Category Archives: Censorship

Evanston Now

Viewpoint: Censorship at the library | Evanston Now Evanston Now On Friday June 2, the Evanston Public Library held a hearing that may lead to the firing of librarian Lesley Williams this week. Her alleged crime? Posting a ... and more »

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Viewpoint: Censorship at the library | Evanston Now - Evanston Now

A leading activist in Florida denounced the campaign to boycott an international LGBTQ film festival that took place in Tel Aviv last week, calling on theLGBTQ and progressive ally communities to take a stand against censoring, and against anti-semitism, in an op-ed published Saturday in The Miami Herald.

James Moon, a board member of both the LGBTQ group A Wider Bridge and South Floridas Outshine Film Festival, and said that he felt at home during his first visit to Israel and sees no difference between the American and Israeli LGBTQ communities.

While his trip centered aroundTLVFest, which was held June 1, he also toured across Israel andthe West Bank, meeting with political, artistic and advocacy leaders.

However, he said that proponents of the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions campaign who denounced TLVFest aspinkwashing cast an ugly pall over the event. The term means that any person or organization that promotes or even acknowledges the progress of LGBTQ rights in Israel is really a mouthpiece for Israeli propaganda, Moon wrote. He dismissed thecharacterization as a slanderous allegation.

BDS and those that hate Israel are playing a zero-sum game where any achievement by Israel or any community or person in or from Israel cannot be tolerated or recognized, he explained. A recent example of this was the banning of the film Wonder Woman in Lebanon because it starred Israeli actress Gal Gadot.

It is morally unacceptable to block internationalLGBTQ-themed films from Israeli audiences because you cannot advocate for LGBTQ rights without supporting Israeli LGBTQ rights, Moon wrote.And you cannot advocate for progressive values and not stand against bald bigotry when confronted with it.

Moon concluded by asking the LGBTQ community to support TLVFest because, if you do not stand now, your festival may be the next target of the BDS movement.

There is currently a crowdfunding campaignto raise $10,000 in support of TLVFest.

[Photo: A Wider Bridge / YouTube ]

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LGBT Activist: Progressives Must Oppose BDS Censorship, Support Tel Aviv Film Festival - TheTower.org

At the Evergreen State College in Olympia, Washington, anti-racist protests spilled over once again into threats of violence. Every year at Evergreen, minority students play virtue-signal hooky to highlight racial inequities. They call it the Day of Absence. When this years Day of Absence turned into the Day-That-Evergreen-Students-Demand-That-All-Whites-Leave-Campus, Professor Bret Weinstein disobeyedshades of Thoreau!and calmly explained the difference between Evergreens past clarion calls to anti-racist righteousness and this years diktat to discrimination: The first is a forceful call to consciousness which is, of course, crippling to the logic of oppression. The second is a show of force, and an act of oppression in and of itself.

Heres the rub: Weinstein has deluded himself if he thinks the Day of Absence was ever about crippling oppression. Todays student demands are about power exercised through threatened and actualized violence.

Its everything to do with Evergreen students fascistic beliefs and threatsso severe that the Olympia chief of police told Professor Weinstein it was unsafe for him to go to the colleges campusand nothing to do with equality or equity.

You might be wondering where the Mayor of Olympia is in all this, or why the damn police arent getting in gear. Because left-leaning professional politicians, increasingly isolated on the coasts, choose to abstain from the free speech fracas unless theyre dragged in. The party being banded to a coastal sliver means theyre hardened by the demands of a homogeneous progressivist base.

A little south of the Evergreen fray, in Oregon, Portland Mayor Ted Wheeler announced that he would not issue any permits for alt-right events scheduled to take place in the weeks following the Portland stabbing carried out by Joseph Christian.

To support his position, Wheeler used the same canard about there being a hate speech exception to the First Amendment that Howard Dean peddled in justifying Ann Coulter being barred from Berkeley. Lets call it the Wheeler-Dean Theory of the First Amendment. Heres the proposition: A) Right-wing political positions are hateful and disfavored by progressives; B) that which is hateful is not protected by the Constitution; therefore, C) the spoken political positions of the Right are unconstitutional.

Howard Dean, completely ignorant of the history he thinks supports his position, is fond of citing the WWII-era case Chaplinsky v. New Hampshire, the source of the fighting words doctrine (which doesnt apply to hate speech).

Deans discursus conveniently omitted how vile the Chaplinsky case really was. Chaplinsky was a Jehovahs Witness being accosted by a town mob. He was arrested for opposing the war and calling a police officerbrace yourselfa damn fascist.

Citing Chaplinsky proves nothing other than that Mayor Wheeler and Howard Dean both unthinkingly draw from the well of authoritarianism. Its a bad case.

Inconvenient truths like the true story of Chaplinsky are obscured by a supine media who obsess over the apparition of white-race-hatred. Notice that white supremacy is the catch-all term used to justify the most outrageous behaviors, including Evergreen College students using physical intimidation to confine administrators. The willingness of Evergreen College president George Bridges to give in to their every babyish demand doesnt help much either.

The concern for white supremacist activity overwhelming society is, of course, absurd. Joseph Christian, for instance, is more crazed hobo than calculating hater; he was swigging from a bladder of purple-drank sangria before he attacked, he hadnt had a permanent address in years, he once robbed a convenience store because the guy there d[id]nt sell any winning lottery tickets.

Calling Christian a white supremacist is a misdirect, a red herring, a tactic used to raise the stakes so that restrictions applying to only one side of the political spectrum can be justified.

Will more violence come in our cultural Cold Civil War? If it does, it wont be frivolous. It also wont be the doing of the criminally insane like Joseph Christian. If violence comes, it will be a return to the insecurity of the 1970s, when 1,470 terror attacks resulted in the deaths of 184 people. It will be terror and political violence.

The sum-total of terrors tollmortality, fearwill rattle us. And if there is a John Brown moment, a Wall Street Bombing moment, or anything of the kind, the Cold Civil War is going to heat right up. The bloodshed will come on the heels of censorship. The Battle of Berkeley is so much evidence.

Free speech is, as Dr. Jordan Peterson puts it, the mechanism by which we keep our society functioning. The apparatus to which Peterson refers is a safety release valve, a kill switch on combat.

People need to feel like they have an outlet; they need to know they can jettison the frustration (and even the poison) that accumulates in their mind. But today, the institutions of civil societywhats left of it, anywayhave formed an anti-speech coalition: students against speech, politicians against speech, intellectuals against speech, journalists against speech, and on and on.

Youll remember that The Washington Post assumed a new taglineDemocracy Dies in Darknesswhich like most contemporary clichs is not true at all and means nothing. As a matter of fact, democracy dies in the blazing solar heat of the public forum, where the wrong ideas swelter in the hot box, awaiting a heatstroke-induced death, while the emboldened authoritarians of the left wait in the cool shade.

This will cause incalculable damage. And lots more violence.

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Evergreen, Portland, And The Censorship-Violence Nexus - The Daily Caller

As we reel from the third terror attack in Britain in as many months, politicians are scrambling to come up with strategies to make the public feel safer. Amid rows over police cuts, the old debate about online safety has inevitably been revived. Theresa May said, in her speech on Sunday, that internet giants were providing a safe space for extremists online. We need to work with allied democratic governments to reach international agreements that regulate cyberspace to prevent the spread of extremist and terrorism planning, she said.

Yesterday, culture secretary Karen Bradley found time in a series of cringeworthy interviews where she refused to be drawn on police numbers to reiterate the same censorious point. She urged companies like Google and Facebook to tackle extremist content. We know it can be done and we know the internet companies want to do it, she told the BBC.

But all of the big internet firms and social-media networks already regulate their content. Google said it was already planning an international forum to accelerate and strengthen our existing work in this area. In any case, as some commentators have pointed out, any state or international regulation of online content would do little to tackle the problem of terrorism.

The Open Rights Group, a campaign group for online free speech and privacy, said increased regulation could risk pushing terrorists vile networks into darker corners of the web. Dr Shiraz Maher from the International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation (ICSR) at Kings College London said terrorist groups and their supporters have already moved to more clandestine methods. This is the reality of the situation. However scary it is to know that you can Google a guide on bomb-making, forcing internet companies to remove and regulate such content would simply push it on to the Dark Web or similar, where it becomes harder for security services to investigate sources and followers. There are also no guarantees that being forced to use more clandestine sites would deter would-be terrorists. As Professor Peter Neumann, an ICSR director, tweeted: Blaming social-media platforms is politically convenient but intellectually lazy.

Home secretary Amber Rudd has also taken the opportunity to insist once again that tech firms provide a back door into their end-to-end encryption. She first suggested this in March, after it was discovered that the Westminster attacker, Khalid Masood, had sent a WhatsApp message minutes before carrying out his murderous act. WhatsApp uses end-to-end encryption, so that only the sender and recipient can read their messages. As tech firms are quick to point out, any back door into encrypted messages, which allows the state to hack into a terrorists phone, means the same hacking is possible on anyones phone. Thus encryption becomes pointless.

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You can't fight terrorism with online censorship - Spiked

Over onthe home page, Tiana Lowe tells the tale of the campus craziness at the Evergreen State College of Washington. Id encourage you to read the entire piece, but the basics are just as absurd as weve come to expect. Radical activists wanted to turn the schools traditional Day of Absence (a day where black students leave campus) into effectively a day of exclusion, demanding that white students and professors leave instead. Bret Weinstein, a progressive biology professor, wrote a polite and thoughtful letter objecting, and the response? Well, the response was insane. Heres Tiana describing what happened next:

Within days, vitriolic student mobs took over Weinsteins classroom, screaming at him, calling him a racist, and demanding his resignation. When videos of the mobs made it to YouTube, the protesters demanded that the videos be taken down. Rather than ignoring the disruption and demands of students including the immediate disarming of police services and mandatory sensitivity and cultural competency training for faculty, staff, administrators, and student employees Evergreens president, George Bridges, actively enabled them, excusing protesters from homework, instituting said mandatory sensitivity training for all college employees, creating a new equity center, and launching an extensive forensic investigation to seek criminal charges against whoever posted the videos to YouTube. While local police chief Stacy Brown told Weinstein to remain off campus as law enforcement could not guarantee his safety, Bridges lauded the protesters passion and courage.

By the way, if you want to read the full list of the mobs demands, here they are:

We demand for the coordinator of the Trans & Queer Center to be permanently hired full time. Currently, they are temporarily hired and their contract ends in June.

We demand the creation of a permanent position that will support undocumented students. This position will have a budget that will create scholarships, housing, and protections.

We demand that the video created for Day of Absence and Day of Presence that was stolen by white supremacists and edited to expose and ridicule the students and staff be taken down by the administration this Friday.

We demand Bret Weinstein be suspended immediately without pay but all students receive full credit.

We demand an official statement on each of these demands from George Bridges that is divided up into 10 sections on this Friday May 26th, 2017.

We demand that no changes to The Student Code of Conduct be made without democratic student consent.

We demand that Officer Timothy ODell be fired and suspended without pay while an investigation takes place.

We demand the immediate firing of Andrea Seabert Olsen, the Assistant to the VP for Student Conduct, from all Evergreen State College positions.

We demand the immediate disarming of Police Services and no expansion of police facilities or services at any point in the future.

We demand mandatory sensitivity and cultural competency training for faculty, staff, administrators, and student employees.

We demand the creation of an Equity Center

We demand for the coordinator of the Trans & Queer Center to be permanently hired full time.

We demand the creation of a position that will support undocumented students.

Not to be outdone, a coalition of dozens of faculty and staff have signed their own letter, and its one of the most craven academic documents Ive ever read. It begins:

We acknowledge that all of us who have power within the institution share responsibility for the racist actions of others. Furthermore, those of us who are white bear a particularly large share of that responsibility.

We acknowledge that we have a great deal of work to do in order to honor and live up to the demands made by student leaders during last weeks protests.

And lest you have any doubt about where these folks stand on the First Amendment, they commit themselves to:

Demonstrate accountability by pursuing a disciplinary investigation against Bret Weinstein according to guidelines in the Social Contract and Faculty Handbook. Weinstein has endangered faculty, staff, and students, making them targets of white supremacist backlash by promulgating misinformation in public emails, on national television, in news outlets, and on social media.

This is legally indefensible, of course, and morally repugnant. There is no effort to engage with Weinsteins ideas andno acknowledgment of the threats that have driven him off campus. Weinstein has shown unusual courage in continuing to speak out against threats and intimidation, but how long can he endure? How long can any reasonable person persevere in the face of similar threats and demands? Evergreen has reportedly faced serious threats of violence after the media covered Weinsteins story, but Weinstein is in no way responsible for these threats. Will his radical colleagues apply this standard to their ideological friends? Do they hold them responsible for the threats that drove Weinstein off campus? Of course not.

Instead, this is exactly how even peaceful professors and protesters actively collaborate with the violent fringe. Rather than unequivocally standing up for the fundamental liberties of a colleague while condemning all threats of violence, they blame him for the misdeeds of others, ignore the misconduct of their allies, and then urge their universityto violate the law. Ive said it before, and Ill say it again. Unless and until campus administrators have the courage to use the law to protect liberty, theyll reward violence, increase campus volatility, and set the stage for a truly ugly (and perhaps deadly) incident.

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Evergreen State College Professors Turn On Their Colleague, Demand Censorship and Discipline - National Review

It promises to be the mother of all censorship meetings. On Tuesday evening at the Oberoi Trident Towers in Mumbai, Rajyavardhan Rathore has invited film producers from all across India for a conference on the proposed amendment in the censor certification guidelines.

Says a source, Mr Rathore has invited producers from every state, from Bengal to Karnataka, and from Mumbai to Chennai to discuss the finer points in the reports on censorship amendments suggested by the Shyam Benegal committee and Justice Mudgals report. Every opinion would be given equal weightage. The idea is to take into confidence the requirements of every region before changes are brought into censorship rules.

The source promises an early and radical change in censorship rules.We may soon have entirely new censorship guidelines or for all we know the Central Board Of Film Certification (CBFC) as we know it may cease to exist.It will all depend on what producers feel about censorship rules, says a source close to the I & B ministry.

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Just In: I&B Minister to discuss CENSORSHIP ammendments suggested by Shyam Benegal committee - Daily News & Analysis

Introduction

The Chinese government has long kept tight reins on both traditional and new media to avoid potential subversion of its authority. Its tactics often entail strict media controls using monitoring systems and firewalls, shuttering publications or websites, and jailing dissident journalists, bloggers, and activists.Googles battlewith the Chinese government over internet censorship and the Norwegian Nobel Committees awarding of the 2010 Peace Prize to jailed Chinese activist Liu Xiaobo have also increased international attention to censorship issues. At the same time, the countrys burgeoning economy relies on the web for growth, and experts say the growing need for internet freedom is testing the regimes control.

Chinasconstitutionaffords its citizens freedom of speech and press, but the opacity of Chinese media regulations allows authorities to crack down on news stories by claiming that they expose state secrets and endanger the country. The definition of state secrets in China remains vague, facilitating censorship of any information that authoritiesdeem harmful[PDF] to their political or economic interests. CFR Senior FellowElizabeth C. Economysays the Chinese government is in a state of schizophrenia about media policy as it goes back and forth, testing the line, knowing they need press freedom and the information it provides, but worried about opening the door to the type of freedoms that could lead to the regimes downfall.

The government issued in May 2010 its firstwhite paperon the internet that focused on the concept of internet sovereignty, requiring all internet users in China, including foreign organizations and individuals, to abide by Chinese laws and regulations. Chinese internet companies are now required to sign the Public Pledgeon Self-Regulation and Professional Ethics for China Internet Industry, which entails even stricter rules than those in the white paper, according toJason Q. Ng, a specialist on Chinese media censorship and author ofBlocked on Weibo. Since Chinese President Xi Jinping came to power, censorship of all forms of media has tightened. In February 2016, Xi announced new media policy for party and state news outlines: All the work by the partys media must reflect the partys will, safeguard the partys authority, and safeguard the partys unity, emphasizing that state media must align themselves with the thought, politics, and actions of the party leadership. A China Daily essay emphasized Xis policy, noting that the nations media outlets are essential to political stability.

In 2016, Freedom House ranked China last for the second consecutive year out of sixty-five countries that represent 88 percent of the worlds internet users. The France-based watchdog group Reporters Without Borders ranked China 176 out of 180 countries in its 2016 worldwideindex of press freedom. Experts say Chinese media outlets usually employ their own monitors to ensure political acceptability of their content. Censorship guidelines are circulated weekly from the Communist Partys propaganda department and the governments Bureau of Internet Affairs to prominent editors and media providers.

Certain websites that the government deems potentially dangerouslike Wikipedia, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, and some Google servicesare fully blocked or temporarily blacked out during periods of controversy, such as the June 4 anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre or Hong Kongs Umbrella Movement protests in the fall of 2014.Specific materialconsidered a threat to political stability is also banned, including controversial photos and video, as well as search terms. The government is particularly keen on blocking reports of issues that could incite social unrest, like official corruption, the economy, health and environmental scandals, certain religious groups, and ethnic strife. The websites of Bloomberg news service, theNew York Times, and other major international publicationshave periodically been blacked out, their journalists harassed and threatened, and visa applications denied. In 2012, Bloomberg and the New York Times both ran reportson the private wealth of then Party Secretary Xi Jinping and Premier Wen Jiabao. Restrictions have been also placed on micro-blogging services, often in response to sensitive subjects like corruption, including 2012 rumors of an attempted coup in Beijing involving the disgraced former Chongqing party chief Bo Xilai. Censors are alsoswift to blockany mention of violent incidents related to Tibet or Chinas Xinjiang Autonomous Region, home to the mostly Muslim Uighur minority group, and the Falun Gong spiritual movement.

More than adozen government bodiesreview and enforce laws related to information flow within, into, and out of China. The most powerful monitoring body is the Communist Partys Central Propaganda Department (CPD), which coordinates with General Administration of Press and Publication and State Administration of Radio, Film, and Television to ensure content promotes party doctrine. Ng says that the various ministries once functioned as smaller fiefdoms of control, but have recently been more consolidated under the State Council Information Office, which has taken the lead on internet monitoring.

The Chinese government employs large numbers of people to monitor and censor Chinas media. Experts refer to an October 2013 report in a state-run paper, the Beijing News, which said more than two million workers are responsible for reviewing internet posts using keyword searches and compiling reports for decision makers. These so-called public opinion analysts are hired both by the state andprivate companies to constantly monitor Chinas internet. Additionally, the CPD gives media outlets editorial guidelines as well as directives restricting coverage of politically sensitive topics. In onehigh-profile incidentinvolving the liberal Guangdong magazineSouthern Weekly, government censors rewrote the papers New Years message from a call for reform to a tribute to the Communist Party. The move triggeredmass demonstrationsby the staff and general public, who demanded the resignation of the local propaganda bureau chief. While staff and censors reached a compromise that theoretically intended to relax some controls, much of the censorship remained in place.

The Chinese government deploys myriad ways of censoring the internet. The Golden Shield Project, colloquially known as theGreat Firewall, is the center of the governments online censorship and surveillance effort. Its methods include bandwidth throttling, keyword filtering, andblocking accessto certain websites. According to Reporters Without Borders, the firewall makes large-scale use ofDeep Packet Inspection technologyto block access based on keyword detection. As Ng points out, the government also employs adiverse range of methodsto induce journalists to censor themselves, including dismissals and demotions, libel lawsuits, fines, arrests, and forced televised confessions.

As of February 2017, thirty-eight journalists wereimprisoned in China, according to the Committee to Protect Journalists, a U.S.-based watchdog on press freedom issues. In 2009, Chinese rights activist Liu Xiaobowas sentencedto eleven years in prison for advocating democratic reforms and freedom of speech inCharter 08, a 2008 statement signed by more than two thousand prominent Chinese citizens that called for political and human rights reforms and an end to one-party rule. When Liu won the Nobel Peace Prize, censors blocked the news in China. A year later, journalist Tan Zuorenwas sentencedto five years in prison for drawing attention to government corruption and poor construction of school buildings that collapsed and killed thousands of children during the 2008 earthquake in Sichuan province. Early 2014 saw the governmentdetain Gao Yu, a columnist who was jailed on accusations of leaking aParty communiqu titled Document 9.

The State Internet Information Office tightened content restrictions in 2013 and appointed anew director of a powerful internet committeeled by President Xi Jinping, who assumed power in late 2012. AJuly 2014 directiveon journalist press passes bars reporters from releasing information from interviews or press conferences on social media without permission of their employer media organizations. And in early 2015, the governmentcracked down on virtual private networks(VPNs), making it more difficult to access U.S. sites like Google and Facebook. By blocking these tools, the authorities are leaving people with fewer options and are forcing most to give up on circumvention and switch to domestic services,writes Charlie Smith[pseudonym], a cofounder of FreeWeibo.com and activist website GreatFire.org. If they can convince more internet users to use Chinese serviceswhich they can readily censor and easily snoop onthen they have taken one further step towards cyber sovereignty. The restrictions mount on a regular basis, adds theNew YorkersEvan Osnos. To the degree that Chinas connection to the outside world matters, the digital links are deteriorating, he wrotein an April 2015 article. How many countries in 2015 have an internet connection to the world that is worse than it was a year ago?

China requires foreign correspondents to obtain permission before reporting in the country and has used this as an administrative roadblock to prevent journalists from reporting on potentially sensitive topics like corruption and, increasingly, economic and financial developments. Under Xi, the ability of foreign journalists and international news outlets to travel and access to sources have shrunk. The hostile environment against foreign journalists is being fueled by efforts to publicly mark Western media outlets as not only biased, but part of a coordinated international effort to damage Chinas reputation [PDF], according to PEN Americas 2016 report on the constraints of foreign journalists reporting from China. Eighty percent of respondents in a 2014 survey conducted by theForeign Correspondents Club of Chinasaid their work conditions had worsened or stayed the same compared to 2013. International journalists regularly face government intimidation, surveillance, and restrictions on their reporting, writes freelance China correspondentPaul Mooney, who was denied a visa in 2013.

Austin Ramzy, a China reporter for theNew York Times, relocated to Taiwan in early 2014 afterfailing to receivehis accreditation and visa.New York Timesreporter Chris Buckley was reported to have been expelled in early January 2013an incidentChinas foreign ministry said was a visa application suspension due to improper credentials. China observers were also notably shaken bythe 2013 suspensionof Bloombergs former China correspondent, Michael Forsythe, after Bloomberg journalists accused the news agency of withholding investigative articles for fear of reprisal from Chinese authorities.

The treatment of foreign reporters has become a diplomatic issue. In response to theArab Springprotests in early 2011, then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton pledged to continue U.S. efforts toweaken censorship[PDF]in countries with repressive governments like China and Iran. In response, Beijing warned Washington tonot meddlein the internal affairs of other countries. On a December 2013 trip to Beijing, then Vice President Joe Biden pressed China publicly and privately about press freedom,directly raising the issuein talks with Chinese President Xi Jinping and meetings with U.S. journalists working in China.

In more recent years, China has made it exceedingly difficult for foreign technology firms to compete within the country. The websites of U.S. social media outlets like Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram are blocked. Google, after a protracted battle with Chinese authorities over the banning of search terms, quietlygave upits fight in early 2013 by turning off a notification that alerted Chinese users of potential censorship. In late 2014,China banned Googles email service Gmail, a move that triggered a concerned responsefrom the U.S. State Department.

In January 2015, China issuednew cybersecurity regulationsthat would force technology firms to submit source code, undergo rigorous inspections, and adopt Chinese encryption algorithms. The move triggered an outcry from European and U.S. companies, wholobbied governmental authoritiesfor urgent aid in reversing the implementation of new regulations. CFR Senior FellowAdam Segal writesthat the fact that the regulations come from the central leading group, and that they seem to reflect an ideologically driven effort to control cyberspace at all levels, make it less likely that Beijing will back down.

Despite the systematic control of news, the Chinese public has found numerous ways to circumvent censors.Ultrasurf, Psiphon, andFreegateare popular software programs that allow Chinese users to set up proxy servers to avoid controls. While VPNs are also popular, the government crackdown on the systems have led users todevise other methods, including the insertion of new IP addresses into host files,Tora free software program for anonymityor SSH tunnels, which route all internet traffic through a remote server. According to Congress, between1 and 8 percent[PDF]of Chinese internet users use proxy servers and VPNs to get around firewalls.

Microblogging sites like Weibo have also become primary spaces for Chinese netizens to voice opinion or discuss taboo subjects. Over the years, in a series of cat-and-mouse games, Chinese internet users have developed an extensive series of punsboth visual and homophonousslang, acronyms, memes, and images to skirt restrictions and censors, writes Ng.

Googles chairman, Eric Schmidt, said in early 2014 thatencryption could helpthe company penetrate China. But such steps experienced a setback in March 2014 when authorities cracked down on socialnetworking app WeChat(known as Weixin in China), deleting prominent, politically liberal accounts. Soon thereafter, the governmentannounced new regulationson instant messaging tools aimed at mobile chat applications such as WeChat, which has more than 750 million users and was increasingly seen as replacing Weibo as a platform for popular dissent that could skirt censors. CFRs Economy says that the internet has increasingly become a means for Chinese citizens to ensure official accountability and rule of law, noting thegrowing importanceof social network sites as a political force inside China despite government restrictions.

China had roughly 731 million internet users in 2017. Although there have beenvocal callsfor total press freedom in China, some experts point to a more nuanced discussion of the ways in which the internet is revolutionizing the Chinese media landscape and a society that is demanding more information. Some people in China dont look at freedom of speechas an abstract ideal, but more as a means to an end, writes authorEmily Parker. Rather, the fight for free expression fits into a larger context of burgeoning citizen attention to other, more pertinent social campaigns like environmental degradation, social inequality, and corruptionissues for which they use the internet and media as a means of disseminating information, says Ng.

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Media Censorship in China | Council on Foreign Relations

The light is beginning to fade in downtown Beirut on the first Friday of Ramadan.

While the original ancient souk was flattened in the civil war, remnants of medieval walls and the bullet-ridden facades of French influenced mansions remain, jostling with soulless modern buildings.

Between Starbucks, Virgin Megastores and Cinema City, theres little to distinguish this part of town from any other city in the word but on a hazy golden evening the plaza outside is a good place for families and teenagers to kill time before its dark enough to break their fast.

The cinema is also a favourite for whiling away the hours without thinking about food and drink. Yet moviegoers who had been looking forward to seeing Wonder Woman, the latest offering from Warner Brothers and the DC Extended Comics Universe, have come away disappointed.

I had to go see a romantic film instead. I was the only boy in the room, 14-year-old Rami said, grimacing.

On Wednesday the Lebanese authorities officially banned Wonder Woman from cinemas,despite the fact posters advertising the film are dotted around the city, there have been trailers for it before other movies and advance screenings were held on Monday and Tuesday.

An employee at the Beirut Souks Cinema City said that management had taken down posters after an emailed government order, instructing staff to refund people who had bought tickets when they arrived.

Although Lebanon is one of the most liberal countries in the Middle East (ranking 98th out of 180 countries in the World Press Freedom Index) theres still a lot that doesnt make it past the governments censorship bureau. Reasons for banning art, books and other media range from content deemed sexually explicit to work that could inflame sectarian tensions; the only constant is a blanket ban on anything originating from Israel.

The neighbouring countries are technically still at war, and while Lebanons censorship laws are vaguely written and outdated, Wonder Woman fell foul of the authorities because the lead actor Gal Gadot is Israeli.

Wonder Woman Social Teaser

Despite the fact films starring Godot in the same role (such as Batman vs Superman) have previously aired in Lebanon without an issue, the hype with which Wonder Woman was anticipated, and Godots starring role, brought the film to the General Securitys attention.

Its because shes the main star of this film, it freaked some people out, said Anthony Sargon, a dual Lebanese-American national who runs The Comic Stash, Beiruts leading comic bookstore.

Its never been an issue before. Natalie Portman is Israeli and all her films come out here. Its also so unusual to ban something after its already come out... The film already made it past the censorship bureau, he added.

I think some vocal minority, probably some religious group, got flustered about it and started putting pressure on the government once they heard about it.

Godot has attracted particular controversy because she served in the Israeli army. Social media posts from 2006 surfaced recently in which she allegedly proclaimed unequivocal support for Israeli forces in that summers war with Hezbollah a conflict which, although short, killed 1,200 Lebanese civilians and decimated Beirut and south Lebanons infrastructure.

I think its a message Lebanon can send to Israel, passer-by Nawal said outside Cinema City. Its not about Gal Gadot as a person. And its not about banning anything an Israeli touches, that would be silly.

But this is a high-profile movie and it is our way of saying, We reject you and your outlook in the same way thatin Israel, Arab stuff is banned. They censor the deaths of Lebanese and Palestinians all the time.

General Security, the bureau for censorship, and the state Shura Council did not immediately return The Independents requests for comment.

Its absurd what happened, said Gino Raidy, an executive member of MARCH, a Lebanese freedom of expression NGO. To turn around and retroactively ban something once it has already been given the OK. Theres nothing remotely political about the film.

Its kind of good that Wonder Woman has kicked up such a fuss. Warner Brothers will lose some money, sure, but the real victims of the censorship bureau are local Lebanese artists and filmmakers.

If you want to watch Wonder Woman, you will download it. Its local art that suffers because it has no other market.

Lebanons decision is unlikely to dent Hollywood profits: the female-directed, critically acclaimed film is expected to smash initial box office predictions to take in $175m(136m)worldwide.

Many films that get banned on their cinema release are often still sold in Lebanon when they come out on DVD something Raidy anticipates will happen with Wonder Woman.

They just dont look at the big picture. Its exasperating, Raidy continued.

The Israeli ban is a clear example of that. An Israeli person could be the biggest pro-Palestinian activist on the planet, but he and his books and his speeches will be banned here, just because of his birthplace.

MARCH, like many freedom of expression advocates, is worried that the sudden banning of the film from cinemas ostensibly because of the political views of an actor sets a dangerous precedent for censorship in future.

I think the censors will be more hawkish after this. Its a slippery slope, Comic Stashs Anthony Sargon said.

In my opinion its totally wrong and it seems the majority of people are against it. If you want to boycott the film, thats fine, but give people the choice.

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Wonder Woman and a dangerous precedent for censorship in Lebanon - The Independent

Fox News host Tucker Carlson slammed a federal judge Wednesday for ordering the pro-life group, the Center for Medical Progress, to remove its latest video from YouTube.

Last week, a law firm representing the Center for Medical Progress released a video recorded by the pro-life group showing Planned Parenthood employees using gruesome terms to describe abortion procedures.

A judge previously blocked the Center for Medical Progress from releasing the undercover footage its filmmakers recorded of conversations that took place at the National Abortion Federations 2014 and 2015 annual conferences. NAF argued that the videos publication could endanger its members. The pro-life group is currently appealing that injunction.

The video released by the law firm was described as a preview of the footage from those conferences that is under injunction. Soon after the video was published, U.S. District Judge William Orrick said it violated the injunction and ordered it removed from YouTube.

The video has since been removed from YouTube, as well as other social media websites. At press time, the video was available on Newsbusters:

On his show, Carlson read quotes from the video, including a Planned Parenthood employee who described a fetus as a tough little object and a member of the Consortium of Abortion Providers who said, An eyeball just fell down into my lap, and that is gross!

Wed love to show you the video, but we cant, because of a man called William Orrick, Carlson said.

Carlson said that Orrick is a massive donor to Democrats and that he intentionally suppressed the video. He argued that Orricks claim means the First Amendment doesnt exist.

Its an atrocity and its gotten very little attention, Carlson said.

Lila Rose, the founder and president of Live Action, a pro-life group, told Carlson that the effort to remove the video by NAF and Planned Parenthood shows us that theyre very afraid of whats on these tapes.

Rose said that the video is horrific and so difficult to hear but that its exactly what the public should hear, Tucker, because Planned Parenthood, the very abortionists that are laughing about what theyre doing on these tapes, are receiving half a billion dollars every single year from taxpayers.

Earlier this week, a coalition of pro-life groups sent a letter to Attorney General Jeff Sessions and acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe asking them to direct their respective departments to investigate allegations raised by the Center for Medical Progress videos that Planned Parenthood trafficked aborted fetal body parts.

Planned Parenthood has denied illegal conduct.

Original post:
Tucker Carlson slams censorship of Planned Parenthood video - TheBlaze.com

The Turkish governments dominance over TV and print media and its intimidation of critical journalists with arbitrary detentions and trials is well known.

Less known is a sweeping campaign of misinformation orchestrated by bogus fact-checking groups with ties to the government that propagate explosive claims: The Armenian genocide is a lie; the government didnt try to censor Wikipedia; thousands of government employees who were fired for political reasons have an effective appeals procedure.

These fake fact-checkers aim to refute critical stories about Turkeys government even when they contain verified facts.

Sarphan Uzunolu, a media studies lecturer at Istanbuls Kadir Has University, says Turkey established a post-truth regime before it became the word of the year in 2016. The regime has provided unique contributions to the field, he adds, such as propagandists use of the fact-checking title for political purposes.

Bengi Ruken Cengiz, a doctoral researcher and an editor at Turkeys first and genuine fact-checking service, DogrulukPayi.com, concurs that the popularity of fact-checking made it an appealing format for partisans trying to gain the moral high ground.

Enter Fact Check Armenia.

Fact Check Armenia

Turkey officially denies the Armenian Genocide, conducting campaigns and lobbying efforts against recognition of the genocide worldwide, especially in the United States.

It is aided in this goal by FactCheckArmenia.com, a site with ties to government-affiliated organizations that peddles misinformation about the death of more than a million Armenians.

Last year an aerial stunt spelled out 101 YEARS OF GENO-LIE, and promoted the website FACT CHECK ARMENIA.COM in the skies of Manhattan. The website was also advertised on Google results for search queries on Armenian Genocide.

FactCheckArmenia.com does not reveal who actually owns or runs the website. The whois records, which show ownership of registered websites, are hidden via a company in Bahamas. But their Facebook page say they are funded by the Turkic Platform. That platform, with similarly undeclared owners, is an NGO based in Istanbul according to the Turkish pro-government media, but many activities seem to take place in the United States.

The fact sheets provided on the FactCheckArmenia.com take a firmly pro-Turkish stance. This is most visible in the use of the word relocation, that mirrors Turkeys official narrative, instead of acknowledging orders for the forced deportation of Armenians that caused hundreds of thousands of deaths.

Many other claims, such as No Armenians were harmed of the April 24, 1915 arrests, are simply untrue given that 79 of the first group of 235 intellectuals were reportedly killed.

The individuals who promoted the genocide-denying campaign in the U.S. left trails that connect the Fact Check Armenia project directly to the Ankara government.

Ayhan zmekik, the spokesperson for the Fact Check Armenia, and also for the Turkic Platform, is the founder of the Turkish American Youth and Education Foundation. The organization has good access to government officials, as zmekik later took a role in the AK Partys U.S. outreach activities. In 2015, zmekik produced an interview with President Erdogans son Bilal Erdogan for Fact Check Armenias sister project, LetHistoryDecide. The site was promoted by Turkeys Minister for Foreign Affairs Mevlt avuolu, the Turkish embassy in D.C. and ambassador Serdar Kl, Turkish consulates, and also by the ruling AK Party.

Derya Taskin, who organized the Manhattan stunt, was then the president of Turkish Institute for Progress (TIP), one of the prime Turkish lobbying organizations in the U.S. She also sits on the executive board of the Turkish-American Steering Committee (TASC) which organized the LetHistoryDecide rallies. Back in Turkey, Taskin was considered to run for a parliamentary seat from Turkeys ruling AK Party in the province of Afyon.

Ms. Taskin initially denied being involved with the project, but when provided with her own quote from an article on Turkeys state-run news agency that TIP organized the aerial stunt, she declined to reply further. Mr. zmekik, and the organizations he is affiliated with, did not respond to our requests for comment.

Fact Check Armenia also uses paid campaigns on other news organizations to spread its misinformation. Using the PR Newswire service, Fact Check Armenia managed to publish a paid story on Reuters in April 2015 that claimed Russia was behind the Armenian Genocide commemoration efforts that article was later deleted without correction. On the same day, TASC published an open letter, again paid as an ad on The Washington Post, that disputes the genocide and promotes the other denial website, LetHistoryDecide.org.

Turkeys English-language media outlets, such as public broadcaster TRT World TV and the pro-government newspaper Daily Sabah pursue the same objective improving Turkeys image abroad said Koray Kaplca, also an editor at DogrulukPayi. But in the name of national interest these outlets can turn into pure propaganda tools for the ruling party.

Case in point, Fact-Checking Turkey.

Fact-Checking Turkey

Just like Fact Check Armenia, FactCheckingTurkey.com, launched in 2016, is not a fact-checking service. Instead, it is a project to counter articles critical of Turkeys government.

Unlike nonpartisan fact-checkers, FactCheckingTurkey does not use a transparent methodology to adjudicate claims. Conclusions are usually reached by making reference to government statements.

Officials statements are often the only source and are treated as the ultimate truth, Kaplca said.

The recent article, Story behind Wikipedia ban in Turkey, is a case in point: An unnamed Turkish state official is the only source used to completely debunk nine global media outlets news reports about Turkeys censorship of the online encyclopaedia. The article even contends that a representative of Wikipedia privately confirmed the same unnamed state officials story saying the exact opposite of what the executive director of Wikimedia Foundation, Katherine Maher, stated publicly.

Yet, some counterclaims are more dangerous than others. On Twitter, the group recently targeted Amnestys report on Turkeys post-coup purge.

Based on 61 interviews, Amnesty concluded that in spite of the clear arbitrariness of the dismissal decisions, there is no effective appeal procedure for public sector workers against their expulsions. A commission proposed in January to assess the cases lacks both the independence and the capacity to make it effective. It is yet to start operating.

FactCheckingTurkey countered this with a month-old speech by a presidential advisor, Mehmet Uum, on a TV show, saying that an appeal commission is expected to start out soon.

In fact, the members of the commission have already been appointed. The seven-member commission, chaired by Justice Ministrys deputy undersecretary, is expected to face a barrage of 200,000 appeals in its two-year term. Yet, none of these developments addresses Amnestys warnings about its independence or effectiveness.

There are two main reasons these propaganda projects arent real fact-checkers, Cengiz said.

First, the claims that are chosen for analysis should be verifiable. Second, the fact checks should rely on more than one publicly available, preferably unbiased, source of information.

To debunk Amnestys report, Fact Checking Turkey offers a political argument instead of scrutinizing the effectiveness of the commission. And in the Wikipedia case, they rely entirely on an unnamed official while publicly available sources, such as Wikipedias page history, do not support their counterclaims.

With such sloppy research and no advertisements, how do Turkeys fake fact-checkers operate? A recently leaked cache of government emails provided a behind-the-scenes glimpse at their methods.

Last October, a Marxist hacker collective, The Red Hack, leaked the personal email archive of Turkeys Energy Minister Berat Albayrak, who is also Erdogans son-in-law. The email archive featured the budget for a think-tank, Bosphorus Global, to be run by a pro-Erdogan columnist Hilal Kaplan and her spouse. However, the biggest part of the costs were servers, firewalls, network infrastructure and the salaries of web designers and software developers.

Kaplan, Bosphorus Global and Fact-Checking Turkey did not respond to our requests for comment.

To date, Bosphorus Global has set up at least 20 projects in six languages, including a TV programme on the public broadcaster, TRT, dedicated to refuting criticism about the Turkish government. However, most of these projects initially appeared anonymous. The groups first project, GununYalanlari.com (Lies of the day) acknowledged its connection with the Bosphorus Global only to debunk news stories about an expensive waterside mansion alleged to be used as their headquarters. The leaked emails not only confirmed the existence of said mansion, but also that money came from Berat Albayrak.

Uzunolu credits this type of political propaganda for consolidating the governing AK partys support base and claiming the high ground against challengers.

Yet these fact-checkers are not a match for their global counterparts, he says.

The way they define themselves, with such partisanship and by picking sides, damage the truth the most.

Read the original here:
These fake 'fact-checkers' are peddling lies about genocide and censorship in Turkey - Poynter (blog)