Chinese performance artist and activist Brother Nut, age 39, is using silence to send a message opposing government censorship, particularly with regard to the coronavirus pandemic.

As part of a new project hes calling#shutupfor30days,Brother Nut kept his mouth closed for 30 days, sealing his lips in different wayswith metal clasps, gloves, and a surgical face mask reading shut up.In a reference to Chinas widespread blocking of internet content, Brother Nut also wore packing tape with the 404 error code that comes up when a website cant be found.

China has been widely criticized for possibly covering up the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic. During the early days of the outbreak, police arrested Chinese doctorLi Wenliang and forced him to confess to spreading rumors when he alerted colleagues to thedeadly new virus.Li later died of the disease.

Sometimes I feel my job is similar to that of an NGO or a journalistseeking to raise awareness of social issues and the moves to counter them, Brother Nut, who goes by a pseudonym to avoid police retaliation, told Reuters.If you ask me how an artist should digest unfair treatment, such as violence or censorship, my first reaction is: keep fighting, with art.

The artists work has already attracted negative attention from the government. He was previously detained by police for 10 days.

In 2018, Chinese authorities shut down a Brother Nut exhibition that featured more than 9,000 bottles of Nongfu Spring, a common Chinese brand of water. He had refilled each one with contaminated drinking water from a Chinese village to highlight the dangers of pollution.

The artist also made headlines with a 2015 work, Project Dust, for which he vacuumed smoggy Beijing air for 100 days during a period of particularly poor air quality in the city. Sometimes mistaken for a high-tech street sweeper with his industrial-strength vacuum, Brother Nut took the tiny condensed pollution particles and mixed them with clay to create brick sculptures that represented the negative health effects of air pollution.

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Chinese Artist and Activist Brother Nut Is Taking a Vow of Silence to Protest Government Censorship of Coronavirus Data - artnet News

Carolyn Wysinger is a teacher and activist who says Facebook censors her from discussing racism online, sometimes locking her out of her account. USA TODAY

Acknowledging complaints over censorship and harassment, Facebook is creating teams to examine and address racial bias on its platform and on Instagram.

The teams will focus onthe experience of Black, Hispanic and other minority users, the company said Tuesday.

Scrutiny of the company has intensified since nationwide protests over the death of George Floyd brought the issue of racial justice to the forefront.

Hundreds of brands are boycotting Facebook and Instagram this month, giving voice to criticism that these platforms stifleBlack users while failing to shield Black users from racially motivated hate speech and threats.

The racial justice movement is a moment of real significance for our company. Any bias in our systems and policies runs counter to providing a platform for everyone to express themselves, Vishal Shah, Instagrams vice president of product, said in a statement.

Facebook while Black: Black users call for Facebook to stop censorship, harassment

Facebook diversity report: Efforts still failing Black and Hispanic employees, especially women

An internal civil rights audit of Facebooks policies and practices released earlier this month highlighted the companys failure to rein in racism and toxic speech.

The prioritization of free expression over all other values, such as equality and non-discrimination, is deeply troubling, civil rights activist Laura Murphy wrote in the audit, which began in 2018 at the urging of civil rights organizations and some members of Congress.

In probing the challenges underrepresented groups face, Instagram said a dedicated team would review how it enforces harassment policies and how it evaluates algorithms for potential bias. The team will also work on new features to promote equity on Instagram, such as supporting minority owned small businesses, the company said.

The Instagram app logo is displayed on an iPhone on August 3, 2016 in London, England.(Photo: Carl Court, Getty Images)

Facebook will also work on includingthe perspectives of Black and other marginalized users in itsproducts, the company said.

Facebook said it'sconsulting with civil rights groups on how to responsibly collect and study sensitive data on the race of its users.

When deciding what speech or behavior to allow on its platforms, Facebook relies on a list of rules called "Community Standards." Facebook defines hate speech as an attack against a "protected characteristic," such as race, gender, sexuality or religion. And each individual or group is treated equally, even if they do not face oppression or marginalization.

Civil rights groups trace these policies to the people in a position toshape them. Despite pledges to close the racial gap, Facebook still struggles to hire, promote and retain Black employees and has few Black executives in the C-suite.About 4% of the company'scurrent workforce is Black and 6.3% is Hispanic while3.4% of senior leaders are Black and 4.3% are Hispanic.

USA TODAY coverage: Race and equity in Silicon Valley

Black users say they have no choice but to stick with these platforms. Movements on social media have helped put the deaths of Black Americans by police officers on the public agenda, along with racial disparities in employment, health and other key areas, they say.

To elude bans when talking about racism, Black users say they resort to using a white avatar, digital slang such as "wypipo" or "huite" or a cloud emoji as phonetic or visual stand-ins for white people. They operate under aliases and maintain backup accounts to avoid losing content and access to their community. And they've developed a buddy system to alert friends and followers when someone has been sent to Facebook jail, sharing the news of the suspension and the posts that put them there.

Harassment on Facebook and Instagram has gotten worse as nationwide protests following Floyds death in police custody draw renewed attention to historic racial inequities, Black users say.

Private groups discussing racial justice and police brutality report being swarmed by organized networks of white supremacists, who use racial slurs and tell them to go back to Africa.

Read or Share this story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/tech/2020/07/21/facebook-instagram-racial-bias-african-americans-hispanics/5483986002/

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Facebook and Instagram to study racial bias against African Americans, Hispanics on their platforms - Detroit Free Press

Harpers magazine recently posted a letter signed by over 150 leading authors, journalists, and public intellectuals calling for greater support for freedom of speech. The letter criticized the intolerance for opposing views frequently exhibited on Twitter and social media. Does the freedom to criticize speech threaten the free exchange of ideas?

Signers included David Brooks, Noam Chomsky, Malcolm Gladwell, Salman Rushdie, Gloria Steinem, and Matt Yglesias. To quote from the letter, The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences.

A society organized for the benefit of people as opposed to the glory of rulers requires freedom for people to think, voice their ideas, and engage with others. Our rational faculties require critical exchange. And limiting government requires freedom to criticize our leaders.

Some commentators have criticized social media censorship by companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google while others want more active removal of offensive content. The censorship claim is technically false, as only governments truly censor, whether through prior restraint to prevent publication of views or punishments for speech.

Is freedom from government coercion sufficient, or can the actions of private individuals neutralize freedom of expression? Negative reactions to the Harpers letter ultimately turn on these questions.

Third parties can illegitimately chill speech, as Harpers signatory Salman Rushdie can attest to. His 1988 novel The Satanic Verses was considered blasphemous by Muslims; Irans Ayatollah Khomeni issued a fatwah on or order to Muslims to kill Mr. Rushdie, who spent a decade in hiding. In January 2015, armed gunmen killed 11 employees at the offices of the French radical magazine Charlie Hedbo over offensive content.

Criminal acts are unacceptable. We will not have free exchange if violence is the price of speaking. Are other forms of outrage over or criticism of speech acceptable?

Some must be. People who found Mr. Rushdies book offensive should be free not to buy it. The writing of letters by newspaper readers or television viewers demanding that certain columnists or reporters be fired also seems acceptable.

Social media mobs seem more adept at getting offenders fired than letter writers ever were. A parallel for todays events might be the Hollywood blacklist during the anti-communist McCarthy era. While Senator McCarthy and the House Committee on Un-American Affairs exercised government power, the blacklist was private reprisal. The entertainment industry feared public backlash from employing actors, actresses, directors or writers seen as communists or communist sympathizers.

Is there anything different and more dangerous about social media? For one, social media permanently records peoples misstatements and offensive actions. An inappropriate Halloween costume lives forever on Facebook or Instagram and cannot be denied. Furthermore, social media outrage organizes at warp speed compared to the letter writing campaigns of yesterday.

Yet social media critics cannot fire businesses employees; they prevail only by persuading business managers of the merits of their complaints. I may think that businesses respond too quickly and overreact to social media outrage. As an economist, I recognize that business leaders know the challenges they face much better than I do.

Consider the recent resignation of CrossFit founder and CEO Greg Glassman in the wake of his criticism of protests over George Floyds death at the hands of Minneapolis police. Was his company taken from him unjustly? Not necessarily; the financial harm he caused was real. Reportedly 1,000 of the companys 14,000 gyms ended their affiliations in response, and Reebok severed a decade-long licensing deal. CrossFit is privately held, but investors sought to make money, not lose due to Mr. Glassmans comments.

Loss of ones ability to earn a livelihood is a harsh penalty likely to chill speech, both now and during the Hollywood blacklist. Ultimately, however, social media protests only succeed by persuading others that someones speech is offensive. Persuasion and criticism are part of life in a voluntary society.

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News - The Freedom to Speak and Criticize - The Heartland Institute

By Marilyn M. Singleton, MD, JDPast PresidentAssociation of American Physicians and Surgeons

The COVID-19 lockdown has its benefits: a chapter a day of the unabridged version of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyns "The Gulag Archipelago," a study in fear and redefined normal values, among many other lessons.

Free speech is the bedrock of our politics, but media manipulation is now rampant. Under the guise of fact-checking, our modern day "newspapers" YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter have become the arbiters of what constitutes a worthy opinion or fact in contrast to misinformation.

Scientists were certain that something heavier than air could not maintain flight. The misinformed Wright brothers proved them wrong.

Vladimir Lenin recognized that the media are propagandists and their information presented should be easy to digest, most graphic, and most strongly impressive.

With COVID-19, the media create irrational fear with daily charts of deaths and case numbers without corresponding recoveries. They fail to mention that many deaths were of patients with serious underlying conditions or who were already in hospice and had weeks to live and coincidentally tested positive.

The raw numbers are unaccompanied by the CDCs instruction to classify a death as COVID-19 even if merely suspected or, in some cases, with a negative test. There is no corresponding warning with blinking lights that the tests have false positives or that the daily report of increases includes old tests that were not previously reported.

As Lenin noted, ideas are much more fatal than guns. Thus, where propaganda and media bias do not succeed, censorship will.

Currently, a vocal physician is being silenced and investigated for questioning the motives and possible over-reporting of COVID-19 as the cause of death. Censorship is our polite version of disappearing dissidents.

We are not Communist China and cannot allow the treatment of Dr. Li Wenliang, a Wuhan ophthalmologist to be the new normal. In December 2019, he courageously warned his colleagues on social media about the new SARS-like pneumonia cases but knew that he would probably be punished.

Indeed, Chinese officials forced him to sign a letter accusing him of making false comments that had severely disturbed the social order. Fortunately for scientific advancement of our relentless search for COVID-19 treatments and mitigation, many questioned the official story about the novel coronavirus coming from a pangolin at a Wuhan wet market.

Censorship, corrupt scientific inquiry and media bias have no place in medicine. It is not clear that lockdowns are scientifically sound. Curiously, social justice protests are allowed despite lockdowns. One epidemiological analysis concluded lockdowns in Western Europe had no effect on COVID-19 deaths.

Additionally, studies show severe psychological effects of quarantines. The five states with the most COVID-19 deaths from March through April showed a 35 to 400 percent increase in deaths from various non-respiratory underlying causes, including diabetes, heart diseases, Alzheimers disease, and cerebrovascular diseases. Some 80,000 diagnoses of five common cancers may be missed or delayed by early June because of disruptions to medical care caused by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Most reviews conclude that masks do not slow down the spread of the SARS-CoV-2 virus (that causes COVID-19). Studies show non-medical masks do not stop aerosolized droplets less than 2.5 microns. A group of 239 scientists from multiple disciplines from 32 countries have recently agreed that SARS-CoV-2 is spread by such small droplets. They recommend improving indoor ventilation infection controls as the key protective measure. Handwashing and social distancing but not masks were advised. The CDC recommends masks.

Faced with a global pandemic, physicians were exploring hydroxychloroquine (HCQ), which had been favorably studied during the 2003 SARS epidemic, as a prophylactic or an early treatment. Numerous reports of HCQs efficacy on thousands of patients continue to mount.

Once the media labelled it Trumps drug, the fix was in. The long-awaited randomized clinical trial showing no benefit was gleefully reported by the media. However, the media were silent when the study was found to be so corrupt that it had to be retracted. Detroits Henry Ford Hospitals large three-month observational study that showed a significant reduction in mortality in hospitalized patients with HCQ and validated HCQs over 60-year record of safety garnered little media attention.

These (purposefully) chaotic times are an opportunity for a movement toward government control and the suppression of individuality. Lockdowns keep us apart and stifle the free exchange of ideas and social communion. As Eric Hoffer explained in True Believer, a mass movement deliberately makes the present mean and miserable. . . . People whose lives are barren and insecure seem to show a greater willingness to obey than people who are self-sufficient and self-confident. Becoming a psychological cripple is not an option.

Is this chaos a new form of plastic surgery? When the bandages (masks) are removed will you be a changed person?

Dr. Singleton is a board-certified anesthesiologist. She is the immediate past president of the Association of American Physicians and Surgeons (AAPS). She graduated from Stanford and attended UC Berkeley Law School.

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COVID-19 chaos - The Highland County Press

Your partner recording and posting a video of you showering without your knowledge seems like the sort of thing that only happens in awful relationships ... or when you're partnered with a renowned prankster and endlessly devoted troll like Chrissy Teigen.

She is one of those celebrities who is just as well known for her shenanigans as she is for being a model, host, and author. Typically, those shenanigans revolve around trolling her husband, singer and EGOT winner John Legend.

Messing with Legend is nothing new for Teigen, and nothing Legend isn't used to. He has gone on record multiple times saying he loves her sense of mischief and sass.

The first line in his hit song "All Of Me" (which was written for Chrissy) is:

Teigen even joked she knew, for sure, the song was about her just from that line.

We're establishing this all because it's important to note that Legend is a willing participant in his own repeated roastings.

For many people, this round of Shenanigans With Chrissy would have been humiliating. For John Legend, it's just another day being married to your best friend and biggest troll.

Recently, she posted a video of him naked in the shower. The clip is only four seconds long, and lovingly censored by Teigen's strategically placed hand, but yup... that's definitely naked John Legend. In fact, it's naked John Legend only kept "decent" by Teigen who, ever the supermodel, is precariously balancing on her toes.

Teigen can't help but laugh as she films.

Where mere mortals like you and I might cringe at the idea of a shower video posted for millions to see, Legend and the couple's friends and family (and fans!) find it hilarious.

This is just another in a lengthy string of ribbings at Teigen's hand. She has also messed with him by comparing him to the cartoon character Arthur, joking about how all babies look just like him and posting countless teasing pics pretending to do things like pick his nose or grab his butt.

People, particularly their friends, are laughing right along with the pair as usual.

Chrissy Teigen / Instagram

Chrissy Teigen / Instagram

Chrissy Teigen / Instagram

Chrissy Teigen / Instagram

Chrissy Teigen / Instagram

We can't wait to see what she comes up with next on her endless quest to mess with her husband. Keep up the fun, Ms. Teigen!

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Chrissy Teigen Filmed John Legend Taking A Shower With Just Her Hand As A Censor, And Her Fans Are Living For It - Comic Sands