Category Archives: Censorship

David Cronenberg makes movies ahead of their time and hed like to keep it that way. When a global pandemic broke out, the godfather of body horror didnt rush to make his own response.

I sort of felt Id done that already with Shivers and Rabid, the filmmaker told IndieWire during an interview at the Cannes Film Festival, while sitting on a hotel balcony at the Cannes Film Festival, referencing movies he made four decades ago. Of course, the whole body is reality thing is very real for me. Things that affect the human body are very basic, primitive and essential.

Body is reality is one of many provocative lines from Crimes of the Future, the 79-year-old auteurs first feature in eight years, which premieres in Cannes this week. Borrowing a title from his unrelated 1970 film and utilizing a screenplay he wrote two decades ago, the movie once again shows the mark of a director so immersed in his exploratory concepts that he demands the audience think through them to keep up.

Set in a near future in which people can grow new organs in their bodies, Crimes of the Future centers on a performance artist couple (Viggo Mortensen and La Seydoux) whose work involves the removal of such organs onstage before a live audience, and brings scrutiny from a team of bureaucratic investigators at the National Organ Registry (Don McKellar and Kristen Stewart). Like so much of Cronenbergs work, the scenario evades precise interpretations even as it amounts to a remarkable meditation on identity. In this case, the focus is the interplay of physicality and technology unique to the 21st century so it makes sense, of course, that Cronenberg came up with it at the end of the 20th.

When I wrote this in 1998, it was very theoretical unlike now, when everyones talking about microplastics in their bloodstream, the director said, insisting that he hadnt changed a word of his original draft when production resources finally came together last year. The human condition is the subject of my filmmaking and all art. Right now, these are things that are intriguing in terms of where people are and how theyre living.

There were some contemporary twists to the movie, which includes meme-worthy lines like surgery is the new sex, an observation Cronenberg has said was inspired by the amount of surgeries one can watch on YouTube. Theres also recurring POV footage from a ring-cam that was shot with an iPhone, which registers as Cronenbergs acknowledgement of the way personal devices have invaded our way of seeing the world. Its meant to be super-modern, Cronenberg said.

The director previously explored prospects of technological control impacting everyday life with Videodrome, and said he wanted to incorporate a similar theme this time. Crimes of the Future doesnt just revel in the interplay of art and technology; it gets inside the humanity at the core of that intersection. I personally do not have an agenda as a filmmaker, but Im interested in people who do, because that reveals many things about how they struggle with who they are and who they should be, he said. My filmmaking isnt political in the literal sense.

screenshot/NEON

In a separate interview at Cannes, Seydoux said that she was struck by Cronenbergs sensitivity. Hes very romantic, extremely romantic, and its not something you would think of him, she said.Hes very sentimental and very alive, very young, inside. Its inspiring. Theres something about him that I felt and its great when you admire people and you meet them in reality and they are even better than what you imagined.

Still, she wasnt able to get many answers out of the director about the nature of her surgical artist character. He didnt like to talk about it, she said. But we had very interesting conversations about life and about love.

Cronenberg delighted in the ambiguity around his work. Most of my movies are quite open-ended, he said. Things arent tied up in a nice little bow.

Though he has speculated in other interviews ahead of Cannes that audiences might walk out of the movie during its opening minutes, he was now radiating a Zen-like energy about the potential reception of his work. You know, Im from the 60s, he said, referencing the era when he made his first feature. I just want to be here now and chill. I never know how people will react.

Plus, no matter what happens, he already has a new project in the works that he expects to shoot in Toronto next spring: The Shrouds, which imagines a world in which people can witness their dead relatives decaying in real time. The movie has been seeking financing at the Cannes market.

Originally, Cronenberg was paid by Netflix to develop the concept as a series, and said he wrote two episodes before the streaming service backed off. I think theyre very conservative and for whatever reason, they didnt go ahead with my project, he said. I still thanked them because I wrote a script and I wouldnt have done that if it hadnt been for their enthusiasm. I was interested in a streaming series as an alternative form of cinema, because suddenly youre making eight or 10 hours of film.

As for Crimes of the Future, Cronenberg said he researched COVID protocols for the production through TV acting gigs he took on over the past year ahead of the shoot. I wanted to see if it was possible to make a movie with those protocols, he said. How awkward does it make things, how much more expensive does it make things, does it affect your acting, your directing, your acting? I saw that it was perfectly possible to do. It was more expensive, it was more awkward, but it was very doable and you got used to it. You got used to wearing the mask. When it came time for the Crimes of the Future shoot in Athens, among our crew of 150, nobody got COVID, so it worked, he said.

In the years since his last effort, 2014s Maps to the Stars, Cronenberg has written a horror novel, produced a VR experience, and acted in both the Shudder series Slasher and Star Trek: Discovery. But the world has been deprived of his filmmaking during critical moments of societal upheaval, including new sensitives about onscreen representation that he said gave him pause. A lot of artists are worried about saying the wrong phrase on Twitter or getting canceled, he said. Its kind of Stalinist in a bizarre way. Its not the same politics but its about the results the inflexibility and the lack of understanding of what art is.

It didnt take much prodding for Cronenberg to offer some specifics. Of course there are power trips as soon as people feel they have some power through this stuff, he said. You take something like the MeToo movement, which is totally legitimate, but obviously it can be politicized, weaponized by people who want to take it to an absurd extreme, and that has happened. So how do you deal with that? I guess that always happens. Something that has value is misused and used as a weapon. It can be for personal vengeance. Right now, there are a lot of people running scared.

Cronenberg said he navigated pushback to his own work on the institutional level back in 1979, when the Ontario Censor Board cut scenes out of The Brood without his permission (they were later restored). Ive had moments where things were forbidden, things were bad, things were taboo, he said. I havent paid any attention to it in terms of altering my approach.

The gap between his last feature and this one has also meant that the filmmaker didnt join the fray of artists who addressed the Trump years, though the exploding head in Scanners was also ahead of its time in terms of capturing the nature of public discourse these days. I wouldnt dignified my art with Donald Trump, I have to tell you, Cronenberg said. He didnt deserve it. As a destructive force, he was to ludicrous to me. It was so obvious I cant believe anyone would vote for him.

And no matter what his work says about the manipulation of physicality, Cronenberg made one thing clear: He abhorred anti-vaxxers. When I was a kid, we were all terrified of polio, he said. The vaccine was the savior. I just cant believe the attitude toward vaccines right now. Its an amazing thing to be able to have a vaccine right now. If youre refusing a vaccine, I just think youre a ridiculous person.

The filmmaker is often asked about the commercial opportunities that have come his way over the years, including Top Gun and Flashdance. He was adamant that he never seriously entertained these offers. People ask me about this all the time and there could be some misunderstandings, he said. Im flattered because theyre trying to put a huge enterprise into your hands. With Top Gun, he added, he was put off by one ingredient above all. I like machines. I like those jets, he said. Its just all about American military stuff and that wasnt something I wouldve wanted to do. Asked if he found anything fascistic about the plot, he added: I would say that mightve been an issue for me, he said. There was a bit of that in there.

Cronenbergs thematic consistency has inspired a new generation of filmmakers that includes his own son, Brandon Cronenberg. The younger Cronenbergs unsettling and imaginative thrillers Antiviral and Possessor are undeniable spiritual successors to his fathers work, though he has been coy about discussing such comparisons in interviews.

I think thats for obvious reasons, David said. But we love each other and talk about it all the time. As it turns out, both Cronenbergs were shooting new movies produced by U.S. distributor Neon at the same time, and Brandon decided not to rush the completion of his upcoming Alexander Skarsgard effort Infinity Pool to make the Cannes deadline to clear the way for his dad. It was really quite sweet, David said. To be shooting at the same time is delicious for a father. I was really very proud.

And then theres Julia Ducournau, the rising star who nabbed the Palme dOr last year for Titane, the Cronenbergian tale of a serial killer woman who has sex with a car. It ended up as the countrys Oscar submission. While Mortensen recently compared the movie unfavorably to Cronenbergs Crash, the director himself who participated in a conversation with Ducournau in Paris last week felt differently. I liked the film a lot, he said. Shes got a really strong visual sense. I know shes said how much of an influence my filmmaking has been, but its basically in the sense of unlocking her own sensibility, which is unique. Shes got a really strong visual sense and a sense of the absurd, the extreme. Her films are totally not like my films.

Neon

And then there were the accolades. I was delighted that she won the Palme, and I thought it was a real breakthrough for the festival, he said. More than that, the fact that it was chosen to represent France as the official Oscar selection was pretty bold. That also tends to be a conservative choice. In this case, they went the distance with that.

Still, Cronenberg expressed indifference about awards when it came to his own work (he has never been nominated for an Oscar, though A History of Violence scored nominations for William Hurt and screenwriter Josh Olson). I forget which awards Ive won, he said, without a hint of irony. I have to look at my shelf to see what they are. Im not being arrogant. Its the truth. You often know that the awards-givers are doing it more for themselves than for you. They need somebody to be a figurehead for the festival or whatever. Its a little bit transactional in a way. Its just not the reason Im making movies.

So what is that reason? He answered the question so quickly it was almost like a mantra. To be an artist, to create, and connect with human beings, he said. But even as he approached his eighth decade, he wasnt committed to filmmaking at all costs. Cinema is not my life, he said. I have three kids, four grandchildren. Thats life.

Crimes of the Futurepremiered at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival. Neon will release it in the U.S. on Friday, June 3.

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David Cronenberg on Body Horror, Titane, and Stalinist Censorship as Crimes of the Future Hits Cannes - IndieWire

History hardly lacks examples of unintended consequences, but Hanoi 1902 remains especially instructive. Having caused a rat infestation by laying nine miles of sewage pipes, the colonial government of French Indochina reckoned it could fix things by paying locals to catch them: one cent per tail handed in at the local municipal office. The scheme began in April and by June the Vietnamese were producing up to 20,000 tails per day.

And yet the rat population seemed only to increase to the point where bubonic plague returned to the city. Why? Instead of killing rats, hunters simply docked their tails and set them free to breed more rats. There were even reports of rat farms popping up just outside the city.

This provides a perfect illustration of how well-intentioned incentives can misfire. When you reward people for certain outcomes, they will pursue them by methods that you never foresaw, and with side effects that you never intended.

Something very similar has happened in the UKs higher-education sector. Advance HE, a charity established in 2018 from a merger of the Equality Challenge Unit, the Higher Education Academy and Leadership for Higher Education, currently offers two incentive schemes to British universities: the Race Equality Charter and the Athena SWAN Charter. Universities apply for Bronze, Silver and (for Athena SWAN) Gold awards that demonstrate their commitment to race and gender equality. To apply, institutions have to subscribe to Advance HE and submit, among other things, an action plan for change. If an institution wins, it can get a shiny badge that it can advertise to potential students, employees and funding bodies.

Racism, sexism and other prejudices do exist, of course. And some institutions are taking serious steps to address them for instance, by introducing blind application processes for some posts, as at the University of Birmingham. But all too often these action plans are effectively blueprints for corporate virtue-signalling, censorship and indoctrination.

As part of its race-equality action plan, the University of Dundee, for instance, wants to make anti-racism training compulsory for all staff and students. Imperial College London, among many others, wants to extend the use of unconscious bias training. Never mind the glaring lack of evidence that anti-racism training helps anyone except those selling it, or the mountains of evidence that unconscious bias training is useless.

More importantly, universities attempts to win the approval of Advance HE, and thus signal their virtue, are eroding academic freedom and free speech.

Take the many ham-fisted plans to encourage the calling out, reporting, suppression and punishment of microaggressions commonplace expressions that make some people feel discomfited, even where no malice is intended.

For instance, the University of Cambridge tried to launch a new website to allow staff and students to report these micro-offences anonymously. The list of potential microagressions included the stereotyping of religion. Think of the effect this would have in the seminar room. Philosophers, for instance, have made all kinds of general and stereotypical claims about religions that are not entirely complimentary. As a teacher of philosophy, I may have to mention these claims is this a form of microaggression?

Either way, debating and thinking through potentially challenging ideas ought to be central to the academic enterprise. If anyone in charge thinks shutting down such debate is an acceptable price to pay for winning an Advance HE badge of approval then perhaps they shouldnt be running a university.

The erosion of free speech and academic freedom doesnt stop there. To win an Athena SWAN award a university must show its commitment to particular principles. These have changed since 2015. Where once they included tackling the discriminatory treatment often experienced by trans people, now an institution must also agree to fostering collective understanding that individuals have the right to determine their own gender identity.

This looks like a move from tackling discrimination to the policing of thought, and on a highly controversial topic, too. Gender identity means your personal sense of your own gender, but there are many serious thinkers who doubt that that means much at all. Are we meant to suppress these critical voices? And even if that is not Advance HEs intention, it is certainly something it appears to be incentivising. Surely, the job of a university is to facilitate open debate not to foster collective understanding on any controversial matter.

Advance HE claims that it doesnt want to compromise academic freedom. I dont think any, or at least not many, of the HE institutions which sign up to its schemes want to destroy academic freedom, either. But this will be the unintended upshot of what some of them are doing.

If Advance HE is serious about defending academic freedom, perhaps it should set up an Academic Freedom Charter. In the meantime, the rest of us will need to work hard to put freedom of speech and thought back at the heart of our universities, where they belong.

Arif Ahmed is a lecturer in philosophy at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge.

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Universities are sleepwalking into censorship - spiked - Spiked

V Rising developer Stunlock Studios says improved in-game censorship tools are on the way.

The early access vampire survival game has proved a massive success for the studio, selling a whopping 500,000 copies in just three days. And while it's hard to frame that as a negative for the studio, players are reporting an alarming amount of hateful and discriminatory in-game language.

In a statement to GamesRadar, the developers admit they weren't expecting the game to be so popular and say they're working on tools to combat "harassment and discrimination." These tools will apparently include stricter filters and options for players to mute offensive language.

"As an early access title, this is one problem thats proved to be a bit of a pain point for us," a spokesperson for the studio told GamesRadar. "We did hope for success but were not prepared for this volume of players.

"Were currently stepping in as much as we can in the most egregious cases, and what we cant do by hand, were trying to make tools to allow us to handle them better. Where that fails, were hoping to put more tools in the hands of players to better allow them to mute and hide offensive language that bypasses our current filters."

Stunlock didn't specify when players can expect any of these features to arrive, but did note that "some of this can take time."

"Even if the majority of players behave well on our servers, we will do everything we can to fight harassment and discrimination," the studio adds.

In the meantime, the studio says it hopes the admins of private servers "aren't lenient with this sort of behavior" and urges players to "find communities that are able to better moderate themselves while we build these tools, and find like-minded people to face and conquer Vardoran alongside."

V Rising Whetstones | V Rising Stone Bricks | V Rising leather | V Rising Paper | V Rising Blood Essence | V Rising Scourgestone | V Rising offline mode

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V Rising devs are working on in-game censors "to fight harassment and discrimination" - Gamesradar

Technology is tampering with freedom of speech, and we dont know what to do about it. At issue are the global platforms Facebook, Twitter and Instagram and the disturbing propaganda, disinformation and lies propagated on them.

The inclination, on the left and the right, is to censor. It is a terrible solution, more toxic and damaging to the body politic than the disease.

The left would like to shut down Fox Cable News and its principal commentator, Tucker Carlson. The right would like to have Twitter sold, presumably to Elon Musk, so that it stops blocking tweets from the right, notably those from former President Donald Trump.

How our society and others deal with the downside of social media racial incitement, disinformation, mendacity and opinions that are offensive to a minority, whether that is the disabled or an ethnic group is a work in progress. The instinct is to shut them down, shut them up. The tool that old monster solution is censorship.

The first trouble with censorship is that it has to define what is to be eradicated. Take hate speech. The British Parliament is struggling with a bill to limit it. The social networks seek to exclude it, and there are U.S. laws against crimes inspired by it.

How do you define it, hate speech? When is it fair comment? When is it satire? When is it truth taken as hate?

I say if you can untie that knot, go ahead and censor. But I also know you cant untie it without savaging free speech, doing violence to the First Amendment, arresting creativity and hobbling humor.

The censor is often as much clothed in moral raiment as in political garb. Take Thomas Bowdler and his sister, Henrietta, who in 1807 published an expurgated version of the works of Shakespeare. Henrietta did most of the work on the first 20 plays, later Thomas finished all 36. They expunged sex, blasphemy and double entendre. Thomas was an admired scholar, not a crackpot, although that might be todays judgment.

Oddly, the Bowdlers are credited with increasing the readership of Shakespeare. People reached for the forbidden fruit; they always do.

Likewise, many a novel would have avoided success if it hadnt been serially banned, like D.H. Lawrences Lady Chatterleys Lover. The moral censorship of movies by the Hays Office, starting in 1934, didnt save the audiences from moral turpitude. It just led to bad movies.

The censors often begin with specific words; words, which it can be argued, represent offense to some group or some social standing. So specific words become demonized whether it is the naming of a sports team or a colloquial word for sex, the urge to censor them is strong.

Jokes, like the English ones about the Welsh or the Scots ones about the English, became victim to a newly minted sensitivity, where political activists sell the idea that the joked about are victims. The only victim is levity, to my mind.

When you start down this slope there is no apparent end. Euphemisms take over from plain speech, and we live in a society in which the use of the wrong word can suggest that you are not fit for public office or to teach. Areas around ethnicity and sexual orientation are particularly fraught.

Until the 1960s and the civil rights movement, newspapers de facto censored people of color: They ignored them a particularly egregious kind of censorship. At The Washington Daily News where I once worked, a now defunct but lively evening newspaper in the nations capital, some of us once ransacked the library for photos of Blacks. There were none. From its founding in 1927 until the civil rights movement took off, the newspaper simply hadnt published news of that community in a city that had a burgeoning African-American population.

That was collective censorship as pernicious as the kind that both political extremes would now like to impose on speech.

Alas, censorship banning someone elses speech isnt going to redress the issue of the rights of those maligned or lied to or excluded from social media. In print and traditional broadcasting, libel has been the last defense.

Libel laws are clearly inadequate and puny against the enormity of social media, but they are a place to begin. A new reality must, and will in time, get new mechanisms to contend with it.

One of those mechanisms shouldnt be censorship.It is always the first tool of dictatorship but should be an anathema in democracies. For example, it is an open issue as to whether Russian President Vladimir Putin would have been able to invade Ukraine if he hadnt first censored the Russian media.

Continue reading here:
Censorship Isn't the Solution to Social Media's Ills InsideSources - InsideSources

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Hacking. Disinformation. Surveillance. CYBER is Motherboard's podcast and reporting on the dark underbelly of the internet.

Microsoft-owned search engine Bing censors content that is politically sensitive to the Chinese government for users who are using the search engine from the United States, researchers claim in a new report.

The research shows how censorship efforts in one country can bleed over and impact users in others. The findings come after Bing censored image searches for the infamous tank man even from the United States last June. At the time, Microsoft blamed that issue on an accidental human error. The new research indicates more widespread censorship of politically sensitive searches, and especially names of certain people.

Using statistical techniques, we preclude politically sensitive Chinese names in the United States being censored purely through random chance. Rather, their censorship must be the result of a process disproportionately targeting names which are politically sensitive in China, the report, written by researchers from the University of Torontos Munk School of Global Affairs Citizen Lab, reads.

Do you work for a tech company on censorship? We'd love to hear from you. Using a non-work phone or computer, you can contact Joseph Cox securely on Signal on +44 20 8133 5190, Wickr on josephcox, OTR chat onjfcox@jabber.ccc.de, or emailjoseph.cox@vice.com.

Microsoft operates Bing in China with limitations in place so it falls in line with Chinese law. Much of that involves heavy censorship around certain topics, events, and people, often resulting in those areas being undiscoverable via Bing searches conducted from within China. For comparison, Google planned to launch a dedicated search engine just for the Chinese market which would have complied with the countrys strict laws, and was met with widespread criticism, both inside and outside the company, before being shelved.

Citizen Lab tested what form that censorship took on Bing by examining what names autosuggested on Bing when typing search terms into the site while connecting from mainland China, Canada, and the United States, and while performing the search in Chinese or English characters in December last year.

Citizen Lab found that 93.8% of names in Chinese characters that were Chinese political were censored from the United States, while 6.2% of names in Chinese characters that were not Chinese political were censored from the United States. The result all but confirm[s] that Bing is targeting Chinese politically sensitive names in the United States for censorship, the report reads. For English letter searches, such as Xi Jinping, Citizen Lab did not find similar levels of censorship from the United States.

Across mainland China, Canada, and the United States, Citizen Lab observed overwhelming censorship of Chinese character names relating to Chinese politics. These names predominantly pertain to names of top-level Chinese government leaders and party figures, including incumbent leaders (e.g., , Xi Jinping), retired officials (e.g., , Wen Jiabao, a former Chinese Premier), historical figures (e.g., , Li Dazhao, a co-founder of the Chinese Communist Party), and party leaders involved in political scandals or power struggle (e.g., , Zhou Yongkang, a former Party leader), the report reads.

As Citizen Lab notes, the censorship of these names in China may be due to Microsoft complying with legal restrictions in the country. However, there is no legal reason for the names to be censored in Bing autosuggestions in the United States and Canada, the report states.

In a statement to Motherboard, a Microsoft spokesperson said that We addressed a technical error where a small number of users may have experienced a misconfiguration that prevented surfacing some valid autosuggest terms and we thank Citizen Labs for bringing this to our attention.

We were not able to reproduce other examples they cited in their report after trying multiple scenarios. In general, the autosuggestions someone sees are largely based on the query itself, and driven largely by user behavior, such as the queries other local users are searching for. Not seeing an autosuggestion does not mean it has been blocked, the statement added. The company did not respond to a specific question from Motherboard asking why Bing was not performing autosuggestions for certain Chinese politically sensitive names for users who were connecting from the United States.

Jeffrey Knockel, a research associate at Citizen Lab who worked on the report, told Motherboard in an emailed statement that While they note that some of our findings from December 2021 are no longer reproducible in May 2022, our report recognizes that the censorship of autosuggestions fluctuates over time. However, we also would note that the direction of fluctuation is not always in the direction of reducing censorship. We are happy that our research led to Microsoft's discovery and resolution of a misconfiguration preventing valid autosuggestions from appearing. However, aside from general fluctuations, we are unaware of any change in Bings overall tendency to censor politically sensitive autosuggestions in regions outside of China.

Search engine DuckDuckGo uses Bings autosuggestion features. Citizen Lab did not perform extensive testing on DuckDuckGo, but found the search engine does not provide an autosuggestion for xi when browsing from Canada, which users might ordinarily expect to autosuggest Xi Jinping.

Kamyl Bazbaz, spokesperson from DuckDuckGo, told Motherboard in a statement that Our policy is to not actively censor anything unless legally required to do so. We have no relationship with the Chinese government or assets in China, and DuckDuckGo has actually been blocked in China since 2014 due to us not censoring anything. Bing is a primary search partner and we work with them continuously to improve search results. If we find that autofill is not working appropriately, we will work to rectify the circumstances.

In the report, Citizen Lab discusses whether Microsoft could permanently address this issue. The findings in this report again demonstrate that an Internet platform cannot facilitate free speech for one demographic of its users while applying extensive political censorship against another demographic of its users, they write. One solution could be for Microsoft to launch a separate operation in China entirely, the researchers write.

Updated: This piece has been updated to include a statement from DuckDuckGo.

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Microsofts Chinese Bing Censorship Impacts United States Too, Researchers Say - VICE

by Dennis Crouch

Texas HB20 treats social media platforms as common carriers, especially those with very large number of users and market dominance. For its purposes, the law focuses on platforms with more than 50 million US monthly users and has a number of disclosure requirements. But, the heart of the new law is its prohibition on censorship.

CENSORSHIP PROHIBITED. (a) A social media platform may not censor a user, a users expression, or a users ability to receive the expression of another person based on: (1) the viewpoint of the user or another person; (2) the viewpoint represented in the users expression or another persons expression; or (3) a users geographic location in this state or any part of this state.

Censor means to block, ban, remove, deplatform, demonetize, de-boost, restrict, deny equal access or visibility to, or otherwise discriminate against expression.

HB 20. The rule has a few exceptions. Censorship appears OK if done to protect intellectual property rights; based upon a request from an organization with the purpose of preventing the sexual exploitation of children and protecting survivors of sexual abuse from ongoing harassment or if user expression directly incites criminal activity or consists of specific threats of violence targeted against a person or group because of their race, color, disability, religion, national origin or ancestry, age, sex, or status as a peace officer or judge. The law creates a private right of action for a censored user and also authorizes the state Attorney General to bring action.

The new law was passed by the Republican dominated Texas House and Senate and signed by Gov. Abbott back in 2021. But, before the law became effective a Federal District Court entered a preliminary injunction against its enforcement. Ordinarily, appeals are only proper after final judgment. One exception though is that a district courts decision regarding a preliminary injunction is ordinarily immediately appealable. And so the state of Texas has appealed the Preliminary Injunction to the 5th Circuit.

The news over the past two weeks: On May 9, the 5th Circuit heard oral arguments and two days laterissued a 1-sentence decision staying the preliminary injunction pending appeal (as the State requested). Here, the judges have not issued their final decision on whether the preliminary injunction was proper, but the stay suggests that their final decision will also favor Texas since a key element of relief here is likelihood of success on the merits. Those opposing the law have filed an emergency request with the US Supreme Court to reinstate the preliminary injunction during the appeal. Justice Alito is assigned to the Fifth Circuit region and so is set to decide the emergency petitionhowever, the full court could choose to weigh-in. Briefing in the SCOTUS case from Texas is due on May 18.

So to be clear, the decisions thus far have all focused on preliminary relief whether the law can be enforced while the trial & appeal is ongoing.

In prior cases, the Court has treated social media has an important avenue for speech. In Packingham v. North Carolina, 137 S. Ct. 1730 (2017), for instance, the court found that prohibiting prior sex offenders from all social media violated those individuals speech rights since social media is the modern public square. Id. Here though, it is the social media platforms seeking the right to discriminate freely against viewpoints. Texas presents the argument that social media platforms are not speaking through their editorial role, but rather are taking technological actions to present the speech of others. Of course, publishing and dissemination of speech are also protected by the First Amendment, and those opposed to the law present this as an open-and-shut case.

From the moment users access a social media platform, everything they see is subject to editorial discretion by the platform in accordance with the platforms unique policies. Platforms dynamically create curated combinations of user-submitted expression, the platforms own expression, and advertisements. This editorial process involves prioritizing, arranging, and recommending content according to what users would like to see, how users would like to see it, and what content reflects (what the platform believes to be) accurate or interesting information.

SCT Brief.

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HB20: Social Media Censorship and the Supreme Court - Patently-O

One hashtag calling for the feature to be revoked quickly accumulated 8,000 posts and was viewed more than 100 million times before it was censored in late April. A university student in Zhejiang province sued Weibo, the Chinese social platform, in March for leaking personal information without his consent when the platform automatically showed his location. Others have pointed out the hypocrisy of the practice, since celebrities, government accounts, and the chief executive of Weibo have all been exempted from the location tags.

Despite the pushback, the authorities have signaled the changes are likely to last. An article in the state-run publication, China Comment, argued the location labels were necessary to cut off the black hand manipulating the narratives behind the internet cable. A draft regulation from the Cyberspace Administration of China, the countrys internet regulator, stipulates that user I.P. addresses must be displayed in a prominent way.

If censorship is about dealing with the messages and those who send the messages, this mechanism is really working on the audience, said Han Rongbin, a media and politics professor at the University of Georgia.

With the worsening relationship with United States and China and propaganda repeatedly blaming malign foreign forces for dissatisfaction in China, Mr. Han said the new policy could be quite effective at snuffing out complaints.

People worrying about foreign interference is a tendency right now. Thats why it works better than censorship. People buy it, he said.

An uncertain harvest. Chinese officials are issuing warnings that, after heavy rainfalls last autumn, a disappointing winter wheat harvestin June could drive food prices already high because of the war in Ukraine and bad weather in Asia and the United States further up, compounding hunger in the worlds poorest countries.

A pause on wealth redistribution. For much of last year, Chinas top leader, Xi Jinping, waged a fierce campaign to narrow social inequalitiesand usher in a new era of common prosperity. Now, as the economic outlook is increasingly clouded, the Communist Party is putting its campaign on the back burner.

The vitriol can be overwhelming. One Chinese citizen, Mr. Li, who spoke on the condition that only his surname be used for privacy reasons, was targeted by trolls after his profile was linked to the United States, where he lived. Nationalist influencers accused him of working from overseas to incite protest in western China over a post that criticized the local government of handling a students sudden death. The accounts listed him and several others as examples of spy infiltration. A post to publicly shame them was liked 100,000 times before it was eventually censored.

Inundated by derogatory messages, he had to change his Weibo user name to stop harassers from tracing him. Even though he has used Weibo for more than 10 years, he is wary of the baseless attacks these days. They want me to shut up, so Ill shut up, Mr. Li said.

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Chinas Internet Censors Try a New Trick: Revealing Users Locations - The New York Times

WASHINGTON, D.C. More than a dozen states have new laws prohibiting schools from teaching certain topics in the classroom, including lessons related to racism, bias, and LGBTQ+ topics.

This week, Congress reviewed these policies and heard some passionate statements from several high school students about this issue.

Krisha Ramani, a high school student from Michigan, told lawmakers she has seen firsthand how some of these new policies are affecting her education.

Gen Z has the capacity and more importantly the willingness to learn about the issues affecting us, said Ramani. We want to participate in these tough conversations. We want to read about the diverse perspectives affecting us and efforts to regulate what can be taught in the classroom is an insult to a young persons ability to understand nuanced arguments.

These students are urging Congress to preserve their freedom of speech and protect their teachers.

Some of these new state laws will punish teachers who violate them.

Something has gone very wrong when teachers think they will be fired for supporting the concept of diversity, said Claire Mengel, a high school student from Ohio. Most critically students of color are being told by the highest authority in the district that their stories dont deserve to take up school time, school grounds or school resources.

Many Democrats believe these laws are undermining public education by banning literature, historical concepts and other classroom materials.

But some Republicans say these policies are set up to increase parental rights and transparency.

Our childrens innocence should be protected and prioritized and along with their potential for their personal and academic success, said Rep. Nancy Mace (R South Carolina).

Rep. Mace believes schools should focus on supporting students, especially those who are suffering from COVID-19 learning loss.

Our children should not be taught that they are oppressors or that they are victims merely based on the color of their skin. Instead, we should re-double down on our efforts to ensure that our children have the foundation to achieve their best and full potential, said Rep. Mace.

Some educators say these new laws are also contributing to the teacher shortage because its harder to recruit staff.

Congress working on legislation to help workers recover stolen wages

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Students share growing concerns over classroom censorship with Congress - WPXI Pittsburgh

Facebook held a conference call Tuesday to discuss which posts they most often remove and why, which was inconveniently timed after the weekends Buffalo mass shooting video was still on the platform.

One of the many depressing aspects of Saturdays racist mass shooting in Buffalo was how the grisly video proliferated on social networks. According to CNN, the shooter livestreamed it on Twitch, and to that streaming platforms great credit, the stream was cut off within two minutes. The Washington Post reports that only 22 people saw it.

But eventually Facebook enters the picture. Clearly some (if not all) of those 22 viewers were horrible white supremacist trolls, because according to the New York Times, the video was was posted on a site called Streamable and viewed more than three million times before it was removed. And a link to that video was shared hundreds of times across Facebook and Twitter hours after the shooting.

As of Tuesday, there were still a few copies of the video floating around on Facebook, according to that Washington Post report. And this is the unfortunate backdrop against which Facebook released a quarterly report on which posts they remove and why, as The Verge explains.

The report was accompanied by a conference call, as Facebooks parent company Meta now has these calls and reports quarterly, not long after the company's earnings calls. The call was scheduled well before the shooting took place, but obviously, Meta had some explaining to do.

People create new versions and new external links to try to evade our policies, vice president of integrity Guy Rosen said, according to AdWeek. We will continue to learn, refine our processes and refine our systems to ensure that we can take down these links more quickly in the future. Its only a couple of days after the incident, so we dont have any more to share at this point.

Meta also released the Facebook quarterly community standards enforcement report, which The Verge describes as a document that has a boring name, but is full of delight for those of us who are nosy and enjoy reading about the failures of artificial-intelligence systems.

And yes, human moderators are much better at recognizing genuinely problematic posts than bot moderators. Facebook counts up the posts they admit were wrongfully removed, and the bots wrongfully remove posts more frequently than human moderators. No surprise there.

What is a surprise, at least in the context of the current Big Tech censorship discourse, is that very little political speech is removed. The Verge sifted through the removed-post numbers and concluded Very little of it is political, at least in the sense of commentary about current events. Instead, its posts related to drugs, guns, self-harm, sex and nudity, spam and fake accounts, and bullying and harassment.

These are Facebooks own numbers, and not independently verified, so take that into account. But some standout numbers are that Facebook removed 1.6 billion fake accounts, and 2.5 million posts labeled "Terrorism and Organized Hate."

The current conservative horseshit grievances about Facebook censorship try to frame this as an attempt to attack free speech, all done by a company where Left Coast Liberals are supposedly in charge. This is a huge part of Elon Musks Twitter takeover discourse (to whatever degree said takeover is actually happening). And while I hate to give Facebook the benefit of the doubt, its pretty clear that the censorship claims are driven by bad-faith attempts to blur the line between political speech and actual violence. But since those bad-faith efforts have proven an excellent political talking point, there is no amount of transparency from Facebook that will likely change this.

Related: Facebook Relaxes (and Then Reverses) Its Rules Over Calling for Leaders to Be Killed, Because of Putin [SFist]

Image: Solen Feyissa via Unsplash

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Facebook Releases Report On Which Posts They Remove and Censor, Turns Out Most Aren't Political - SFist

Re Virginia Beach School Board group removes Gender Queer book from libraries, calls it pervasively vulgar (May 16): As both a Virginia Beach citizen and librarian, I find the removal of this book very concerning. This act is censorship, plain and simple. Is the book for everyone? No. Will some kids be able to identify with it, maybe find some answers in it, and feel less alone? Yes.

Heres the thing, there are lots of books in the library that have content I find objectionable. Yes, Im an adult, but what I think is missing in these censorship cases is that if you find your kid has been reading something you dont agree with, that is a huge opportunity to discuss the book or topic with your child. You may discover they still have questions. They might share how they are feeling. You can share, this is what our family believes and why.

Banning books doesnt make a childs questions dissolve, doesnt bolster what is often fragile self-esteem, doesnt help build their critical thinking skills, and doesnt help the child learn to navigate the world with all its variety of people and ideas. Teens are uniquely positioned to discover their identities and books are, or should be, an amazingly nonjudgmental method for them to learn. Finally, do you honestly think reading something will change your sexual preference? No. It wouldnt work for you, and it doesnt work like that for your kids. Stop with the homophobia.

Tamara Sarg, Virginia Beach

Re Forced out: Closure of Newport News airports mobile home park throws residents lives into turmoil (May 15): What have we come to in this country when we no longer have any compassion for the least of our countrymen and place greed and profit over every other human consideration? The Peninsula Airport Commission should reverse the shameful, unilateral, patently cruel and uncaring decision of the Airport Executive Director Mike Giardino and guarantee the occupants of mobile homes in the airport commission-owned mobile home park that their tenancy is safe and will not be uprooted.

It isnt being socialist to think that we all have some responsibility for our fellow citizens, especially those at the base of the economic pyramid. Were already losing our identity as caring Americans in the face of the terrible divisions in our country, and this has to stop somewhere. I urge everyone reading this letter to contribute to the legal defense fund for the mobile home occupants being handled by Newport News attorney Nathaniel J. Webb III. I intend to do so.

Anthony R. Santoro, Yorktown

Re Newport News budget includes first real estate tax reduction since 2008 (May 11): Thanks a lot, Newport News City Council, for reducing the tax rate on real estate by 1.6% ($1.22 to $1.20 per $100), when my assessment has increased 38% since 2018 and 24% in just the past two years.

And thanks to Council member Patricia Woodbury for wanting a larger reduction but voting for this one anyway. It reminded me of using the, all the other kids were doing it defense as a kid when I did something stupid, and of having my mother ask me, If all the other kids jumped off a cliff, would you do it too?

Charles Wilson, Newport News

Now that politicians, columnists and others are saying it is okay to protest in neighborhoods, it is time for them to give out their addresses. This way people who disagree with them can protest in front of their homes. Or how about making any opinion on anything include the persons actual name and address with it?

It just seems we no longer have the right to be civil to others and to disagree without going to the nth degree. Americans have allowed so much to change our lives for what? Are we better off now than before? Americans have worked together in the past and should do now as Americans without any other label attached. Stop the division and start uniting all Americans to build a country we can all be part of for our children.

Joan Fuhrman, Virginia Beach

Re All about power(Your Views, May 6): Besides demanding that the minority must switch its votes to support the majority, which is a pretty power-hungry move, its too late. Power-hungry lunatic Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell has already got that position locked up. First he blocked former President Barack Obama from his constitutional right to select a Supreme Court judge. It was too close to the election, and he wanted to make sure the next president got to make the choice.

Then when the vacancy came open at the end of President Donald Trumps term, he now had to rush through the nominee, not worrying about the people getting to choose to see who would be the next president. So, whos the power-hungry lunatic changing all the rules to suit his partys every need? Rather obvious isnt it Don Lovett?

Mike Schoen, Norfolk

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Letters for May 20: Don't censor, use controversial books as a way to teach - The Virginian-Pilot