Category Archives: Censorship

The swelling ranks of Chinese fans of streamed Hollywood TV shows, such as The Walking Dead and House of Cards, have expressed outrage at recently issued regulations requiring tighter censorship for all streaming video in China.

The broadcast watchdog, the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television (SAPPRFT), said in a statement on its website last month that online companies would have to closely vet content before making it available to stream.

STORY:'House of Cards' Season 2 Skirts Censors for China Release Online

A survey on Sina Weibo found that 130,153 surveyed users of the micro-blogging service did not want censors to decide which Western television series they could watch.

We should be free to choose what we want to watch and experience multiple cultures, wrote one Weibo user.

Just 6,476 people backed new guidelines that require regulatory approval before Western series -- which now include Saturday Night Live, The Ellen DeGeneres Show and the Danish political drama Borgen --can appear on a Chinese online video website, with some arguing they were too open and could affect domestic culture.

In a report on the Xinhua government news agency, online companies such as Sohu ruled out the possibility that shows like The Walking Dead and Masters of Sex would be banned.

They insisted that many of the censorship rules were already in place, and said the statement on the government website merely reiterated the status quo.

STORY:China's Censors Clamp Down on Booming Internet Video Sector

"Although American TV series are strictly scrutinized in China, most of those currently available to the public have already been approved," a Sohu.com source told Xinhua.

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China's 'House of Cards' Fans Revolt Online Over Fears of More Censorship

Last week, two Australian retailers pulled Grand Theft Auto V from their shelves in response to a petition decrying sexual violence in the game. What I found interesting about the situation wasn't so much the news itself as the curiously strong reaction it drew, lighting up Twitter feeds and comments sections, including ours. The first GamesIndustry.biz story on the situation drew nearly 100 comments, the second pulled in about 50.

Compare that to the zero comments that greeted last month's news that Indian obscenity laws would prevent Dragon Age: Inquisition from releasing in the country. So what's the difference? Why are people so upset about two retailers choosing not to stock the poster child for controversy-courting games, but evidently apathetic about a billion people being denied the option to play another game held in almost universally high regard for vaguely defined obscenities? (Interesting side note: Grand Theft Auto V is readily available in India.) For an industry so vocal about even the faintest shadow of censorship, we're pretty damn complacent when it comes to the genuine article.

"As far as censorship goes, this may be the least harmful, least effective strain of it you can find."

Yes, Grand Theft Auto V is a hyperviolent game, and its removal from some retailers is censorship of a form. Not the government-mandated, legally binding form of censorship, or the sort of censorship that will actually keep interested people from finding and buying the game, but it is a private institution removing one route of access to a title because it objects to the content within. And yes, Target Australia and K-Mart Australia are well within their rights to do that. As far as censorship goes, this may be the least harmful, least effective strain of it you can find.

Compare that to the situation with Dragon Age: Inquisition in India, or the industry-approved censorship that has shaped the console and mobile markets for years. Apple in particular has been heavy-handed with what sort of games it allows on the iPhone and iPad, deciding that people who use its products shouldn't have access to educational games about female masturbation, games that use nudity to help get across a worthy message, games based on current events, or titles that criticize sweatshop production methods and smartphone makers like Apple in particular.

"We view Apps different than books or songs, which we do not curate," Apple says in its App Store Review Guidelines. "If you want to criticize a religion, write a book. If you want to describe sex, write a book or a song, or create a medical App."

And if that weren't enough to show how little Apple values freedom of speech, just a few lines later in the guidelines, the company is nakedly threatening those who run afoul of its policies--those whose speech it has already silenced--to stay silent.

"If your App is rejected, we have a Review Board that you can appeal to," Apple says. "If you run to the press and trash us, it never helps."

"How many of the people furious about the Grand Theft Auto V situation own iPhones? How many developers see the company's behavior for what it is and then support the platform anyway?"

My problem isn't so much that Apple won't let these games on its virtual shelves. Like Target Australia and K-Mart Australia, Apple is a private company and can choose what products it will offer through its store. My problem is that this is accepted by the industry as a whole. How many of the people furious about the Grand Theft Auto V situation own iPhones? How many developers see the company's behavior for what it is and then support the platform anyway? How much of the principled outrage we have seen this week doesn't apply to Apple? How much is rationalized by thoughts like, "But it's a really cool phone..." or "But it's such a large potential audience..."?

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Censorship On Ponography In The UK
The Man Mindset assists you to look deeply within to see where you stand...with leadership, success, relationships with women, marriage, fathering, personal goals, ultimately leading to a realizati...

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Censorship On Ponography In The UK - Video

A coalition of secular organisations has launched a campaign to protest Twitters censorship of so-called blasphemous tweets in Pakistan. Accusing the company of being a #TwitterTheocracy, campaigners want the company to uphold human rights-based standards of conduct, particularly when it comes to freedom of expression.

Bob Churchill, from the International Humanist and Ethical Union explained why it is important:

The idea that it is better to have censored access to social media and search, rather than none at all, is debatable. The blasphemy law in Pakistan is widely used to harass minorities, and to suppress free speech which, for example, legitimately criticises certain religious authorities or practices. Any company which gains business in a state by cooperating with laws like this is complicit.

Its not just about censorship in Pakistan, or abstract concerns about freedom of belief. Its about the growing number of people in jail on death row under permanent threat of execution, its about mob killings of those accused of blasphemy, its about a permanent state of fear that prevents questioning and progress for the religious and the non-religious alike.

I know Twitter posts take-down requests to another site but thats not good enough. Thats not really taking a stand, not when the stakes are so high.

To protest, they want users to sign a petition and use the hashtag #TwitterTheocracy.

Sometimes Twitter Hashtag Activism is accused of not working but hey, when youre protesting against Twitter then thats the one place they might actually listen.

By James O'Malley | June 10th, 2014

LG launches new G Pad 10.1 across the globe ...

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Twitter censorship targeted with hashtag activism

The Portrayal of Women in Gaming/Game Censorship
Hey guys a new video for you all I hope you guys enjoy, the following below is a summary of what my point is - The point I was trying to convey in this video is that gender bias shouldn #39;t...

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The Portrayal of Women in Gaming/Game Censorship - Video

JK North Korea Censorship Media
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JK North Korea Censorship Media - Video

Singer Barbra Streisand and the governments of Turkey and Pakistan have little in common. But there is one thing: All have tried to censor the Internet, and all have failed miserably.

In a new paper, Zubair Nabi, with IBM Research's big data and analytics research group in Ireland, details how the so-called "Streisand effect" plays out over and over again when authoritarian governments try to censor information online, either by blocking or partially blocking "offensive" websites, throttling access speeds, or out-and-out manipulating content. Increased knowledge about the futility of censorship could help activists and researchers fight back against it and force regimes to rethink their censorship actionsor at least thats the hope.

The Streisand effect took its name when the Funny Girl star unsuccessfully sued to have an aerial photo of her Malibu beach house removed from the website of a photographer who had posted it along with thousands of other images of the California coastline. (He was actually aiming to document coastal erosion.) Prior to her lawsuit, only a few people had seen the image of Streisands house. After the ensuing lawsuit-related publicity, hundreds of thousands of people saw it.

A similar phenomenon played out in Turkeyone of the most connected nations in the worldearlier this year, when the government blocked access to SoundCloud to stop access to leaked recordings implicating the Turkish prime minister and other officials in corruption. Two months later, in March, the government also blocked access to Twitter and YouTube, also related to leaked recordings.

All of these efforts seemed to have failed, Nabi shows. Alexas rankings of website popularity show that YouTube stayed in the top 10 most-visited websites in Turkey during the censorship period. Google Trends showed that searches for the Twitter handle "Haramzadeler," which initially began uploading leaked recordings earlier in 2013 to no fanfare, spiked significantly when the government blocked SoundCloud in January 2014 and stayed high through late March. At the same time as the censorship events, searches for anti-censorship tools like "Tor," "Spotflux," "Ultrasurf," and terms like "unblock" and "proxy" also spiked, showing that people were actively working to get around the censors.

Last, Nabi analyzed YouTube statistics to see whether people searching for blocked content were actually able to access it. This was difficult in many cases because many videos were later taken down and because YouTube only shows graphs, not the actual data. However, Nabi was able to pinpoint YouTube stats for one video, which reveals the Turkish prime minister discussing construction permits with a business tycoon friend and was among the videos causing Youtube to be blocked in March. "It is clear from the graph that even though the video was uploaded in February 2014, its popularity spiked in March, after YouTube was censored," he writes.

More than 60 countries around the world today censor the Internet in some form, according to the paper. However, Nabi cautions that this Streisand effect does not manifest itself in all instances of censorship. Its existence in some cases only underscores the need for political activists and citizens to continue to develop and disseminate tools, such as VPNs and proxies, that circumvent censorship, he says.

The study also shows the Streisand effect at work in recent censorship episodes in Pakistan. However, it's also difficult to prove in many cases where data the data that companies like Google and Alexa provide is not granular enough or put into context. Nabi calls on more companies to open up more data to help the cause of anti-censorship activists.

"While the Streisand Effect is a handy instrument to keep censorship in check, it is only one of the many means to an end, not an end in itself. The end being an open, universally accessible Internet," he writes.

[Illustration: Daniel Salo]

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Government Internet Censorship Isn't Just Ineffective: Here's Proof It Backfires Horribly

Despite fairly liberal media laws in Rwanda, journalists there work in a restrictive and abusive atmosphere, according to a new report by the Committee to Protect Journalists.

Twenty years after the genocide that killed 800,000 Tutsis and moderate Hutus, the situation in Rwanda is now seen as largely stable. But that stability has a price: many journalists still can't work freely and critical reporting is often suppressed - even though press freedom and freedom of information are basic rights in Rwanda's constitution.

That is the conclusion that the most recent report by the New York-based NGO Committee to Protect Journalists (CPJ) reaches. The report (published on December 8, 2014) was written by Anton Harber who runs the journalism program for the University of Witwatersrand in Johannesburg and heads the South African Freedom of Expression Institute.

Internalised self-censorship

Harber spoke to over 25 Rwandan journalists, publishers and government representatives for his report. Many critical journalists complained that they were being harassed and their work impeded by public authorities, random police questioning and anonymous threats, Harber told DW.

"All the journalists I spoke to said there's a great deal of self-censorship," he said. "For many, it's an issue of survival. They feel that if they don't self- censor, then they will be harassed, closed down, threatened or driven into exile."

Rwandan journalists have become used to self-censorship

In his report, Harber quotes Fred Muvunyi, chairman of the self-regulatory Rwanda Media Commission: "Self-censorship is flowing like blood in the arteries and veins. There is no [direct] censorship, but there are things that journalists don't do because they are not confident of what will happen."

Journalistic hopes shattered

In the past few years, many people hoped there might be a liberalization in Rwandan journalism. After all, four years ago a critical report by the state authority for media pointed out that journalists were not free to carry out their work unimpeded. According to the government report, the Rwandan government officially stands for a liberal attitude towards free speech, but Rwanda's political culture is repressive when it comes to dissenting opinions. At the time, the report called for a change to this culture.

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Rwanda: Censorship or Self-Censorship?

China is in a league of its own when it comes to online censorship. The government has long gone to great lengths to cleanse Chinese cyberspace of topics it finds objectionable. Even so, party official Lu Wei stands out for imposing unprecedented restrictions on Internet activities in the Peoples Republic.

The new Internet czar of China recently paid a visit to the US. And Lu had a packed schedule that included plenty of high-level meetings in Washington, which has taken an increasingly harder line toward China on matters of online censorship and computer hacking.

The meeting that attracted the most attention,though, was probably Lus visit to Mark Zuckerbergs office in Silicon Valley.

When Lu showed up, the Facebook chief executive just happened to have a copy of the Chinese presidents book sitting on his desk. Xi Jinping: The Governance of China is a weighty compilation its more than 500 pages in English of speeches and commentary by Xi, written with a heavy dose of Marxist jargon familiar to anyone who follows the Chinese Communist Party closely.

Mr. Lu is basically an old school propagandist, says Paul Mozur, who covers the Internet in China for the New York Times. And the book by Xi, as Mozur describes it, is the prime propaganda text thats been put out by President Xi Jinping.

Apparently, Zuckerberg told Lu that the Chinese presidents book is helping him and his staff at Facebook better understand socialism with Chinese characteristics. Mozur says he verified this account with someone who attended the private meeting.

Facebook has been blocked in China since 2009, leading to some instant criticism of Zuckerberg on social media for his perceived attempt at currying favor with the Chinese government.

The episode might be concerning to lots of Facebook users, says Mozur. Xis book doesnt hide the Chinese presidents skepticism toward the value of online freedom. Censorship and control over the Internet is a key element of Chinas goals for the future, is a message that comes through clearly in the book, Mozur says.

As the man in charge of implementing Chinas national Internet policies, Lu has made his own mark. He has singlehandedly presided over ... an unprecedented crackdown, Mozur says. Thats in a place where, already, the censorship regime and blocks were already [among] the most sophisticated and strict in the world.

It is easy to see why Zuckerberg would want Beijing to lift the ban on Facebook. China has more than 600 million people online and more than 40 percent of the global growth in the tech industry will come from China alone next year, according to Mozur. The big American tech players know they have to secure a place in the China market if theyre going to continue to grow.

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China's Internet censor-in-chief gets a warm welcome at Facebook headquarters

When staffers at GitHub first saw the email from a Russian agency claiming dominion over the internet last month, they didnt take it seriously. GitHub operates an enormously popular site where computer programmers share and collaborate on code, and to the Silicon Valley startup, an email requesting the removal of a list of suicide techniques from the site just didnt seem believable.

But GitHub is a place where you can post almost anythingnot just code. On a handful of GitHub pages, someone had indeed cataloged the pros and cons of different suicide techniques (with the pistol, the drawback was Time: From the fractions of a second to several minutes if bad aim). And the Russian agency was dead serious about wanting to take these pages down. Last week, after GitHub failed to remove the links, its service was blocked in Russia.

The outage lasted only a day, but it holds broader implications for US companies hoping to do business in Russia. Call it a minor skirmish in Russias larger battle to build a Kremlin firewall around the internet. Today, the Russian government is trying censor individual pages served from overseas, but a recently passed law could eventually prevent foreign internet companies from reaching Russia unless they set up computer servers inside the country, a setup that would leave them very much at the mercy of the local governmentand not only in terms of censorship.

Its a battle that threatens to put Russia on par with Chinaa world power whose people experience a downgraded and closed online experience. Unlike China, however, censorship on the Russian internet is a relatively recent phenomenon, says Eva Galpern, a global policy analyst with the Electronic Frontier Foundation. For a couple of decades, theyve actually had a relatively free internet, she says.

That all changed in the summer of 2012a year after Moscows streets were rocked by protests. Thats when Russia created the Roskomnadzor.1 Over the past two years, the agency has built out the muscle and infrastructure to take down anything it doesnt like. It administers a central blacklist of blocked sites, used by Russian internet service providers to manage the Kremlin firewall.

We should inform you that the URLcontains information which has been recognized by Federal service on customers rights protection and human well-being surveillance (ROSPOTREBNADZOR) as prohibited on the territory of the Russdan Federation, read the email the agency sent GitHub on October 21.

In March, the Roskomnadzor cut off access to websites run by Putin critics Alexei Navalny and Garry Kasparov. But its been harder for the agency to vaporize the instantly forkable GitHub suicide pages. Since news of GitHubs one-day outage went public last week, hundreds of new pages, including virtually identical content have sprung up on the website. The agency did not respond to WIREDs request for comment.

Ostensibly, the Roskomnadzors blacklist is there to keep what Russia considers to be dangerous content from the internetthings like suicide instructions, drug cookbooks, and information about terrorist organizations. But critics see it as a first step toward shuttering dissent. What we have discovered, of course, is because there is no accountability for who gets added to this blacklist, says the EFFs Galperin, they blocked pretty much all of the major independent news sites.

At the same time, says Andrei Soldatov, an investigative journalist who runs the website Agentura.Ru, the governments long-term goal is to force companies U.S. companies to move their online operations into Russia. This year, the State Duma passed a law that would force foreign companies such as GitHub, Google, and Twitter to use servers located within the country when storing data from local users. Its set to take effect next year.

If their servers are in Russia, that would mean even stricter censorship for U.S. companies. But, as Soldatov explains, it would also open these companies to surveillance by Russias Federal Security Service, known as the FSB. The more likely outcome is that, if Russia clamps down on U.S. companies, some just wont play in the country. Indeed, the Wall Street Journal described the situation as a near-impossible challenge for US-based firms that have millions of Russian users but generally store data on servers outside the country.

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Russias Creeping Descent Into Internet Censorship