another in the Inner Mongolia region, Apple has largely ceded control to the Chinese government. Chinese state employees physically manage the computers. Apple abandoned the encryption technology it used elsewhere after China would not allow it. And the digital keys that unlock information on those computers are stored in the data centers theyre meant to secure. Internal Apple documents reviewed by The New York Times, interviews with 17 current and former Apple employees and four security experts, and new filings made in a court case in the US last week provide rare insight into the compromises Cook has made to do business in China. Apple now assembles nearly all of its products and earns a fifth of its revenue in the China region. But just as Cook figured out how to make China work for Apple, China is making Apple work for the Chinese government.

Cook often talks about Apples commitment to civil liberties and privacy. But to stay on the right side of Chinese regulators, his company has put the data of its Chinese customers at risk and has aided government censorship in the Chinese version of its App Store.

Chinas leader, Xi Jinping, is increasing his demands on Western companies, and Cook has resisted those demands on a number of occasions. But he ultimately approved the plans to store customer data on Chinese servers and to aggressively censor apps, according to interviews with current and former Apple employees. Apple has become a cog in the censorship machine that presents a government-controlled version of the internet, said Nicholas Bequelin, Asia director for Amnesty International, the human rights group. A Times analysis found that tens of thousands of apps have disappeared from Apples Chinese App Store over the past several years, more than previously known, including foreign news outlets, gay dating services and encrypted messaging apps. It also blocked tools for organising pro-democracy protests and skirting internet restrictions, and apps about the Dalai Lama.

And in its data centers, Apples compromises have made it nearly impossible for the company to stop the Chinese government from gaining access to the emails, photos, documents, contacts and locations of millions of Chinese residents, according to the security experts and Apple engineers.

The firm said that it followed the laws in China and did everything it could to keep the data of customers safe. An Apple spokesman said that the company still controlled the keys that protect the data of its Chinese customers and that Apple used its most advanced encryption technology in China . Apple added that it removed apps only to comply with Chinese laws. These decisions are not always easy, and we may not agree with the laws that shape them, the company said.

No Plan B

In 2014, Apple hired Doug Guthrie, the departing dean of the George Washington University business school, to help the firm navigate China, a country he had spent decades studying.

One of his first research projects was Apples Chinese supply chain. Guthrie concluded that no other country could offer the scale, skills, infrastructure and government assistance that Apple required. Chinese workers assemble nearly every iPhone, iPad and Mac. Apple brings in $55 billion a year from the region, far more than any other American company makes in China. This business model only really fits and works in China, Guthrie said. But then youre married to China. China was starting to pass laws that gave the country greater leverage over Apple, and Guthrie said he believed Xi would soon start seeking concessions. Apple, he realised, had no Plan B.

Golden Gate

In November 2016, China approved a law requiring that all personal information and important data that is collected in China be kept in China. It was bad news for Apple, which had staked its reputation on keeping customers data safe. While Apple regularly responded to court orders for access to customer data, Cook had rebuffed the FBI after it demanded Apples help breaking into an iPhone belonging to a terrorist involved in the killing of 14 people in San Bernardino, Calif. Apple encrypts customers private data in its iCloud. But for most of that information, Apple also has the digital keys to unlock that encryption. The location of the keys to the data of Chinese customers was a sticking point in talks between Apple and Chinese officials, two people close to the deliberations said. Apple wanted to keep them in the US; the Chinese officials wanted them in China. The cybersecurity law went into effect in June 2017. In an initial agreement between Apple and Chinese officials, the location of the keys was left intentionally vague, one person said.

But eight months later, the encryption keys were headed to China. It is unclear what led to the change.

Documents reviewed by The Times do not show that the Chinese government has gained access to the data. They only indicate that Apple has made compromises that make it easier for the government to do so.

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Censorship, surveillance and profits: A hard bargain for Apple in China - Business Standard

There has been a dramatic increase in the censorship of Palestinian political speech on social media over the past two weeks, during the period of intense fighting between Israel and militants in Gaza.

Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram have all been used by Palestinians to share information from, among a variety of areas, the East Jerusalem neighbourhood of Sheikh Jarrah where families face eviction.

However the report from 7amleh, The Arab Center for the Advancement of Social Media, shared exclusively with The Independent, argues that social media companies moderation attempts and codes of conduct have resulted in numerous citizens accounts being taken down.

It comes in the context of huge criticism surrounding the Israeli governments military decisions, which include displacing 52,000 Palestinians via air strikes, causing the deaths of numerous children, bombing the Associated Press and Al Jazeera building, and, on social media, the bizarrely flippant tone of its Twitter account.

Overnight, Israel and Hamas have since entered a mutual and simultaneous truce, after Israels security cabinet agreed to put an end to heavy bombardment which has killed more than 230 Palestinians.

Twelve people have been killed In Israel, including two children and a soldier. The Israeli military said 4,340 rockets were fired at Israel by militants over the course of the 11 days of fighting.

It is unlikely, however, that this will be the last time the conflict rears its ugly head, or that social media companies moderation decisions will not exacerbate future battles in the region as seen by their long-ranging and concerning approaches to Palestinian content in the past.

7amleh documented 500 cases of what it calls the digital rights violations of Palestinians between 6 May and 18 May this year through a form shared via its social media channels with the support of partners including MPower Change, Adalah Justice, Jewish Voice for Peace, and Eyewitness Palestine. These violations include content being taken down and accounts being removed or their visibility restricted.

Half of the 500 instances were on Instagram, the report states, with 179 cases on its parent companys platform Facebook; Facebook also apparently increased geo-blocking, where social media companies target the geographical location of content to help their moderation efforts, with a number of these cases [documented] for activists from the occupied Palestinian territory.

The organisation states that 45 per cent of all reported violations on Instagram were due to deleted Stories, with users receiving no prior warning or notice. While Instagram did not respond to 7amleh about 143 of the cases submitted, it confirmed that only one case violated the community standards. Instagram admitted the removal issues on 7 May, but 7amleh says the majority of reports (68 per cent) occurred after the problem was seemingly addressed.

As well as these holistic problems with content moderation, there have been specific, dramatic cases of harmful flaws in the companys content moderation, such as Instagram removing or blocking posts with hashtags for the Al-Aqsa Mosque, the third-holiest site in the Islamic faith, as its moderation system mistakenly deemed the religious building a terrorist organisation.

We know there have been several issues that have impacted peoples ability to share on our apps, including a technical bug that affected Stories around the world, and an error that temporarily restricted content from being viewed on the Al Aqsa hashtag page. While these have been fixed, they should never have happened in the first place, Facebook told The Independent in a statement.

Our policies are designed to give everyone a voice while keeping them safe, and we apply these policies equally, regardless of who is posting or their personal beliefs, the company added. Our dedicated team, which includes Arabic and Hebrew speakers, is closely monitoring the situation on the ground. It added that it was continuing to review 7amlehs reports.

There have also been instances of Facebook blocking the accounts of Palestinian journalists, a critique which has been also levied at Twitter on which there were 55 cases of violations of Palestinian content, 91 per cent of which were suspension of accounts, according to 7amleh.

Our automated systems took enforcement action on a number of accounts in error by an automated spam filter. We are expeditiously reversing this action to reinstate access to the affected accounts, many of which have already been reinstated, Twitter said in a statement, adding that it had an appeals process for such accounts.

Twitter also temporarily restricted the account of Palestinian-American writer Mariam Barghouti, who was reporting on Palestinians being evicted from Sheikh Jarrah. "We took enforcement action on the account you referenced in error. That has since been reversed," Twitter said in a statement, changing Barghoutis account to say that it was temporarily unavailable because it violates the Twitter Media Policy.

Twitter said that if an accounts profile or media content is not compliant with our policies, we may make it temporarily unavailable and require that the violator edit the media or information in their profile to comply with our rules. We also explain which policy their profile or media content has violated. Twitter did not explain to The Independent which policy was violated.

The issues around social media moderating content, specifically about Israels war against Palestine, are long-running. In 2016, the Israeli government announced a formal collaboration with Facebooks Tel Aviv office, that were meant to force social networks to rein in content that Israel says incites violence.

Internally, Facebook listed globally protected vulnerable groups including homeless people, foreigners, and Zionists a person who supports the re-establishment of and support for a Jewish state in the Holy Land, currently located in Palestine - in documents revealed by The Guardian in 2017.

In January 2021, Facebook apparently proposed a revision of the term Zionist that would make it a proxy for Jew or Jewish, although the company said that no decision had been made. An anonymous Facebook moderator who spoke to The Intercept said the policy, in practise, leaves very little wiggle room for criticism ofZionism.

That decision was criticised by Rabbi Alissa Wise, Deputy Director at Jewish Voice for Peace, who said that restricting the word prevent[s] its users from holding the Israeli government accountable for harming Palestinian people.

Facebook said it understand[s] that the word Zionist is frequently used in important political debate. ... thats why we allow critical discussion of Zionists, but remove attacks against them in specific instances when context suggests the word is being used as a proxy for Jews or Israelis, both of which are protected characteristics under our hate speech policies.

It added: We always work to apply our Community Standards as accurately and consistently as possible, and dont remove content that doesnt break our rules. We have a clear process for handling requests from governments and regulators, which is the same around the world. Were public about how many pieces of content we restrict locally for breaking local law, and publish these numbers in our Transparency report twice a year.

However, much like how western news media headlines have slanted towards pro-Israeli language, reflecting the foreign policies of their national governments, many of the policies put forth by American companies are informed by US culture and norms, Jillian York, Director for International Freedom of Expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, told The Independent.

She added that the US has historically been a strong supporter of Israel and has long dehumanized Palestinians, so it isnt surprising that corporate policies would align with that worldview.

For Facebook its more important to censor terrorism than it is to ensure that Palestinians can speak freely, York continued. Amidst the pandemic, this has only gotten worse, as content moderators in some countries are still stuck at home. As such, were seeing more bugs, more keyword filtering, more shadowbanning and other subtle enforcement tactics that arent simply takedowns.

It is for this reason that social media is so important in reframing the conversation of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, allowing messages that may not come through traditional media to reach the general public.

Snapchats Snap Maps feature, for example, has been used to demonstrate in real-time the difference in the effects of the conflict between Tel Aviv and Gaza, as have TikTok memes.

Snapchat Maps video compares situation in Gaza and Israel

Both companies present a challenge to Facebook and Twitter but, York says, the network effect of these companies is still hard to disrupt and when it comes to bold decisions, such as banning President Trump, many follow one another.

Facebook's rules related to Israel-Palestinian have always been opaque and one-sided. Marwa Fatafta, a policy manager at Access Now, told The Independent.

It's no secret that Facebook often bows to government pressure and converts such demands into rules governing online speech. But thats only half of the story [as] social media platforms rely on algorithms to moderate speech at scale and being blind to context as they are, lots of legitimate content get flagged and taken down. Such issues stress the need for algorithmic transparency, which Fatafta says is clearly biased.

At some big technology companies, employees are very conscious of this power. This week both Jewish Google workers and Apple staff have called on their respective executives to recognise that millions of Palestinian people currently suffer under an illegal occupation,.

In affecting change, 7amleh recommends a number of practises to improve social media companies moderation in the end of its report.

These include hiring fact checkers specifically for Israeli and Palestinian content, allowing people access to geo-spatial information needed to respond to the humanitarian crises, providing transparency on voluntary takedown requests, and conducting human rights assessments that includes the impact of Israel on Palestinians in Israel and the occupied Palestinian territory.

Censorship and bias have been issues for years, however, and the escalation of violence over the past two weeks only scaled it up and made it more pronounced, Fatafta says.

Social media has been a life-linefor Palestinian activists deprived of access to mainstream media, and the despite of the ceasefire, the reality of occupation and oppression continues. So Palestinians will continue to use social media to organise and dissent. The main question here is: would social media companies learn their lessons this time?

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Palestinians digital rights violated by censorship on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, new report claims - The Independent

In the early 80s, a loophole in film classification laws allowed a series of so-called video nasties think low-budget horror and exploitation offerings like Blood Feast and The Burning to hit the market without any sort of regulation. The response to these films was swift and expected: public panic, supposed moral outrage, and eventually heightened censorship and regulation. Such is the world of Censor, a gory and clever horror feature about, well, horror films. Sort of.

Per the films official synopsis: Film censor Enid takes pride in her meticulous work, guarding unsuspecting audiences from the deleterious effects of watching the gore-filled decapitations and eye gougings she pores over. Her sense of duty to protect is amplified by guilt over her inability to recall details of the long-ago disappearance of her sister, recently declared dead in absentia. When Enid is assigned to review a disturbing film from the archive that echoes her hazy childhood memories, she begins to unravel how this eerie work might be tied to her past.

Censor stars Niamh Algar as the censor of the title, Enid, and was directed by Prano Bailey-Bond in her feature debut (she also wrote the film alongside Anthony Fletcher). The film debuted at this years Sundance Film Festival, where IndieWires Eric Kohn called it a disturbing debut steeped in 80s horror.

In his review, Kohn wrote:The movie unfolds with elegant atmospheric dread, as Enid contends with a brutal, male-dominated work environment in which her opinions rarely hold weight. When a lunatic murders his family in a manner based off one of the movies she was forced with cutting down, the world turns against her. Thats when she sees a particularly unnerving exploitation movie called Dont Go in the Church, with an opening slasher bit featuring an actress that bears an unmistakable resemblance to Enids missing sibling. At least, thats what Enid thinks, as she journeys down a rabbit hole of theories and detective work that may or may not hold together.

Magnet Releasing will release Censor in theaters on June 11, with a VOD rollout to follow on June 18. Check out the first U.S. trailer and poster for the film, available exclusively on IndieWire, below.

Sign Up: Stay on top of the latest breaking film and TV news! Sign up for our Email Newsletters here.

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Censor Trailer: Video Nasties and Real-Life Horror Meld Together in Disturbing Sundance Chiller - IndieWire

The late Village Voice journalist and civil libertarian Nat Hentoff loved telling the story about how three rabbis, gathered in a Massachusetts motel in 1982, officially excommunicated him from the Jewish people for the crime of signing a New York Times advertisement protesting Israel's invasion of Lebanon. That their clerical authority to extinguish Hentoff's Judaism was recognized by no one but themselves is a source of both comedy and anger. In matters political, even the smallest of factions can pretend that their extremism matters, but at the heart of that absurdity is the dark human desire to censor and to silence anyone deviating from the party line.

And so joining the three rabbis in this tragic comedy are the 900+ signers of what's now called the "Jewish Harper's Letter," published by the Jewish Institute for Liberal Values, alleging that an undefined "social justice ideology" holds that there is "only one way to look at the problems we face, and those who disagree must be silenced." They assert that this "suppression of dissent violates the core Jewish value of open discourse" (Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 5/5/21). It's called the "Jewish Harper's Letter" because it echoes and extends a letter signed by journalists and academics about censoriousness, published in Harper's (7/7/20; FAIR.org, 8/1/20).

So far the letter has received some mainstream attention (Newsweek, 5/5/21), given the prominence of some of the rabbis, academics and journalists who signed it, like New York Times columnist Bret Stephens and his former colleague Bari Weiss. The letter never says how their views have been silenced, or names a group, individual or specific school of thought that is implementing such a chilling effect. Nor do the signers, many of whom are prominent journalists associated with the Jewish right, disclose their own unease with free discourse, their own desire to suppress speech and their own extremism.

For example, Weiss (who now maintains her own newsletter at Substack) famously tried to silence critics of Israel at Columbia University (Intercept, 3/8/18). Stephens alerted an academic's boss because he called the columnist a "bedbug" on Twitter (NBC, 8/27/19). Liel Leibowitz, a signer and Tablet writer, said Jews shouldn't go to college because of the ideas they might be exposed to (Tablet, 10/28/18)or, as he put it, because college is a place where "tenured professors train like-minded fanatics, and students are punished or rewarded for their willingness to pledge allegiance to their loony dogma."

The lack of specificity in the letter isn't an accident. Defining an ideological enemy so vaguely will allow these individuals, many of whom are on the right of the political spectrum, to employ the accusation of overly censorious "social justice" talk when they deem it necessary.

Given that so much of the letter aims at racial discordthe letter says that on "racial justice," Jewish organizations do not "encourage discussions that include differing perspectives," because "in some cases, Jewish leaders have even denounced Jews for expressing unpopular opinions"one can assume this is responding to Jewish Americans who have in the last several years aligned with Black Lives Matter, Abolish ICE and Antifa, which have responded to both the rise of far-right extremist groups and the state violence of border enforcement and overly militarized policing. The letter evokes the Republican hype about "cancel culture," the idea that the price of offending "social justice" activists means losing your job or media platform.

"This is not a new phenomenon," said Joshua Shanes, an associate professor of Jewish studies at the College of Charleston. "The idea that [the left] is betraying liberalism is an old trope to stop progress, going back to the '30s, and then to 'neocons' in the '70s and '80s."

The fact is that while the Jewish right claims they are being silenced or vilified in the media by the left, the Jewish right and its allies have levied harsh criticism toward liberal Jews and have in some cases attempted to deplatform them. The right-wing Zionist Organization of America blasted the Jewish immigration group HIAS for opposing the Trump administration (Jerusalem Post, 8/24/20), and the ZOA has also attempted to punish campus Jewish groups for voicing criticism of Israel (American Prospect, 1/4/07). DePaul University rejected tenure to anti-Israel scholar Norman Finkelstein, a result of his famous feud with pro-Israel legal scholar and Trump advocate Alan Dershowitz (Inside Higher Ed, 6/11/07). When New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo announced an executive order against the pro-Palestinian Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement, he didn't do so in a vacuum, but in "a speech at the Harvard Club in Manhattan to an audience including local Jewish leaders and lawmakers" (New York Times, 6/5/16).

The former US ambassador to Israel likened liberal Jewsthat is, the bulk of US Jewsto Nazi collaborators (New York, 12/16/16). Chicago-based Palestine Legal published a report on the heavily coordinated activity to silence critics of Israel across the countrya report that, unlike the JILV letter, cited specific examples, like how Florida politicians attacked the president of the Florida State student senate because of "social media posts he had made against the Israeli occupation."

The JILV "is a project of an opaque foundation connected to Republican megadonor Adam Beren," the Forward (5/6/21) reported. Lila Corwin Berman, a professor of history and Jewish studies at Temple University, told FAIR, "It is concerning when an initiative claiming to 'stand up for democratic liberal values' is far from transparent about its funding source." She added: "It seems that a basic requirement of supporting free and open debate would be to eschew cloaked or unaccountable modes of influence."

Leo Ferguson, director of strategic projects at Jews for Racial and Economic Justice, told FAIR:

The letter demonstrates a cynical, willful misunderstanding of the liberal political tradition, the meaning of free speech and dissent, and the mechanisms at work in a free marketplace of ideas. Let's be clearthe almost exclusively white signatories to this letter aren't motivated by an ironclad commitment to free political expression. On the contrary, many of these folks have led the charge to pass anti-BDS bills like the Israel Anti-Boycott Act, which is about as illiberal and censorious as you can get in a country with a First Amendment. At the end of the day, the not-so-sub-text of this letter is that conservative white Jews really don't like being called racist. But just because they don't like it doesn't mean it's not true.

It's easy to laugh off academic and journalistic elites who believe that they're being censored, but the true tragedy of the letter is that the signers hold up robust Jewish debate as their guiding tradition, when what they really want is for their ideas to go unchallenged in the marketplace of ideas. These signers have every right, both in the name of free discourse and the US constitution, to say whatever they want, no matter how controversial. But that also means Jewish leftists and "social justice" activists have a right to respond in kind. The anti-woke, antisocial justice right, to quote Hentoff again, wants "free speech for me, but not for thee."

Weiss said in her resignation letter that her conservatism was under attack while at the Times because colleagues ridiculed her, and that she faced viciousness on Twitter (New York Times, 7/14/20). But the gritty world of New York City journalism is home to lots of biting editors, and sources who love to complain to reporters about their coverage.

As for online harassment, that is unfortunately the world that any journalist has to deal with in the social media age. Julie Ioffe received considerable antisemitic harassment after she wrote a critical profile of Melania Trump (GQ, 4/27/16), attacks that Trump, whose husband would later become president, blamed on Ioffe (Washington Post, 5/17/16). I was put on an alt-right hit list (Forward, 10/19/16), and was harassed by Nazis on Twitter when I defended Antifa (Ha'aretz, 6/7/20). Welcome to the club, Bari. If you don't like it here, perhaps the writing profession isn't for you.

This failed attempt to paint "social justice" as some sort of anti-free speech mob is funny only until you put it into the context of a conservative movement that is taking legal moves to ban or threaten certain ideas (such as proposed laws against boycotts against Israel), and to protect violence against protestors. I have previously written for FAIR.org (10/23/20, 2/16/21) that right-wing anger about "cancel culture" and "wokeness" are often merely projections of the right's desire to censor the left. The "Jewish Harper's Letter" is simply another chapter in this disinformation tactic by the right.

Original post:

Conservative Jewish Journalists Use False Claims of Censorship to Try to Silence Critics - Common Dreams

For a lot of the songs across this album, it explores love from many different angles. Did making the album teach you anything about love, how you love, how you approach love?

I think it definitely made me sort of Im a lot more aware of my own role in a relationship now. And that might just be a result of growing up and kind of not thinking that everything bad that happens to you is, its someone else and putting the blame on others which is not something I do and not something I want to do. But sometimes people have the tendency to not look within before they start judging others. Im really looking at myself on a few of these songs and kind of thats also what Ive just been doing so much this past year. Is just looking in at myself and just being, Wait, what? What did I do here? And what could I have said differently here and how can I make it up to this person? Or how can I let this person know what I feel? And kind of just being like Thinking a lot more about communication which is so key in all of our relationships, really. So I feel like thats something Ive sort of been thinking about this past year when it comes to love and just

Are you a person who communicates better through their art than in conversation?

I would say so, because I dont know. Its definitely easier writing a song. Writing a song is like talking to yourself really. As long as youre okay with saying it to yourself, its not that hard to put it out on paper either or into your notes. Its definitely easier for me to write songs instead of communicating in real life. Im aware of that and thats something I want to get better at. I want to be like, Hey, you know what? What you said there that actually made me feel really shitty, instead of going home and being left with a weird feeling and then writing about it three months later.

And sort of on that tip, has keeping a diary helped you as a musician?

Yes. I would say so. It wasnt necessarily about a feeling, but I read a diary entry from 2014 the other day and I kind of go back to it sometimes where Im like, I want to be I was 15, 16, whatever. I want to make music. I havent been making any music recently. I feel like Ive lost my ability. And I was like, Oh my God. This is 15 year old, 16 year old Marie saying the shit Im feeling right now. And I was like So even though it wasnt anything related to a love entry or anything that, but it was just really great to see that I was struggling with feeling like Im never going to write a good song again at that age. And then Ive written several albums worth of music after that and that its going to be okay and that I just got to keep making stuff. So in a way I would say a diary entry has actually helped me as a musician.

When you look back at the music that youve released under your birth name, what is some of the key differences that you hear in it, between that work and your work as girl in red?

I would say the key difference is that this music really sounds like what I want it to sound like. And this music is straight out from my head and not someone elses. The music that was under my real name, I didnt know what producing was at that point. Even when I was in the studio with the studio guy, I didnt know that his role was a producer. And I didnt know that word. And I was just like, You glued the song together. I was so beyond a rabbit hole of not knowing anything. I would just say that the biggest difference is that this is truly how I want my music to sound and its coming from me because Im a producer now and I have abilities that I didnt have. I feel like thats the biggest difference other than the fact that its Norwegian and really bad.

So have you listened to some of your older girl in red songs recently? And if so, how do you feel about them now that youre going to release your first album?

I have. I actually checked out a few ones very briefly. But I still love them, but Im also like, Whoa, this sounds different. Ive gotten so much better. And that really so Im actually I get this really cool boost when I listen to them because Im like, Ive just been working so hard to get better and Im getting better and thats really inspiring. Even though sometimes I kind of lose track of that, Im actually progressing. Im actually getting better. And I listen to my old stuff and I was like, This sounds like mud. This sounds like I love this, but it also sounds like the mix is so off. The bass tone is literally Its the wrong key. Its dissonance. But its so raw and its so straight from my heart. So you can still feel how much I met everything and I just think thats really cool.

I also read that you really like film scores and of course the final track on your album is this beautiful instrumental piece. I was wondering if you had any favorite film scores and what kinds of movies you would like to score.

Thank you by the way. I also kind of look at that as a film score. And I think it sounds really peaceful. I dont Trying to I dont really have a favorite film score that comes to mind, but I always know when I really I always really appreciate it, but Im not a film score geek. But I want to score a movie maybe at some point in my life. Maybe not all by myself, but with someone. I feel like that would be great. To be in a studio with someone and kind of compose something together for a movie would be so cool. I dont even know what movie, but probably some indie movie thats shot on film, that just feels really A movie that would be really important to me as a teenager, I want to score one of those movies so that I can have something to say in a young persons adolescence and make the soundtrack to a movie that changed their life. That would be really cool.

So have you started thinking at all about how you want your next record to sound?

Yes, actually I have. And Im kind of in the middle of making that right now and figuring that out. Yes. I got to be productive. I have the weird opportunity now to not go on tour, but then to make more music. I kind of want to make the most out of that opportunity. I want to get cracking. Im going to the studio very soon. In three weeks, Im going back to the studio and Im going to be working on an idea that Ive been producing and writing on. So Im definitely trying to figure out what I want my second album to sound like.

Was writing an album something that you always wanted to do from when you started playing music? Because for a while, at least as girl in red it seemed like you were content to just put out singles and EPs.

That is something Ive always wanted. I saw this TikTok the other day that showed you how you could read your old Instagram bios. So I went to one of my first Instagrams. And I was in my bio, it was 16 and then music emoji. And then, Im making an album, music emoji. So when I was 16 years old, thats six years ago. So that was 16. And I was already, then, I was like, Im making an album. Obviously I wasnt because I did not know what it took at that point. I was just like, Im making many songs that is equals making album, which is not the same. But I think in some ways that is something Ive always wanted to do. I just think that the reason I was putting out so many songs was because I was kind of I had figured out that I could make songs and produce songs.

And that was such a big wow moment for me. So I wanted to sort of explore that a little bit before I wanted And sort of learn what it meant for me as a musician and kind of who am I as a musician and what role do I have? So I wanted to really take that time to figure it out. And I feel like if I wouldve made an album earlier, it wouldnt be If I Can Make It Go Quiet, it would, it would be something completely different and it would be rushed. And I also dont want to rush music.

I think thats a good point to talk a little about the album title, If I Could Make It Go Quiet. What does that album title mean to you in the context of the record?

In the context of the record, it means that theres so much shit going on in my head and I want to make it all go away, kind of. Its all about the mental noise thats so loud and it takes up all your mind space and it sort of sits in your chest and its everywhere. And its that loud feeling of wanting to make it all sort of go away and wanting to make it go quiet and wanting to just be happy and in a quiet place, kind of. Its a metaphor. So the quiet, the noise is everything thats not okay, kind of. And the world is a lot. So I just wanted to lower that shit.

And does making music help you do that?

Ironically, yes. Making music makes me really happy and it allows me to have a lot of other noise in my head instead of my thoughts that are incredibly annoying sometimes. So I would definitely say that making music makes other stuff go quiet.

Ive also read in a couple of interviews from you that world domination is the end goal. So in your mind, how is the world changed after girl in red has dominated it?

Thats a good question. Oh my God. I honestly dont even know. I should know this. I would just say that a lot of people are happy. People are being filled with great music. That is world domination. People are listening to music and they are connecting through music. I feel like that would be awesome.

Okay, great. I think well leave it there. Thanks for joining us, girl in red.

Thank you for talking to me. I hope you have a good day.

Excerpt from:

girl in red on writers block, self-censorship, and going cinematic - The FADER

CensorScreenshot: Magnolia Pictures

Between the Satanic panic and the rise of video nasties, the 1980s were a boon for anti-horror movie sentiments. As a result, horror movies seemingly became even more depraved, sadistic, and violent. Unsurprisingly, this period, when many of todays most prominent horror directors came of age, has become the setting du jour for science fiction and horror movies inspired by David Cronenberg, Dario Argento, and John Carpenter. And thats precisely the kind of vibe that the trailer for Censor is going for.

Directed by Prano Bailey-Bond, in her first feature, Censor follows a meticulous film censor named Enid (Niamh Algar) whos grip on reality loosens when her missing sister is declared dead. Unable to discern her childhood memories from a new film shes watching for work, Enid breaks down in what appears to be a frenzy of violence and gore.

The trailer recalls many of the aforementioned directors work, particularly Cronenbergs Videodrome and the red-tinged Giallo photography of Argentos Suspiria (the music in the trailer even sounds like Goblin). Theres a lot of this type of thing going around right now, from the work of Panos Cosmatos to the more family-friendly world of Stranger Things. Though, this falls squarely in the latter. Obviously, if thats your thing, youre going to want to soak up every ounce of blood this trailer has to offer. If not, you might want to cover your eyes because this thing is creepy.

Censor tears its way into theaters on June 11 and video-on-demand on June 18.

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The Censor trailer is here to remind us that horror movies are bad for our mental health - The A.V. Club