Category Archives: Censorship

Theresa May and Emmanuel Macron at a joint press conference in Paris in June. Photograph: Yui Mok/PA

The terrorism legislation watchdog has likened Theresa Mays proposals to punish companies such as Facebook and Google for failing to tackle extremist propaganda to Chinas strict regime of internet censorship.

Max Hill QC, the independent reviewer of terrorism legislation, said internet companies should be brought firmly onside rather than threatened with fines.

In a speech delivered at the Terrorism and Social Media conference in Swansea, reported in the Times, he said: I struggle to see how it would help if our parliament were to criminalise tech company bosses who dont do enough. How do we measure enough? What is the appropriate sanction?

We do not live in China, where the internet simply goes dark for millions when government so decides. Our democratic society cannot be treated that way.

May outlined the idea of punishing companies such as Facebook, YouTube and Google if they fail to remove extremist propaganda and terrorist material from their platforms in the wake of the Manchester Arena bombing.

After a meeting with the French president, Emmanuel Macron, in June, May said they were both determined to ensure the internet could not be used as a safe space for terrorists and criminals.

The UK and France are to develop plans to create a new legal liability for tech companies that fail to take action against unacceptable content.

Speaking at the time, May said: The counter-terrorism cooperation between British and French intelligence agencies is already strong, but President Macron and I agree that more should be done to tackle the terrorist threat online.

In the UK we are already working with social media companies to halt the spread of extremist material and poisonous propaganda that is warping young minds. I can announce that the UK and France will work together to encourage corporations to do more and abide by their social responsibility to step up their efforts to remove harmful content from their networks, including exploring the possibility of creating a new legal liability for tech companies if they fail to remove unacceptable content.

Excerpt from:
Watchdog likens May's internet fines threat to Chinese censorship - The Guardian

June 30, 2017 BerlinGerman lawmakers approved a bill on Friday aimed at cracking down on hate speech on social networks, which critics say could have drastic consequences for free speech online.

The measure approved is designed to enforce the country's existing limits on speech, including the long-standing ban on Holocaust denial. Among other things, it would fine social networking sites up to 50 million euros ($56 million) if they persistently fail to remove illegal content within a week, including defamatory "fake news."

"Freedom of speech ends where the criminal law begins," said Justice Minister Heiko Maas, who was the driving force behind the bill.

Mr. Maas said official figures showed the number of hate crimes in Germany increased by over 300 percent in the past two years.

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Google, and Twitter have become a battleground for angry debates about Germany's recent influx of more than 1 million refugees, with authorities struggling to keep up with the flood of criminal complaints.

Maas claimed that 14 months of discussion with major social media companies had made no significant progress. Last week, lawmakers from his Social Democratic Party and Chancellor Angela Merkel's center-right Union bloc agreed a number of amendments to give companies more time to check whether posts that are flagged to them are illegal, delegate the vetting process to a third party, and ensure that users whose comments are removed can appeal the decision.

But human rights experts and the companies affected warn that the law risks privatizing the process of censorship and could have a chilling effect on free speech.

"This law as it stands now will not improve efforts to tackle this important societal problem," Facebook said in a statement.

"We feel that the lack of scrutiny and consultation do not do justice to the importance of the subject. We will continue to do everything we can to ensure safety for the people on our platform," the company said, noting that it is hiring 3,000 additional staff on top of 4,500 already working to review posts.

Aside from the hefty fine for companies, the law also provides for fines of up to 5 million euros for the person each company designates to deal with the complaints procedure if it doesn't meet requirements.

Social networks also have to publish a report every six months detailing how many complaints they received and how they dealt with them.

Among those cheering the law was Germany's main Jewish organization, which called it a "strong instrument against hate speech in social networks."

Germany has long had a law criminalizing Holocaust denial a response to the country's Nazi-era history of allowing racist ideas to become genocidal policy.

"Jews are exposed to anti-Semitic hatred in social networks on a daily basis," the Central Council of Jews said. "Since all voluntary agreements with platform operators produced almost no result, this law is the logical consequence to effectively limit hate speech."

The nationalist Alternative for Germany party, which has frequently been accused of whipping up sentiments against immigrants and minorities, said it is considering challenging the law in Germany's highest court.

Read the rest here:
Germany passes censorship law to fight online hate speech - Christian Science Monitor

If you tried to search for Emma Watsons Wikpedia page in Iran in 2013, you wouldnt have been able to find it; the article was one of 963 blocked by the government. This tidbit about the Harry Potter actress is found in a 2013 University of Pennsylvaniareport on Irans censorship of Wikipedia. Researchers at Harvards Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society recently built on this publication by analyzing censorship of the site in 15 countries since 2014. In a report published in May, they found that censorship of Wikipedia has declined since then due to the sites new security measures.

In fact, they discovered that only three countries blocked access to parts of Wikipedia during the duration of the study: China and Uzbekistan were blocking the Chinese- and Uzbek-language versions of Wikipedia (read more coverage of censorship in China, and its use of fake social media posts to influence public opinion). Thailand had once blocked the Yiddish versionmost likely a weird misconfiguration, says Justin Clark, a software developer at the center and the principal author of the report. They derived their results partly by analyzing data from the Wikimedia Foundation (Wikipedias parent organization) that showed when people load Wikipedia articles, and partly from 41 servers located in different countries around the world that tried to load Wikipedia and could determine if the website was blocked.

Clark says there are multiple reasons for the changing levels of censorship. The first is Wikipedias transition from HTTP to HTTPS. HTTP (hypertext transfer protocol) guides the way a websites data is sent to a browser. Because the connection is unencrypted, however, other people can intercept that connection and see the data being sent. In HTTPS, the s stands for secure; the major difference between the two protocols is that HTTPS encrypts the data being communicated.

Wikipedias transition affected the way countries could block access, Clark explains. With HTTP, a country could block an individual Wikipedia article. But with HTTPS, the country needs to choose between blocking every article or none. Countries are choosing the latter. As the report states: Russia once again blacklisted Wikipedia over a single cannabis-related article, but the ban was reversed less than 24 hours later.

Monitoring censorship of Wikipedia matters because Wikipedia is one of the most prominent, and most important, sites out there, says Rob Faris, the research director at the center, who also worked on the report. How countries treat Wikipedia, he continues, is indicative of how important Internet freedom is not only to them, but also to the rest of the world. Clark adds that understanding the information controls imposed on the Internet is important for allowing an informed citizenry to emerge.

As the first complete empirical deep dive into incidents of the blocking of Wikipedia projects around the world, Faris says, the report will inform future research as other investigators follow its methods. He also notes that accessing Wikipedia server data is novel. Such research paves the way for examining global Internet outages, Clark says, especially those deliberately caused by countries during elections or protests. He adds that after the study concluded, China blocked access to Wikipedia in additional languages spoken there, and Turkey in all languages, so the Berkman Klein Center will continue to monitor Wikipedia around the world.

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Wikipedia Against Censorship - Harvard Magazine

Credit: Berkman Klein Center

A sharp increase in web encryption and a worldwide shift away from standalone websites in favor of social media and online publishing platforms has altered the practice of state-level internet censorship and in some cases led to broader crackdowns, a new study by the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University finds.

The Shifting Landscape of Global Internet Censorship, released today, documents the practice of internet censorship around the world through empirical testing in 45 countries of the availability of 2,046 of the worlds most-trafficked and influential websites, plus additional country-specific websites. The study finds evidence of filtering in 26 countries across four broad content themes: political, social, topics related to conflict and security, and internet tools (a term that includes censorship circumvention tools as well as social media platforms). The majority of countries that censor content do so across all four themes, although the depth of the filtering varies.

The study confirms that 40 percent of these 2,046 websites can only be reached by an encrypted connection (denoted by the HTTPS prefix on a web page, a voluntary upgrade from HTTP). While some sites can be reached by either HTTP or HTTPS, total encrypted traffic to the 2,046 sites has more than doubled to 31 percent in 2017 from 13 percent in 2015, the study finds. Meanwhile, and partly in response to the protections afforded by encryption, activists in particular and web users in general around the world are increasingly relying on major platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, Medium, and Wikipedia.

These trends have created challenges for state internet censors operating filters at national network levels. When an entire website is encrypted, it is not easy to detect and selectively block a particular dissidents page on Facebook or troublesome history lesson on Wikipedia. So unless a platform agrees to remove content, a country must either block the whole site, or allow everything through.

Twenty years ago the webs infrastructure was truly distributed; visiting a web site could mean corresponding with a server in a university, a private home, or a business anywhere in the world. Today, content and services are increasingly hosted among a handful of cloud providers, says Jonathan Zittrain, professor of computer science and George Bemis Professor of International Law at Harvard University and a co-founder of the Berkman Klein Center. That may have helped standardize the rollout of encryption for day-to-day communication over the web, while at the same time placing the major providers under increasing pressure to shape and censor their services by governments in markets where providers wish to have a strong physical presence.

In some respects, the shift may be reducing the blocking of communications. For example, in 2011, Saudi Arabia was blocking individual Wikipedia entries (such as one describing the theory of evolution); and individual Twitter accounts such as that of Egyptian activist Wael Ghonim, with nearly 2.8 million followers, and the human rights advocate Gamal Eid, the director of a Cairo-based regional human rights NGO. But today both of those sites use HTTPS, making such censorship practices difficult. While Saudi Arabia vigorously censors many types of content, it doesnt block Wikipedia or Twitter, which in effect allows these critics to be heard in the Kingdom.

But in other contexts, the shift has been followed by broader crackdowns. For example, in recent years Medium, the online publishing platform, has become popular among activists in Egypt. But in June 2017, Egypt blocked Medium, effectively censoring not only the activists content but also millions of other articles on the site. Similarly, Malaysia blocked Medium in January 2016 after the company refused to take down articles about a government corruption case.

And in April of 2017, Turkey blocked all of Wikipedia because censors could not block (or convince Wikipedia to remove) entries asserting that Turkey sponsored terrorist organizations. This left Turkeys population without any access to Wikipedias 290,000 Turkish-language entries. Tech companies are on the front lines; to an ever-greater extent they serve as the principal guardians of freedom of expression online around the world, says Rob Faris, a co-author of the report and research director at the Berkman Klein Center.

Among the reports many other findings is that governments are increasingly blocking content from other governments, not merely blocking internal dissidents and other non-state actors. This is particularly evident in the MENA (Middle East and North Africa) countries.

In a related trend, the MENA region is also experiencing a rise in shared internet censorship practices among allied nations. For example, Saudi-allied countries have begun to block the same websites originating from Qatar. State internet censorship practices are increasingly intertwined with intraregional political dynamics, says Helmi Noman, a report co-author and research affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center. The regional political tensions and conflicts and political alliances around them give rise to bloc-centered similar internet censorship policies, he says. As a result, more states now ban content originating from or affiliated with rival states.

Of course, governments have other means at their disposal to suppress online speech, including arresting dissidents, pressuring companies to take down content, and shaping online narratives by launching disinformation campaigns on social media platforms.

The Berkman Klein Center report is the latest of several studies and media reports from the past year documenting global censorship practices. Governments have also blocked encrypted mobile messaging apps like WhatsApp and Viber that allow users to spread information quickly and securely, and even shut all internet access within national borders at certain times.

Regimes that aggressively filter the internet typically use third parties usually private companies that specialize in selling filtering technologies to detect and carry out content blocking. State censors have extended the reasons and rationales for internet censorship. The fight against terrorism has provided one justification for expanding political censorship, and states have exploited this to target political speech they find offensive. More recently, state censors have started using claims of fake news as motive to censor the internet.

For more information and to download a copy of the report, visit the Berkman Klein Center website.

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New Berkman Klein Center study examines global internet censorship - Harvard Law School News

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@H&L5n4E(e4nQ &Q*1+s6"0HqKFZ&HYt1Y]D]SWvTuiALze26"xG8Hq?d* /=tKe&Tt0lZ9:I|(raZk.:lvpZ!`i16Kju.O"tqbqy@fit^Rp4>$69F:B}KSQs671f:H'!]J=/=u-M+qv Uz@:~$~D1;W8v-9Xn~mQw[6AomW{"/tVzrH jn-c% UH=x6NNzhrq7)20O.h2OvGmPG4Lezr'{yRRCT@(7b`FXaE& AZ&yTsB6Td5/Q&+`ExP|h4>PO)";RaN2DFk]$@$C!(GHZ'pv2ca GOR9jJJRe{NY)> J{Ur^XGJFlvTFg}$CdB/tm88o1DgS;I4+`Q@RGV V#;pWo@>}MR0-_~ y=O.Omku(]) #G1Aipz{,SG#.J)Zp6fGiiZt~5q=sGpD18zU){NY1m*;: d.^_jyc>74#zbpTmc.YWjIA{=RB-]JCsQ`j&H`S1.z/mS]#w-[]F#DIQ~6fo(4br~` ID`MTR6 D>4=36t;GaJR:EA} t{!buL{DEIt3CuRcQW#K[)E'nLa3HCt6m+mmD"[QU! H$9 ,4o>,:'E7@c piN,N 8Ig%v*) q`e"0)X.4EBPC[u,#X+t Yq_*vx hU4`2 IA+ 4p?'7Y8}?jbI$e$Lrrxj5-~rv XJ,2i!A,TQ.&#D.AYrhsE>DB5)gh@4[*SaT?r09KW>yY@ +~eMB]mkJ1xbg|bdcz$A?h5uFq)ts_1{`=s'u'i}a:& toy:[],&P 7!*Qo, K/2 &J"pF S!IkV:R`%N!u^do4s#Y3[|8,dj0t T/p?aL:KrnrF=|tkw5 !hOW_ 1 V2gs-k!-inW"G}G&%t8=O2pYLpGy^CDQ e)h"b){&X%@qRS7b*X]yAC:YeD}6-#|ZNo'0pR[JB/qssNb#Uboe)BKp #LLBq*B!:(nAA(JvU. Ho1RVgz)j w3tOk ?k!" nHev

g GOUv LK &(O5-)}*}s+?]OG+l|Ckw6yl6,h=;}UZBO]Kj:2{W{s[z~6N>*;K=?&-[pd~Y*o0*SaE~r(na5)&GQ[rcqeoF5R8{vYvFrzX3 IK j$_v?WF]$g7 RY|A}yP)o3z4s Kt ^{OXTj hyG_srr|;+9??OXs0...^>?i`n@r3wj/}0wEW!8+kr '#} K0(G-|[o_=HppgW9=9>-4'BOmWqf_jd+~j}>Md1fdOGBD#I 73VR19ZF&(}i1k!7dSy*b: Om]`ezn/_mjE8XW12)@4.PA(] 8 O![%GH*[cmzb*]?~TceQtLUW`)X!]@. sX3whu-3!J)CPsy g8jE$+)?YxSi7B{.k"1$?FV"1:[Rtn@d+~$Y1@@+G8"w;?WT,KRug1>hx~|6'? 4I>C _dw_!Zb+79TUK]~nI.FJM`z9'GpvXHD+mv(O.u*M}~D$,.TAmZel 2Z)t+m0D@s15p7U!+kj}|}TUa=OI]5uS1*d,LLNM]'jCR.f|{")1$] @ l/J_Oj)5Eu-L%r^0>|]yCZw{D%vzF hwv!ul;/pV,XamVB%'x1^]obwn6A

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Facebook: Too Big to Delete - WIRED

A country has the right to prevent the worlds Internet users from accessing information, Canadas highest court ruled on Wednesday.

In a decision that has troubling implications for free expression online, the Supreme Court of Canada upheld a companys effort to force Google to de-list entire domains and websites from its search index, effectively making them invisible to everyone using Googles search engine

The case, Google v. Equustek, began when British Columbia-based Equustek Solutions accused Morgan Jack and others, known as the Datalink defendants, of selling counterfeit Equustek routers online. It claimed California-based Google facilitated access to the defendants sites. The defendants never appeared in court to challenge the claim, allowing default judgment against them, which meant Equustek effectively won without the court ever considering whether the claim was valid.

Although Google was not named in the lawsuit, it voluntarily took down specific URLs that directed users to the defendants products and ads under the local (Canadian) Google.ca domains. But Equustek wanted more, and the British Columbia Supreme Court ruled that Google had to delete the entire domain from its search results, including from all other domains such Google.com and Google.go.uk. The British Columbia Court of Appealupheldthe decision, and the Supreme Court of Canada decision followed the analysis of those courts.

EFF intervened in the case, explaining [.pdf] that such an injunction ran directly contrary to both the U.S. Constitution and statutory speech protections. Issuing an order that would cut off access to information for U.S. users would set a dangerous precedent for online speech. In essence, it would expand the power of any court in the world to edit the entire Internet, whether or not the targeted material or site is lawful in another country. That, we warned, is likely to result in a race to the bottom, as well-resourced individuals engage in international forum-shopping to impose the one countrys restrictive laws regarding free expression on the rest of the world.

The Supreme Court of Canada ignored those concerns. It ruled that because Google was subject to the jurisdiction of Canadian courts by virtue of its operations in Canada, courts in Canada had the authority to order Google to delete search results worldwide. The court further held that there was no inconvenience to Google in removing search results, and Google had not shown the injunction would offend any rights abroad.

Perhaps even worse, the court ruled that before Google can modify the order, it has to prove that the injunction violates the laws of another nation thus shifting the burdent of proof from the plaintiff to a non-party. An innocent third party to a lawsuit shouldnt have to shoulder the burden or proving whether an injunction violates the laws of another country. Although companies like Google may be able to afford such costs, many others will not, meaning many overbroad and unlawful orders may go unchallenged. Instead, once the issue has been raised at all, it should be the job of the party seeking the benefit of an order, such as Equustek, to establish that there is no such conflict. Moreover, numerous intervenors, including EFF, provided ample evidence of that conflicts in this case.

Beyond the flaws of the ruling itself, the courts decision will likely embolden other countries to try to enforce their own speech-restricting laws on the Internet, to the detriment of all users. As others have pointed out, its not difficult to see repressive regimes such as China or Iran use the ruling to order Google to de-index sites they object to, creating a worldwide hecklers veto.

The ruling largely sidesteps the question of whether such a global order would violate foreign law or intrude on Internet users free speech rights. Instead, the court focused on whether or not Google, as a private actor, could legally choose to take down speech and whether that would violate foreign law. This framing results in Google being ordered to remove speech under Canadian law even if no court in the United States could issue a similar order.

The Equustek decision is part of a troubling trend around the world of courts and other governmental bodies ordering that content be removed from the entirety of the Internet, not just in that country's locale. On the same day the Supreme Court of Canadas decision issued, a court in Europe heard arguments as to whether to expand the right-to-be-forgotten worldwide.

EFF was represented at the Supreme Court of Canada and the British Columbia Court of Appeal by David Wotherspoon of MacPherson Leslie & Tyerman and Daniel Byma of Fasken Martineau DuMoulin.

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Top Canadian Court Permits Worldwide Internet Censorship - EFF

The list of blocked websites in Egypt keeps growing, as the government widens what some say is an unprecedented crackdown on both local and international digital outlets. So far, 114 websites have been blocked in the north African nation since May 24, according to the latest figures from the non-governmental organization Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression.

A majority of these are news websites, but also included are platforms that can be used to access blocked sites or that allow for anonymous browsing and communication.

The affected websites include sites like Mada Masr, the financial newspaper Al Borsa, and Huffington Post Arabic. Twelve websites linked to Al Jazeera were also been blocked. Medium, the online publishing platform, was also banned. The outage also affected Tor, the free software that provides users with online anonymity, and Tor bridges, which helps users circumvent the blocking of Tor itself. The website of the Open Observatory of Network Interference (OONI), an international network that monitors internship censorship and surveillance, was also blocked.

The growing censorship comes as the government says its cracking down on websites that are publishing false information and supporting terrorism. (Link in Arabic) Egypt is currently in the midst of a three-month state emergency, following twin attacks on churches that killed almost 50 people in April.

The country is also part of a Saudi-led coalition that has put a blockade on Qatar, demanding, among other things, the closure of the Doha-based Al Jazeera media network which it considers to a be a propaganda tool for Islamists. The government of president Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is also embroiled in a maritime demarcation agreement over its decision to vote on the transfer of two islands in the Red Sea to Saudi Arabiaa move that has angered many Egyptians.

However, journalists and activists say the campaign is suppressing free expression and voices critical of the government. Some are accusing the regime of failing to disclose any judicial or administrative decision to block the sitesor whether emergency law provisions were applied.

Even in the darkest days of the repressive Mubarak era, the authorities didnt cut off access to all independent news sites, Najia Bounaim, Amnesty Internationals north Africa campaigns director, said.

In a June 19 report, OONI stated that deep packet inspection technology was being used to monitor and block these websites. Mada Masr, one of the blocked sites, also reported that the decision to block the sites was carried through a centralized decision by the government rather than by the countrys telecoms or internet service providers.

Since going offline, sites like Mada have been publishing articles on Facebook. Lina Attallah, the editor of the site, said the strategy of blocking the sites works to the governments advantage for now. If they did something more grave like arresting team members or me it would make big noise, whereas blocking the website is the best way to paralyze us without paying a high price for it, Attallah told Reuters.

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Fake news and terrorism has prompted Egypt to block more than 100 independent websites - Quartz

DETROIT (ChurchMilitant.com) - Twitter, a privately owned social media giant that boasts of more than 300 million users, is censoring a pro-life group's ads, labeling them hate speech.

On Monday, Tucker Carlson covered this ongoing censorship by Twitter on his show Tucker Carlson Tonight. Live Action is the pro-life group, who's ads are being called hate speech by Twitter and flagged on their social media platform.

Carlson invited on his show Catholic convert Lila Rose, founder and president of the organization, to discuss the issue. On the show, Rose explained exactly what Twitter was objecting to. "The kind of tweets," said Rose, "that they're calling a violation of their hate and sensitive policy show ultrasound images, they're fact checks of Planned Parenthood, they're discussing the prenatal life in its beauty. These are the sorts of tweets that Twitter is trying to block."

Carlson posted a picture of one such ad that Twitter refused to allow on its platform. It was a picture of a baby in utero with the caption, "I AM NOT A POTENTIAL HUMAN. I AM A HUMAN WITH POTENTIAL." On top of the ad is a message by Rose, which reads, "Everyone deserves the right to life! Join me in standing up for human dignity and the least of these."

According to Carlson, Twitter wants Live Action to delete these so-called "sensitive ads" before it will allow the group to buy more ads. Rose points out that Planned Parenthood (PP), the nation's biggest abortion chain, is allowed by Twitter to run ads on their platform, but Live Action, who she calls "the leading pro-life platform for the pro-life movement," is not allowed to do so. She says Twitter is claiming such ads violate their "hate and sensitive policy."

"This is something that they've been kind of keeping a secret, and now we're trying to get this news out that they've been blocking us," said Rose. Carlson responded, "But meanwhile the abortion industry gets to advertise all it wants."

Rose points out that the abortion giant PP has more than a one billion dollar budget and is committing almost 900 abortion every day, yet Twitter ironically says "they're not violating the hate and sensitive policy." She said Live Action is simply "exposing them, talking about the value of preborn life," which she says are messages that a lot of Americans agree with.

She says Twitter has been banning their ads for months now. She relates that Twitter wants them to delete their entire website and create an entirely new website before they can do any more advertising on Twitter. Carlson posted a response from Twitter, which claimed its policy was a set of "clear, transparent rules." Rose denies that the rules are clear because it "took over a year to finally get from Twitter what's wrong with these tweets showing ultrasounds."

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Tucker Carlson Spotlights Twitter Censorship of Pro-Life Group - Church Militant

A voting rights and campaign finance watchdog group is claiming political favoritism and censorship after allegedly being denied the ability to post billboards in Mitchell and McDowell counties.

Democracy North Carolina tried to post billboards calling attention to the ongoing investigation by the State Board of Elections into the campaign finances of state Sen. Ralph Hise, a Mitchell County Republican and chair of the Senate Select Committee on Elections.

The State Board of Elections began investigated Hise has after he allegedly withdrew about $10,000 in excess loan repayments from his campaign and failed to disclose receiving more than $9,000 in donations from political action committees.

Weve been trying to let the voters in Sen. Hises district know about his problems for a month, but the billboard industry seems so worried about making him mad that they are refusing to rent us space for our message, said Bob Hall, executive director of Democracy North Carolina.

Hall said in a press release he was initially encouraged to rent space by sales agents at two companies; he selected billboard locations, submitted the artwork and sent it back with modifications requested by the agents. He signed a contract with Lamar Outdoor Advertising for a billboard in Spruce Pine and a contract with Fairway Advertising for another billboard along I-40 in McDowell County.

In both cases, regional managers of Lamar and Fairway Outdoor Advertising called to cancel the contracts, saying the message proposed for the billboards was political and too controversial or too controversial and could cause problems for the company, according to the press release.

It was very clear in talking with the billboard executives that were the victim of political favoritism and censorship, Hall said. Billboard companies are involved in plenty of controversial and political advertising, but they also have high-priced lobbyists, they want favorable legislation and they dont want to anger a powerful state senator at this crucial time.

Hall claimed in the press release one of the companies has a billboard attacking Muslim on I-40.

Its very disappointing, Hall said. But well continue to shine the light on Sen. Hises campaign violations and expose whatever he is hiding.

At least one of the billboards has been posted on U.S. 19E near the Yancey-Madison county line.

As of press time Hise was more than 50 days past the May 5 deadline set to amend his campaign finance reports.

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Voting rights advocacy group claims censorship - Spruce Pine Mitchell News

YouTubeIn a federal lawsuit filed last week, a group of Jewish plaintiffs allege that San Francisco State University has systematically turned a blind eye toand in some instances actively facilitatedcensorship and harassment of Jewish students and speakers on the public university's campus. The lawsuit points, in particular, to the 2016 disruption of a speech by Jerusalem Mayor Nir Barkat, numerous incidents of anti-Jewish and anti-Israel speech on campus, as well as an incident in which the Jewish student organization Hillel was allegedly banned from a student fair.

Opinions about the lawsuit fall along predictable dividing lines. The editorial board of J., the Jewish News of Northern California, praised the suit and argued that the protesters at the Nir Barkat event had "trampled the free speech rights of Jewish students." On the other hand, Dima Khalidi of Palestine Legal called the Barkat protest "political speech that is protected by the First Amendment" and said that "the complaint is going to fail."

Both sides have a point. The lawsuit raises real concerns about the treatment of Jewish students at SFSU. But the plaintiffs seem to want it both ways: Even as the suit contends that SFSU is violating the free speech rights of Jewish students, it also demands that the university censor protected speech by Palestinian students and their allies, citing anti-Jewish harassment.

As Justice Thurgood Marshall wrote, "the freedom to speak and freedom to hear are inseparable; they are two sides of the same coin." If, as the lawsuit alleges, SFSU officials told campus police to "stand down" while anti-Israel protesters disrupted Nir Barkat's speech, the university may indeed have violated students' First Amendment rights to invite and hear a speaker of their choosing.

Video footage of Barkat's attempt to speak at SFSU last year shows protesters engaging in loud, sustained chanting while students attending the speech huddle around a seated Barkat in an attempt to hear him. While protest is indeed protected by the First Amendment (as is a normal level of "booing" and brief interruptions from the audience), the right to protest does not extend to the right to be so vocally disruptive, for such a prolonged period of time, that the speaker cannot be heard.

And if, as the suit alleges, the university allowed the Hillel student group to be excluded from tabling at a university-sponsored fair because of the organization's viewpoint, that too could constitute a First Amendment violation at a public university like SFSU.

Moving from the First Amendment to the harassment claims, some of the speech cited by the plaintiffs may have crossed the line from protected speech into unprotected threats, such as counter-protesters allegedly yelling "get out or we will kill you" at Jewish students participating in a Hillel-sponsored peace rally.

Other parts of the lawsuit, however, point to examples of clearly protected speech and expression as grounds for the claim that a "hostile environment" exists for Jewish students on campus. In alleging that the university has been deliberately indifferent to a racially hostile environment, the plaintiffs point to examples of constitutionally protected political expression such as posters featuring a picture of a dead baby with the caption "Made in IsraelPalestinian Children Meat, Slaughtered According to Jewish Rites Under American License," as well as students holding placards proclaiming "my heroes have always killed colonizers" and "resistance is not terrorism" alongside portraits of Leila Khaled, the first female airplane hijacker. It is not difficult to see why such speech would offend many students, but asking a government institution like SFSU to police this kind of political rhetoric in the name of preventing a "hostile environment" is a prescription for both First Amendment violations and political side-choosing.

In short: it's complicated. If the truth of the allegations is proven in court, the plaintiffs have some very real grievances about some of the university's conduct and, certainly, about what J. refers to as the "selective outrage" when it comes to the university's response to Jewish students on campus versus other students who claim to feel silenced or threatened. But in other ways, the suit goes too far, citing constitutionally protected political speech and expression as examples of harassment.

This fight should never have had to go to court in the first place. A university campus should be a place where people who disagree about important issues can discuss their differences openly, not a place where opposing views are shouted down, threats are tossed across protest lines, and both sides work to suppress the speech of their opponents.

Originally posted here:
'Get Out or We Will Kill You': Jewish Students Allege Censorship and Harassment in Campus Lawsuit - Reason (blog)