Category Archives: Censorship

Sen. Marsha Blackburn (R-TN) has secured another win for conservatives on tech policy, removing a loophole from a bill designed to regulate the app marketplaces of Apple and Google that would have allowed them to continue to censor in the name of digital safety, according to sources familiar with the matter.

The bill, the Open App Markets Act, protects the ability of app developers to sideload apps onto iPhones and Android devices, bypassing the chokehold of the two tech giants, who control 99 percent of smartphone operating systems worldwide.

Apple CEO Tim Cook looking pensive ( Spencer Platt /Getty)

Google boss Sundar Pichai is masked up ( Drew Angerer /Getty)

An early version of the bill contained a big loophole: Google and Apple would still have been able to boot apps from their marketplaces if they did so in the name of digital safety a term wide-open to interpretation, that has often been used by Big Tech as a pretext to censor conservatives. Even for non-political apps, Apple and Googles current systems represent a strangehold on their businesses.

However, a new version of the Open App Markets Act seen by Breitbart News no longer contains the digital safety language. Sources familiar with the matter say Sen. Blackburn was responsible for this last-minute change. The new version of the bill is likely to be introduced via the hotline procedure in the Senate, meaning it will pass if no Senators object.

Left wing groups such as the Center for American Progress argued that the earlier version of the bill would ensure hate speech and disinformation were not protected because the loophole allowed platforms to take action to protect the safety or security of its users.

The removal of this censorship loophole, which was the number-one point of conservative criticism of the Open App Markets act, would be the second big win for Sen. Blackburn on tech policy this week.

On Tuesday, a last-ditch effort by supporters of the Journalism Competition and Preservation Act (JCPA) to force the bill into law by attaching it to the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) failed.

Sen. Blackburn was the first Republican Senator to come out against the bill, which would establish a gravy train of financial handouts and other favors from Big Tech to the media industry, when it was first introduced in the spring of 2021.

Allum Bokhari is the senior technology correspondent at Breitbart News.He is the author of#DELETED: Big Techs Battle to Erase the Trump Movement and Steal The Election.

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Marsha Blackburn Secures Another Tech Win, Removes Censorship Loophole ...

Internal Twitter deliberations surrounding the censorship of the New York Posts reporting on Hunter Bidens laptop from hell reveal the companys management engaging in willful ignorance of the facts of the story in order to justify censoring it on the platform.

Matt Taibbi, the journalist tasked by Elon Musk to reveal the internal communications, explains that Twitter management at the time used the companys hacked materials policy as an excuse to squelch the Posts reporting, but knew it wasnt going to hold. The reason it wasnt going to hold was because the Post explained that the reporting was based on a hard drive abandoned at a computer repair shop, not hacked material, and produced a federal subpoena given to the repair-shop owner to bolster the claim.

Jack Dorsey and Twitter employees (@Jack/Twitter)

Twitter Exec Vijaya Gadde (Fortune Brainstorm TECH/Flickr)

Former Trust and Safety chief Yoel Roth messaged colleagueVijaya Gadde, The policy basis is hacked materials though, as discussed, this is an emerging situation where the facts remain unclear. Given the SEVERE risks here and lessons of 2016, were erring on the side of including a warning and preventing this content from being amplified.

Another member of management, Brandon Borrman, then asks, Can we truthfully claim that this is part of the policy?

Jim Baker, Twitters then-Deputy Legal Counsel and former senior member of the FBI, adds, [We] need more facts to assess whether the materials were hacked. At this stage, however, it is reasonable for us to assume that they may have been and that conclusion is warranted.

Baker then admits, per the Posts reporting in the story in question, that there is evidence indicating that the computer was either abandoned and/or the owner consented to allow the repair shop to access it for at least some purposes.

But during the time this communication was underway, Twitter did not contact the New York Post to inquire about whether the reporting was based on hacked material, and the story in question explained exactly how the Post obtained the material it was reporting on.

In the story headlined, Smoking-gun email reveals how Hunter Biden introduced Ukrainian businessman to VP dad, published on October 14, 2020, it says that the correspondence between Burisma board memberVadym Pozharskyi and Hunter was contained in a massive trove of data recovered from a laptop computer.

The Post published that it had the entire hard drive, which was originally obtained by a computer repair shop in Delaware.

The computer was dropped off at a repair shop in Bidens home state of Delaware in April 2019, according to the stores owner, the Post wrote in the initial story.

The customer who brought in the water-damaged MacBook Pro for repair never paid for the service or retrieved it or a hard drive on which its contents were stored, according to the shop owner, who said he tried repeatedly to contact the client.

The shop owner couldnt positively identify the customer as Hunter Biden, but said the laptop bore a sticker from the Beau Biden Foundation, named after Hunters late brother and former Delaware attorney general.

Photos of a Delaware federal subpoena given to The Post show that both the computer and hard drive were seized by the FBI in December, after the shops owner says he alerted the feds to their existence.

But before turning over the gear, the shop owner says, he made a copy of the hard drive and later gave it to former Mayor Rudy Giulianis lawyer, Robert Costello.

Steve Bannon, former adviser to President Trump, told The Post about the existence of the hard drive in late September and Giuliani provided The Post with a copy of it on Sunday.

The Post also published an image of a federal subpoena, showing the computer was in the FBIs possession, after being turned in by the computer repair shop owner, who has now been publicly identified as John Paul Mac Isaac.

Emma-Jo Morris is the Politics Editor at Breitbart News. Email her atejmorris@breitbart.comor follow heronTwitter.

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Morris: Internal Twitter Deliberations on Laptop from Hell Censorship ...

Over half of Americans believe media censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story constitutes election interference, a new survey finds.

The survey from the Media Research Center found 49 percent of respondents said it was inappropriate for social media sites to suppress an October 2020 New York Post report that showed Hunter promised Ukrainian business partners access to his father. Twitter suspended the Posts account following publication and blocked users from sharing the link. Fifty-two percent of respondents said the blackout constituted election interference.

Big tech has come under fire over the past year for censoring posts on hot-button issues. Facebook has regularly removed or suppressed content that suggests COVID-19 escaped from a Chinese lab. The platform also removed posts from a Gold Star mother critical of Biden's handling of the death of her son. Twitter this month suspended the account of Rep. Jim Banks (R., Ind.) after he referred to a transgender Biden official as a man.

The Media Research Center survey found that the ban on the Hunter Biden story also shaped voters' perceptions of Joe Biden. Almost 30 percent of respondents said they would have been less likely to vote for Biden if they had been aware of evidence Biden lied about "knowledge of his son Hunter's overseas business dealings."

When the story first broke, media outlets labeled it Russian disinformation, even though there was no evidence that Russian agents were behind the story or that the emails had been falsified. The survey found that line has stuck with many voters, with 30 percent still saying the story was Russian disinformation.

Dan Gainor, a vice president at the Media Research Center, said the survey showed "people are finally catching on to how much we're getting manipulated by big tech." He framed the survey results as a reflection of widespread concerns about self-rule, asking the Washington Free Beacon, "How can democratically elected countries survive if big tech decides it wants to pick who wins the election?"

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Poll: Majority of Americans Say Big Tech Censorship of Hunter Laptop ...

Jonathan Turley is not only a renowned George Washington University law professor, legal scholar, and Fox News contributor; he has called himself a Democrat whos willing to speak truth to power, and as a result, regularly blasts the Democrat Party and liberal media now over the Hunter Biden laptop scandal.

Turley dropped by Fridays episode of Fox Newss Hannity to discuss the ongoing Twitter Files dumps with an intelligent-as-usual take on the Twitter 1.0 internal documents, telling host Sean Hannity that Congressional Democrats have refused to pursue censorship allegations against Twitter for years:

These files are not just an indictment of the FBI, theyre an indictment of Congress. Congress has shown a steadfast refusal to dig into these censorship allegations, many of us have been writing about this for years. The Democratic members have refused to pursue this, and in fact, Democratic members have pushed social media companies to expand censorship.

The good professor then analyze the Democrats telling response to former Twitter CEO Jack Dorseys apology for the social media companys part in the Hunter Biden story:

In the very hearing where Jack Dorsey apologized for the Hunter Biden laptop debacle, the immediate reaction of Democratic senators [was] to tell him, dont backslide on us, we want more censorship. Well, now, we have, not just censorship, we have blacklisting, we have these shadowbans. All of that is now open to the public.

And so, in some ways, Musk has forced people to choose sides. And I think that some of the anger that you see in the media borders on self-loathing. I mean, theyre having now to embrace not just being censorship apologists, but blacklisting and shadowbanning and also lying, because thats what weve seen for the last three years.

Thats a lot to take on yourself and still claim that youre a journalist or you believe in free speech, Turley said of the media.

Both the Democrat Party and the liberal media sock puppets are between a rock and a hard place as a result of Elon Musks return of free speech to Twitter. The Democrats and mainstream media lapdogs vociferously deny their support of censorship out of one side of their face, yet histrionically almost condemn Musk to eternal hell for lifting multiple suspensions of high-profile conservative Twitter accounts out of the other side.

Meanwhile, Musk gleefully continues to troll the crap out of the whole lot.

Trending on Redstate Video

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Jonathan Turley Blisters Democrats Over Twitter Files as 'Indictment of ...

Former President Donald Trump declared on Truth Social that The silent majority is back. The question of a silent majority was raised in both the 2016 and 2020 elections as being essential to a potential Trump victory, under the allegation that censorship and social pressure are keeping his supporters silent.

Meanwhile, theres a large-scale movement underway of propaganda disguised as local news, big tech censorship tools that fine people for misinformation, and programs that allow for communal fact-checking. Yet many of these are facing a troubled launch, amid controversy and social pushback.

In this live Q&A with Crossroads host Joshua Philipp, well discuss these stories and others, and answer questions from the audience.

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Trump Declares Return of the Silent Majority; New Censorship Attempt ...

1. Elon Musk's Free Speech Twitter Still Censoring DDoSecrets  The Intercept
2. Schiff--Russia collusion disinformation specialist--wants more censorship.  KABC
3. Jordan Peterson Returns To Twitter, Immediately Demands The Site Censor Anonymous Trolls  Forbes
4. Donald Trump and the blue-tick pricks  Spiked
5. View Full Coverage on Google News

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Elon Musk's Free Speech Twitter Still Censoring DDoSecrets - The Intercept

Tor, the onion router, remains one of the most effective censorship circumvention technologies. Millions of people use the Tor network every day to access the internet without fear of surveillance and censorship.

Most people get on the Tor network by downloading the Tor Browser and connecting to a relay. But some countries, such as Iran and Russia, block direct access to the Tor network. In those countries people have to use what are known as Tor Bridges to circumvent national firewalls. Tens of thousands of people use bridges regularly to circumvent censorship and national or regional restrictions.

The number of bridge users in Iran grew exponentially in the last week of September 2022.

Of course, ISPs in countries where Tor is banned are constantly trying to find the IP addresses of bridges and block them to prevent people from accessing Tor. Bridge connections can also be identified (or fingerprinted) as connections to the Tor network by an ISP using deep packet inspection. To deal with this, Tor has a clever solution called pluggable transports. Pluggable transports disguise your Tor connection as ordinary traffic to a well-known web service such as Google or Skype, and smuggles your Tor connection inside of the seemingly innocuous traffic.

In the past, running a pluggable transport was difficult to set up, requiring a server and a good deal of time and technical knowledge. Now, thanks to a new pluggable transport called Snowflake, anyone can run a pluggable transport in their browser with just a couple of clicks and help people all over the world access the unrestricted internet.

The user interface for the Snowflake browser extension

Logs from a standalone snowflake instance running on a server

Snowflake is composed of three components: volunteers running Snowflake proxies, Tor users (or clients) that want to connect to the internet, and a broker that delivers Snowflake proxies to clients. Volunteers willing to help users on censored networks can help by spinning up short-lived proxies on their regular browsers. When you enable Snowflake, your browser will contact the broker and let it know that you are ready to accept peer-to-peer connections from people seeking to access Tor. Then clients who are on a restricted network can contact the broker and ask for a proxy, the broker will eventually hand them your IP address, and then the client will make a direct connection to your computer using WebRTC (the same technology which is used by Zoom, Skype, and any other peer-to-peer web connection.) Your computer will then forward traffic from the client to the Tor network.

A visual diagram of Snowflake

The obvious weak point here is the broker server. Why couldnt a country just block the broker IP since it is well-known? The answer is a technique called domain fronting. The details of domain fronting can be found elsewhere, but in brief, domain fronting lets the client make a request that looks like an ordinary web request for google.com, and thanks to HTTPS the request is able to hide its Host header which is actually for an arbitrary web service hosted on Googles cloud. In this case, that service is the Snowflake broker.

To block Snowflake, a network or country would have to block all of Google or every IP address outside of the network, essentially a complete internet shutdown. Of course, countries have repeatedly shown their willingness to do exactly that, but its a much higher price to pay than simply blocking Tor.

The security concerns for the Snowflake proxy operator are minimal. The Snowflake client will not be able to interact with your computer in any way or observe your network traffic, and you will not be able to see their traffic. From the perspective of your ISP it will look like you are connecting to a Tor bridge, which if you are running a Snowflake proxy should be legal and unrestricted in your country. There is no more risk running a Snowflake proxy than running Tor browser.

Snowflake means that everyone can help people exercise their freedom of expression anywhere in the world, and it takes no technical knowledge to run, so if you are in an unrestricted country (such as in North America or most of Europe) go run one now! And if you are in a restricted network consider using Snowflake to circumvent censorship and access the internet.

More technical readers are encouraged to read the Snowflake Technical Overview and the project page for more technical details. For other discussions about Snowflake, please visit the Tor Forum and follow up the Snowflake tag.

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Snowflake Makes It Easy For Anyone to Fight Censorship

Hi, everyone. Glad to hear from Joe Biden that the pandemic is over. But whos going to tell the coronavirus?

The Plain View

The linguist George Lakoff is famous for his theory of framing in political speech. The words people use to describe an issue can end a debate even before the speechifying begins. Framing is about getting language that fits your worldview, he once explained. The ideas are primary and the language carries those ideas, evokes those ideas.

I thought about Lakoff when I read the US Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuits ruling regarding the Texas legislatures House Bill 20, signed by Governor Greg Abbott last year. The law limits how technology platforms can moderate speech, essentially banning companies like Meta, Google, and Twitter from removing or de-ranking content on the basis of the viewpoint it expresses. Two industry associations, NetChoice and the Computer & Communications Industry Association (CCIA), challenged the law, as they had similar legislation in Florida. A lot of complicated appeals and challenges ensued. In Florida, the courts blocked the law, and the state government is appealing to the Supreme Court. But after an appeals court ruling in Texas stopped the law, a higher court, the US Fifth Circuit, intervened, saying that it was constitutional and could be enforced. Then the Supreme Court stepped in. It prevented the law from taking effect, and asked the Fifth Circuit to reconsider its earlier decision.

The Fifth Circuit didnt budge. Writing for a two-to-one majority last week, Judge Andrew Oldhama Trump appointee whose previous post was general counsel for Texas governor Greg Abbottproduced a ruling that reads more like an Infowars dispatch than a reasoned decision. Near the top he rams a contemptuous stake in the ground: Today, he writes, we reject the idea that corporations have a freewheeling First Amendment right to censor what people say.

Okay, put aside the judges belief that a freewheeling use of a basic right is something unsavory. (Isnt that what rights are for?) The key word here is censor. Its the framing from hell. Censorship is the term that Republican legislators and pundits often use to describe ordinary content moderationthe act of a company choosing what kind of speech it wants users to see on its platform. Using that word is a political tactic, intended to cow platforms into allowing speech that violates their policiesthings like Covid misinformation, hate speech, and election denialthat more often come from the right than the left. Indeed, the text of HB 20 adopts that terminology, saying that a social media platform may not censor a user. But this framing is bogus. Censorship is something that governments do, not private parties policing their own websites. Its Orwellian that the government says that private businesses exercise of editorial discretion is censorship, says CCIA president Matt Schruers.

Nonetheless, Oldham locks in on the term as if its the only way to describe how private platforms determine how to maintain civility and safety. The words censor or censorship appear 143 times in his ruling. The platforms are not newspapers, he writes. Their censorship is not speech. Meanwhile, Oldham thinks its perfectly fine for the government to tell a private company what speech it can or cannot hostwhich sounds a lot like, you know, censorship. The kind that the First Amendment prohibits. The Fifth Circuit ruling means that the law will take effect on October 7, unless further legal rulings put it on hold.

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In 2018, #MeToo, the hashtag people around the world use to discuss sexual harassment, was blocked on social media in China.

Internet users in the country formed a new hashtag to keep raising awareness. They used the characters for rice (, pronounced m) and bunny (, pronounced t).

They even used emoji to represent the phrase a clever and more effective way to dodge the censors.

Here are some other ways people in China are tricking the censors to post on social media.

A few months ago, people were posting a lot about the Netherlands on Chinese social media platform Weibo. Wake up, sleeping people of the Netherlands! said one post. Others lamented that the people of Amsterdam wanted their tulips back.

These Chinese social media users arent expressing a nascent interest in all things Dutch. Theyre talking about recent protests over frozen bank deposits in the province of Henan. Ordinarily, discussions about a controversial topic like this would be censored on Chinese social media, and posts containing the word Henan could be blocked or deleted. But Henan () sounds a lot like Helan (), the Mandarin word for the Netherlands. By swapping the names around, people were able to get past the censors and keep the conversation going.

This particular approach to internet speak substituting words that sound like or are spelled like others has been an essential part of being online in China for decades, allowing netizens to use the humor and cleverness of spoken Mandarin to dodge censorship.

Criticism and discussion of Chinas zero-Covid policy is often suppressed on social media. When an outbreak occurs, people are forced to undergo endless rounds of mandatory testing. To talk about it, people used a phrase to represent the concept again and again visually, repeating the character for again (, pronounced yu) an escalating number of times.

In each successive character ( shung, then ru, then zhu), appears another time.

The word again is repeated ten times across the four characters, hiding the phrase again and again in plain sight.

In China, people have perfected this kind of language play online as a way to discuss an ever-lengthening list of banned or controversial topics, creating an eternally shifting lexicon of online slang. The play on puns and homophones has been a long existing literary and cultural tradition, Shaohua Guo, author of The Evolution of the Chinese Internet, told Rest of World. The prevalence of Internet use, particularly social media, further popularizes the practice.

In July, Chinese social media site Weibo announced an effort to clean up the use of intentionally misspelled words and homophones, following on the heels of one of the countrys main internet regulators prohibiting their use in usernames. Weibo said it would refine its keyword identification model to be able to filter this type of coded language, but experts wonder if the company can really keep pace with online slang in China.

Xuan Wang, a sociolinguist at Cardiff University, pointed to memes, GIFs, and even images of everyday household objects, like an empty chair, that have been layered with subtext and additional meaning to demonstrate the diversity of online language in China. There are so many examples, China Digital Times keeps a running catalog. Being able to fully ban language like this as it continues to evolve is not realistic or tenable, Wang told Rest of World. Wherever there is censorship and control, there is resistance. There is no end to it. Thats how social life is.

To illustrate just how difficult this might be, weve collected some popular examples of censor-dodging online slang most of which were eventually banned, too.

If you want to: insult someones intelligenceyou call them: a paratrooperThe word for paratrooper (, pronounced snbng) sounds similar to a popular insult that Chinese internet company Baidu banned from its message forums in 2021. After people started calling each other paratroopers instead, state media published stories defending Chinas airborne forces. It forced Baidu into an awkward spot: the company knew what people were really using the word for, but it couldnt ban a word that honored Chinas military, and left the posts up.

If you want to talk about: censorshipyou mention: seafoodThe reference originated with the word for river crab (, pronounced hxi), which sounds nearly the same as the word for harmony (, pronounced hxi) if something had been censored, it had been harmonized.Once the characters for river crab were themselves banned, internet users subbed in other seafood. Now people say fish, anything you catch in the sea, said Wang. Not using the direct homophone, but words that refer in a zigzag way back to the censored word.

If you want another way to talk about: censorshipyou can invoke: a grass mud horsePerhaps the most widely known of the code words referencing online censorship, the meaningless phrase grass mud horse (, pronounced co n m) sounds nearly the same as a common insult to someones mother and was popularized in response to attempts to scrub vulgar content from the internet.

If you want to talk about: feeling burned outyou can say youre: lying flatSome young people in China have turned to lying flat (, pronounced tngpng), which refers to opting out of participation in the hypercompetitive cultures of work and school. This trend has been in response to intense working hours, a widening wealth gap, and what The New Yorker described in 2021 as a Sisyphean experience of being locked in competition that one ultimately knows is meaningless.

If you want to talk about: social distancingyou can say youre: sittingThe character for seat (, pronounced zu), contains two components representing people. During the Covid-19 pandemic, the winner of a creative character contest in Japan reinvented it, moving one of the people to the line below the other, to look like theyre socially distancing. The example was picked up online in China.Its pictorial, but its not part of the official corpus of characters, so how does anyone pick that up? said Wang, the Wales-based sociolinguist.

If you want to: quiet quityou can: touch fishA tactic thats essential for surviving any workplace with 996 hours, the phrase touching fish (, pronounced m y) means pretending to work appearing busy, while really just passing the time at the office. It comes from the idiom fishing in troubled waters, which refers to the idea that rough seas are easier to catch fish in, allowing a lazy angler to get a big haul.

If you want to talk about: Googleyou can say: valley doveThe word valley dove () is pronounced just like Google. The term became popular after Google relocated its servers from China to Hong Kong in 2010.Some users said that valley doves could not survive in China, referencing the fantastical creature to mock censorship.

If you want to talk about: your Covid-19 health codeyou can refer to: the green horseThese days, in China, being in possession of a green health code (, pronounced l m) means youre Covid-free and can move freely in public. This code is required for everything from entering a movie theater to boarding a flight. People have started talking about holding onto their green horse, pronounced the same way, in order to preserve their freedom. In April, a giant inflatable green horse was put up in a public square in Wuhan, making it an instant social media sensation.

If you want to: defy the censorsyou can write in: chrysanthemum scriptChrysanthemum script (, pronounced jhu wn) overlays the symbol for multiplying a number by one million in Cyrillic between characters.It obscures the characters, visually and in writing, hoping to confuse automated censorship tools while still remaining easily readable by a human. The Cyrillic character is no longer banned, leading some users to believe it is no longer an effective method.

If you want to: stop trying to make something betteryou can: let it rotAn approach that has become particularly popular with the lying-flat crowd, letting it rot (, pronounced bi ln) means to sit back and let a bad situation get worse.

If you want to talk about: government corruptionyou can say theres: govern-rotThis pun (, pronounced zhngf) sounds the same as government (, zhngf), but means totally rotten or completely corrupt.This homophone was used to discuss corrupt government officials online until it was banned.

If you want to: get away from it allyou can: runAs people get tired of economic challenges and Covid-19 lockdowns, those who have the means have been spreading the message: run. The Chinese words for profit and enjoyment both include the character , which is pronounced like the English word run. Through using it as slang, people have been daydreaming, and sharing tips online about getting visas or studying abroad.

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How Chinese citizens use puns on Weibo to talk about #MeToo and zero-Covid without being censored - Rest of World

Artists and culture workers in Poland are increasingly self-censoring their work under pressure from the right-wing populist government, according to a new study.

The 100-page report, Cultural Control: Censorship and Suppression of the Arts in Poland, published today by the Artistic Freedom Initiative (AFI), claims that instead of establishing an explicit, centralized censorship regime, the leading the Law and Justice party (Prawo i Sprawiedliwo; PiS) has taken a more devious approach, exerting its influence by infiltrating art institutions. Since it came to power in 2015, PiS has installed its allies in management at 23 major Polish cultural institutions and artistic events.

The AFI called for Polish and European Union legislators to step up the protection of artistic freedom and will soon initiate a strategic litigation program to challenge Polands acts of artistic suppression before the European Court of Human Rights and the E.U. Court of Justice, according to the initiatives co-executive director Sanjay Sethi.

A protester standing in front of a banner that reads PoliticiansHands off! of the exhibition in April 2017 in Gdansk, Poland, the same day the Supreme Administrative Court ruled on the de facto liquidation of the World War II Museum and a change in its director. (Photo by Michal Fludra/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

But the ongoing war in Ukraine could be an obstacle to concrete action. Although the European Commission in 2017 initiated a procedure under Article 7 to assess whether Poland was at risk of breaching E.U.s common values, the country is currently a critical political ally against Russia and they have taken a strong stance against the war in Ukraine, Sethi told Artnet News. My fear is that Western countries will back off of Poland due to its strategic importance in countering Russia.

The report offered a birds-eye view of the deteriorating situation in Poland by interviewing artists and culture workers and taking stock of changes in the countrys legal framework and administrative structure that limit minority perspectives from entering the public discourses, prevent government criticism from gaining legitimacy, and restrict how artists and creatives can express themselves over the past six years.

One of the conservative governments most effective legal weapons, according to the report, is its blasphemy law, which is regularly used to punish creative expressions capable of harming the sanctity of the Catholic Church. The number of related charges jumped from 10 in 2016 to 29 in 2020, and the number of cases filed with prosecutors climbed from 90 in 2018 to 146 in 2020.

Jarosaw Suchan. Courtesy of Muzeum Sztuki.

Among the recent cases, at least nine were related to artists, including the 2019 arrest of Elbieta Podlena for handing out a work depicting the Virgin Mary with her halo painted with the rainbow colors of the LGBTQ+ pride flag.

Such high-profile cases have already caused widespread fear of legal or other repercussions for controversial work among the local arts community, particularly among LGBTQ+ artists and culture workers, said Johanna Bankston, AFIs human rights research officer. PiSs strategic use of over-broad blasphemy and defamation laws to punish artists for critical work is among the most pressing issues in the report.

Brankston recalled speaking with a lesbian curator who feared she would be dismissed from her position at a major Polish museum if her boss were to find out about her sexual orientation because of the public homophobic comments from the institutions head, who targeted LGBTQ+ employees in the past.

Some artists who expressed fears of legal ramifications and the loss of professional opportunities have had to rethink the theme of their work to avoid controversy, Bankston added. As an E.U. member state beholden to democratic values, Polands lack of effort to protect LGBTQ+ individuals rights and promote their acceptance in society is extremely alarming.

People with bananas demonstrate outside Warsaws National Museum. 29 April, 2019, Warsaw, Poland after gallery removes feminist art featuring bananas. Photo by Krystian Dobuszynski, NurPhoto via Getty Images.

The report also accuses the right-wing government of politicizing the countrys Ministry of Culture and National History through the appointment of PiS party loyalists to promote its nationalist, conservative political views.

Among the staff changes was the 2019 dismissal of Magorzata Ludwisiak as director of the Ujazdowski Castle Centre for Contemporary Art in Warsaw, the replacement of Hanna Wrblewska with a painter and drummer as interim director of Zachta National Gallery of Art, also in Warsaw, and the ouster of Jarosaw Suchan, longtime chief of Muzeum Sztuki in d, who was replaced by Andrzej Biernacki, a painter and the founder of a small private gallery with no institutional experience, this spring.

By unilaterally appointing hard-line right-wingers in nearly all key state cultural institutions, spanning art, literature, historical memory, theaters, and public media, the party can simply claim that artistic production is happening organically, when in reality they are curating what the public sees and hears, Sethi concluded.

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Self-Censorship Among Artists and Museum Workers Is on the Rise in Poland, a New Report Finds - artnet News