Category Archives: Censorship

COLUMBUS, Ohio (WCMH) One year after YouTube removed from its site a video in which an Ohio attorney touted lies about COVID-19, eight Republicans approved a bill to counter what they called Big Techs suppression of free speech.

In an 8-4 vote Thursday, the Civil Justice Committee approved House Bill 441 to prohibit social media platforms from censoring expression based on a users viewpoint not including speech thats already deemed illegal under federal law, like harassment or shouting fire in a crowded theater.

The bill joins an increasingly national discourse concerned with the uptick in social media sites deplatforming or restricting users ranging from the permanent suspension of former President Donald Trumps Twitter account due to incitement of violence to removing individual Facebook posts promoting Holocaust denial conspiracies.

By preventing Big Tech companies from continuing to engage in viewpoint discrimination, we hope to protect the free exchange of ideas and information in Ohio, Rep. Scott Wiggam (R-Wooster) said in his testimony before the Civil Justice Committee.

While the bill does not equip the state with the power to enforce the censorship ban, it does allow individual Ohioans to file a civil suit against social media companies with more than 50 million U.S. users that block, remove or restrict them from using their site.

Bill co-sponsors Wiggam and Rep. Al Cutrona (R-Canfield) did not respond to requests for comment.

Since January 2020, Twitter has challenged nearly 12 million accounts, suspended more than 8,000 and removed nearly 84,000 posts the social media giant said constituted potentially harmful and misleading information about the COVID-19 pandemic, according to Twitters Transparency Center.

A Fremont attorney who testified against Gov. Mike DeWines COVID-19 shutdown orders before a House committee in 2021 was also the victim of what Wiggam called a government-induced attempt to regulate speech.

A video recording of Thomas Renz was removed from YouTube after the platform determined his speech violated their terms of service by spreading COVID-19 misinformation including a debunked claim that no Ohioans under the age of 19 died from the virus, according to the Associated Press.

Big Tech companies have censored individuals in response to suggestions and pressures from government officials and so have censored Americans on behalf of the government, Wiggam said in his written testimony.

Gary Daniels, chief lobbyist of the American Civil Liberties Union of Ohio who testified against HB 441, said its unlikely the legislation would survive a legal battle in court.

Unlike government agencies or public entities, social media platforms are private actors and thus arent required to abide by free speech protections under the First Amendment, he said.

These are private entities; they make the decisions whether they have a policy or not, Daniels said. They make these decisions ultimately as to what they want to host or entertain or have on their social media sites.

Ohio itself, Daniels said, could be found in violation of the First Amendment if HB 441 is enacted, as governments are prohibited from compelling speech in other words, forcing an individual or company like Facebook to support or broadcast certain expressions.

Mandating a social media platform to maintain certain content on its site, Daniels said, would be the similar to the government dictating what a newspaper can print or requiring an anti-abortion group to spread messaging supporting a persons right to an abortion.

The idea that the government can do this with private entities would essentially mean all bets are off government controls speech thats out there and will force you to say whatever the government thinks is appropriate, Daniels said.

HB 441 also doesnt clarify what type of action is deemed viewpoint discrimination by social media companies, Daniels said, creating a murky, ambiguous body of law that could open the door for the proliferation of frivolous lawsuits.

It doesnt have to be political speech. It can be for some reason, you know, Facebook wants to remove your cupcake recipe, he said. Everybody agrees they shouldnt be doing something like that thats unfair and not what the people need or want. But again, its their website. Its their social media company.

Cutrona, however, contended that social media platforms act as common carriers like the U.S. Postal Service, phone companies and public transportation that are responsible for the transmission of goods via services open to the general public.

Commons carriers are required to operate with neutrality, which Daniels said explains the fact that the post office cant refuse to deliver a National Rifle Association newsletter because it disagrees with the NRAs speech. And Amtrak, he said, generally does not concern itself with a passengers political views.

These services are affected with a public interest, are public accommodations, are central public forums for public debate, and have enjoyed governmental support in the U.S., Cutrona said in his written testimony. As such, Ohio is well within its rights to stop Big Tech from censoring users based on their viewpoint.

But Daniels said social media giants dont operate or advertise themselves as common carriers, as they obviously exercise control over speech, enforcing myriad speech-related rules within their terms of service.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis signed a similar bill into law allowing residents to sue social media companies over speech violations only to be served with a preliminary injunction blocking its enforcement by a federal judge in June 2021.

The legislation now at issue was an effort to rein in social-media providers deemed too large and too liberal. Balancing the exchange of ideas among private speakers is not a legitimate governmental interest, the Florida judge wrote in his injunction order.

A Texas bill restricting a social media companys ability to regulate users speech was also hit with a preliminary injunction by a federal judge in December 2021.

The judge said the enacted legislation would radically upset the ways in which social media platforms operate by stifling their ability to maintain safe, useful, and enjoyable sites for users.

Content moderation and curation will benefit users and the public by reducing harmful content and providing a safe, useful service, the federal Texas judge wrote in his injunction order.

Despite Daniels certainty that HB 441 will witness a similar fate in court, hes convinced the bills sponsors are using the legislation as a bully pulpitto garner the publics attention toward the issue.

Even the threat of introducing a law, the threat of having a bill out there and passing it into law those types of things they hope, essentially, will cause social media companies to change what they are doing.

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Ohio bill would allow users to sue Facebook, Twitter over censorship - NBC4 WCMH-TV

China maintains a tight grip over the internet, with legions of censors scrubbing out posts that cast the Communist Party's policies in a negative light.

From quoting the national anthem to referencing Hollywood blockbusters and George Orwell's dystopian novel "1984", Chinese web users are using creative methods to dodge censorship and voice discontent over Covid measures.

China maintains a tight grip over the internet, with legions of censors scrubbing out posts that cast the Communist Party's policies in a negative light.

The censorship machine is now in overdrive to defend Beijing's stringent zero-Covid policy as the business hub of Shanghai endures weeks of lockdown to tackle an outbreak.

Stuck at home, many of the city's 25 million residents have taken to social media to vent fury over food shortages and spartan quarantine conditions.

Charlie Smith, co-founder of censorship monitoring website GreatFire.org, said the Shanghai lockdown had become "too big of an issue to be able to completely censor".

Hell-bent on getting their messages out, wily web users were turning to tricks such as flipping images and using wordplay, he said, using a pseudonym due to the sensitivity of his work.

In one example, censors deleted a popular hashtag on the Weibo social media platform quoting the first line of China's national anthem: "Arise, those who refuse to be slaves."

The line was being shared alongside a torrent of anti-lockdown fury.

Others hijacked a hashtag about American human rights failings to make tongue-in-cheek barbs about home confinement in China.

In a similar attempt, netizens rallied to push Orwell's fiction "1984" to the top of a list of popular titles on the Douban ratings site, before it was blocked.

Censors also raced to kill off a menagerie of memes and hashtags based on a government official who previously said foreign journalists were "secretly loving" the fact they had safely seen out the pandemic in China.

Users then devised a series of oblique puns on that quote, eventually prompting censors to block the hashtag "La La Land".

Last month the internet police floundered in quashing viral video "Voices of April" that featured stories from distressed Shanghai residents in lockdown.

Web users rapidly re-edited and shared the six-minute clip to outrun largely automated screening software, which struggled for hours to identify the different versions.

One frustrated Shanghai local said netizens shared the various formats "to make a point" even though each post vanished within minutes.

"It was us against the AI," the resident told AFP, requesting anonymity.

People in Shanghai have become more "willing to pay the price" for airing critical views, said Luwei Rose Luqiu, an assistant professor at Hong Kong Baptist University.

The "hardship, discontent and anger" they have endured in lockdown have "far outweighed the fear" of punishment for posting sensitive content, she told AFP.

Gao Ming, 46, said he received calls from police last month telling him to delete anti-lockdown posts on Twitter and Facebook, which are blocked in China.

But the public relations professional has so far refused, telling AFP he is "against censorship" and wants to spread debate about China's Covid strategy.

"I'm totally against the current policy," he said, arguing that the lockdown has caused unnecessary deaths by cutting access to regular medical care.

Top Chinese leaders vowed at a meeting on Thursday to stick "unwaveringly" to zero-Covid and "resolutely fight against all words and deeds that distort, question or reject our nation's disease control policies".

State media has played up the positives and "sidelined private difficulties", said a Beijing-based journalism professor who requested anonymity.

The approach has created "two Shanghais", where official portrayals contrast sharply with what people view online, the professor added.

Online outrage is unlikely to prompt the Communist Party to relax its hardline approach, particularly with the country's president so invested in zero-Covid, said Yaqiu Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch.

"It's harder for the government to walk back when it becomes an ideological issue that's attached to Xi Jinping personally," she said.

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Chinese web users get creative to dodge Covid-19 censorship - HT Tech

If Elon Musk truly intends to make Twitter a free-speech platform, hes clearly got a fight on his hands. That was made abundantly clear by the collective meltdown among media and political elites that greeted the billionaires shock takeover of the platform last month. The vested interests in keeping Twitter a sanitised, censorious place are apparently considerable. And not only will Musk have the great and good, his own employees, our own Nadine Dorries and Joe Bidens new disinformation tsar to contend with, but potentially Twitters advertisers, too.

CNN reportsthat giant American brands, including Coca-Cola and Disney, are coming under pressure to boycott Twitter if Elon Musk makes good on his promises to roll back content-moderation policies and bring speech standards on the platform more or less in line with what the law allows. Twenty-six civil-society organisations have signed an open letter, calling on big brands to pressure Musk to at least maintain Twitters existing censorship regime which would include keeping banned bogeymen like Donald Trump off the platform and continuing to limit what is deemed hate speech and misinformation. As top advertisers on Twitter, your brand risks association with a platform amplifying hate, extremism, health misinformation, and conspiracy theorists, the letter warns.

What is blithely skated over here, of course, is that hate speech and misinformation are notoriously difficult to define. And that platforms like Twitter have censored all kinds of material in recent years that, by most peoples standards, is neither hateful nor untrue. Twitter, for instance, currently censorspeople for misgendering which led to feminist Meghan Murphy reportedly being banned for life when she misgendered an activist who at the time was suing beauticians for refusing to wax his bits. Twitter along with Facebook also suppressed the New York Posts infamous Hunter Biden laptop expos in the run up to the 2020 election, locking the New York Post out of its Twitter account and stopping people from sharing the story. This tale of Biden juniors dealings in Ukraine was dismissed as misinformation by experts, who warned that the laptop could be ofRussian origin. But the story turned out to be true. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey later admittedthat censoring the story was a total mistake.

Here we see that content moderation and talk of tackling misinformation are now just polite euphemisms for censorship aimed primarily at those who do not align with the views of the not-so-liberal elite. Clearly, there are plenty of activists who are terrified that Twitter under Elon Musk will no longer clamp down on their opponents. We also see that many of those supposedly horrified at the prospect of unelected billionaires controlling the flow of information are complete hypocrites. They didnt mind the tech oligarchs nearly as much when they were all broadly onside. And as this call for a big-brand ad boycott shows, various groups are more than happy to weaponise other multibillion-dollar companies to the end of limiting what the rest us can say and read online.

Weve seen this all before. In 2020, more than a thousand organisations and advertisers, including Unilever, Coca-Cola and Pfizer, took part in a temporary boycott of Facebook urging it to do more to censor hate. This was sparked by some of President Trumps more incendiary posts about the Black Lives Matter riots posts which Facebook had stubbornly refused to fact-check or censor. That campaign was similarly spearheaded by a group of civil-society organisations. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were also reportedly involved.

Those calling for a boycott against Musk have a point when they say that the flow of information should not be controlled by the rich and powerful. I would rather the state of online freedom didnt depend on the political leanings of billionaires. But the forces of big business are clearly on the side of censorship, or are at least willing to give in to histrionic campaigners. Musk a self-professed free-speech absolutist is very much the outlier here. His critics arent worried about billionaires setting the bounds of acceptable thought and speech. They would just rather a different set of billionaires were doing it, those who agree with them that allowing ordinary people to say and read what they like puts us on a fast track to authoritarianism.

Musk may well fail in his attempt to make the digital public square a moderately freer place. Its unclear whether hes in this for the long haul and for the right reasons. But with the woke establishment lining up against him, the least we can say is that his cause is the right one.

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The fight is on to censor Elon Musk's Twitter - The Spectator

Sunday marked the fourth day that artist Peter Cloughs new solo show at Haul Gallery in Brooklyn was open to the public, and possibly the last. A powerful and engrossing exhibition of new videos filmed during a residency in the spacean unfinished basement beneath a beauty salon accessed from the sidewalk via a steep staircaseExaltation of the Porous Body continues Cloughs explorations of power, submission, architecture and embodiment. Its centrepiece is a 14-minute video calmly, hypnotically narrated by Clough in which he appears completely naked save a few accessories (including a leather hood) and confined in a dog cage.

Given the content, gallery co-directors Erin Davis and Max C. Lee had posted a content warning on the sign at the gallerys entrance, but that may be what ultimately drew the attention of a man claiming to be a representative of the buildings owner, who visited the space on Sunday (1 May).

I was told that they sent a photo of our signs warning viewers that there is sexual content to the landlord, and that the landlord was upset by that, Lee says. The next thing I know, theres a different guy and about seven [Fire Department of New York] crew members entering the basement and citing fire code violations. He continues, I explained that we can address those, and then the representative of the landlord was like, You are trespassing, Im calling the police.

Whether or not the New York Police Department was also summoned to the gallery is unclear, but after a conversation via FaceTime with a man said to be the buildings landlord, Lee, along with Davis and Clough, decided to close early. The gallery has remained closed to the public since.

This alleged act of censorship by a landlord operating through intimidation is complicated by the gallery's rental arrangement, the building owners anonymity and the lack of protections for commercial tenants in New York City. The building in Downtown Brooklyn where the gallery is located, 368 Livingston Street, is owned by Livingston Street Realty Associates, an entity registered as a limited partnership that thereby has minimal public reporting requirements and is very difficult to trace back to any specific individuals.

Nevertheless, Livingston Street Realty Associates and their lawyers are quite active in court. The company is currently suing three of its tenants in the building for at least $192,000 in unpaid rent, much of it accumulated since the onset of the pandemic. (While residential tenants in New York were, until recently, afforded some protections by way of Covid-19 relief, protections for small businesses started being rolled back in March 2021.)

Weve always been interested in showing in unconventional spaces, Davis says, noting that the gallery had signed a one-year agreement to sublet the basement space from another tenant in the building in February and that Livingston Street Realty Associates was aware that the gallery was operating out of the space. Were not lawyers, but were learning quickly.

"The basement cannot be used for commercial use and it violates the Certificate of Occupancy," says Jeremy J. Krantz, a lawyer at Smith & Krantz, who represents Livingston Street Realty Associates. He provided a copy of the fire department summons from the 1 May visit, addressed to the business owner who sublet the basement to Haul Gallery, which states that in order to remedy the situation it must "immediately cease any commercial use of [the] basement".

The gallerists and Clough believe the actions of the landlord and their representatives were entirely motivated by the content of the current exhibition, not any concerns about the fire code. Prior to the gallery moving in, a tattoo parlour operated out of the space without issue. But the precarity of the gallerys rental arrangement has left it in a vulnerable position with little recourse.

The selective enforcement of rules means spaces like this can operate at the margins, but also means they can easily be shut down or pushed out, says Clough, whose previous exhibition at Haul Gallery, HEAD in 2019, was similarly staged in an unconventional, unfinished basement space and was also very explicit (though differently so) but did not provoke censorship. For now, he, Davis and Lee are exploring ways to show the present exhibition and continue Hauls programming in a new location.

We were told to our faces that this shutdown is happening because of the content of the show, Lee says, and it was made clear to us that the landlord is not interested in negotiating or us staying there at all, so were moving forward.

The gallery's very identity was formed, in a sense, by a previous legal dispute. In 2019 the gallery, then known as Uhaul Gallery, changed its name to Haul Gallery after the truck rental company U-Haul threatened legal action.

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New York gallerists say landlord shut down their space to censor exhibition - Art Newspaper

While conditions for the press vary across the Caucasus, many of the dangers are ubiquitous. OCMedia spoke with journalists from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Daghestan, and Georgia about some of the challenges they must overcome to report the news.

World Press Freedom Day on 3May is a chance to highlight the importance of independent media as a blueprint of pluralistic democracy.

It is also an opportunity to look back at recent developments that have affected and shaped media's work in the Caucasus region, including restraints, attacks on, and demonisation of the free press.

In the Russian North Caucasus, a journalist from Chernovik attested to how an already repressive media environment has come under unprecedented new strain due to Russias invasion of Ukraine.

In Armenia, a journalist from CivilNet described how they were also still grappling with the governments censorship during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, and their own efforts not to self-censor.

Last year, Georgia witnessed unprecedented attacks on journalists, including one from TV Formula who reflected on the continuous demonisation of independent media.

Meanwhile, in Azerbaijan, a journalist who served years in prison for his reporting spoke to OCMedia about how the levels of press freedom continued to reach new lows.

Chernovik, a Daghestani newspaper and website, stands as one of only a handful of independent news sources still standing in the North Caucasus, where repression of the press has outpaced that of other regions of Russia.

One employee of the paper who asked to remain anonymous for fears over their safety told OCMedia the situation had only become worse since Russias invasion of Ukraine.

The authorities current approach to journalism during the hostilities is the destruction of independent journalism and freedom of speech, especially in the regions, they said.

Chernovik is no stranger to pressure from the government pickets are still ongoing in support of journalist Adbulmunin Gadzhiyev, who was accused of financing terrorism in 2019.

For the authorities and security forces, the laws introduced on fake news and military censorship give them carte blanch. In such a situation, they can find fault with any word, or even if they do not find a fault, they can use illegal methods to get rid of one or another independent publication or journalist.

For Chernovik, the pressure ramped up a week after Russias full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when, according to the employee, internet providers blocked access to their website following an unofficial request by the Daghestani authorities. This lasted only a week due to its illegality.

But the obstacles did not end there the printing press that has printed Chernovik for many years then refused to publish the paper.

According to the employee, a high-ranking official warned the printing press that their director could be imprisoned if they continued to publish the newspaper.

The publication has already filed a lawsuit against the printing house for breach of contract and has resumed publication thanks to the Makhachkala printing house, the only place to agree to publish it.

Threats that journalists could be imprisoned under the new war censorship laws have also been forthcoming.

Telegram channels associated with the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB of Daghestan began to disseminate information in March that fake news was being published in the Chernovik telegram channel, the employee said.

At the same time, not a single example of such fake news was given. And until now, the security forces have not been able to find a single piece of fake news, as every week, only a list of the Daghestanis who died in the war in Ukraine is published in the newspaper, they said.

They said this had irritated the republics authorities and security forces, who have continued to pressure them using various methods, such as closing down their offices for fire safety violations.

The employee said they feared the authorities might next take economic measures to pile on the pressure, and that the postal service and private traders may start to refuse to distribute Chernovik or advertisers will be banned from taking out ads.

If this were to happen, the paper may have to temporarily close, they said.

For Gevorg Tosunyan, an experienced journalist from Yerevan-based CivilNet, war censorship, including self-censorship by journalists also proved to be a challenge to the role of an independent media.

Tosunyan covered the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War from the day it broke out, facing probably the most strict state censorship in Armenian since independence.

During the war, releasing any information contradicting the governments official line was prohibited, and dozens of organisations and individuals were forced to delete posts on social media or pay fines for violating martial law.

I personally have been receiving information from the borders that was simply the opposite of what the state was saying, he said, but his own self-censorship stopped him from publishing the information.

He said that it was natural that people, including journalists, did not wish to harm their country during a time of war, and that not telling the truth was something that most journalists had to do and later regret.

Tosunyan said that CivilNet complied with the censorship laws while trying to use the interviews and in-field reporting to show how different the reality was.

These were emotional times for everyone, Tosunyan said. For us at CivilNet, it was also hard to find a common ground on what our policy on dealing with the censorship should be.

In their case, the state was not able to directly force them to delete the published articles, because they were cautious, he said, yet dealing with the public perception of the war, and relaying the real scale of the losses was hard.

The attitude, he said, originated from Armenias victory in the first Nagorno-Karabakh War. The idea of Armenias strength and invincibility is rooted in society, making them intolerant towards those even hinting about the opposite.

The governments censorship and the propaganda just acted to deepen these ideas.

He said society was ready to pressure the media, and direct them, even without the state. It was impossible to defeat the public mood at that time, Tosunyan said.

For him, as for many others, the questions and regrets rose after the end of the war.

The media, and my personal approach too, was significantly changed.

Now, Tosunyan said he was not bound by inner barriers when filming the borders and showing Armenias military positions and the infrastructure on the borders.

Since then, we also started taking official information with a grain of salt, he added.

I hope Im wrong, but I expect a dangerous policy from the current government if theres martial law again.

New policies and restrictions introduced since the war are already limiting the work of the media, adding new offences and worsening access to information, but the government doesnt seem to be willing to change.

Were not beaten up in the streets like we were in the 2016 uprising. But that doesnt mean our rights are not being violated, he said.

On the background of lingering restrictions to public information during the pandemic, several journalists in Georgia also faced attacks while covering the parliamentary elections in the autumn of 2020.

However, this all paled in comparison to the mass violence against reporters on 5July 2021 in Tbilisi. Homophobic mobs mobilised by the Georgian Orthodox Church but predominantly led by far-right extremist group Alt Info chased down and attacked reporters who were only doing their job.

Rati Tsverava, a reporter for Georgian TV channel Formula, was among over 50 journalists injured that day.

He was chased for several hundred metres from the Parliament building in Tbilisi, long before police officers eventually showed up to help.

According to Tsverava, no one was properly punished for attacking him or others, including TV channel Pirvelis camera operator Aleksandre Lashkarava, who died days after the attack.

Ten people were hitting me, and only one was detained, and he will be free in three months The authorities have been telling me for almost a year now that they cannot identify the others. This is nonsense; theres just no will to prosecute, Tsverava told OC Media. He was attacked on camera.

Tsverava said the aggression towards journalists from people encouraged by the authorities began before July 2021 like on the 9 May event that year, during a rally led by conservative media personality Gia Gachechiladze, also known as Utsnobi.

5July was only a culmination of the aggression against the media that had been cobbling together slowly, Tsverava said.

He said the situation had not improved since 5July, and that government figures have the same rhetoric as before, if not worse.

When we go to interview them, they start lashing out at us by calling us disinformers the same tone that eventually provokes the violence, he said. This aggression continues and obviously, it has affected my work. While previously I could boldly go anywhere, now I know that I must avoid cerain situations.

[Read more on OC Media: Georgian Dream's anti-media crusade continues]

Since the July violence, Alt Info has been successful in obtaining a national broadcasting license for their TV channel, which they have used extensively to propagate hate against the liberal media.

Mehman Huseynov, the editor-in-chief of SANCAQ, a socio-political magazine, documents corruption and human rights violations in Azerbaijan.

One of the victims of the governments media policy for years, Huseynov told OCMedia that freedom of the press was only deteriorating further in Azerbaijan.

For comparison, the situation with freedom of speech in Azerbaijan is now more critical than at any time in the last 10 years, he said.

The situation for independent media is clearly under the control of the government with the new media law, he said,

The law, signed by President Aliyev in February, imposes broad restrictions on journalists ability to report, requiring they provide only objective information, with objectivity defined at the authorities discretion.

It also requires journalists to register themselves with the government, with future journalists to face a government-run test to prove themselves.

I consider 2014 a breaking point for the Azerbaijani media, Huseynov said. Since then, the government has become more anti-media. It has begun to show an aggressive attitude.

In March 2017, he himself was sentenced to two years in prison on defamation charges after accusing the police of abducting and torturing him. On 2 March 2019, he was released.

The main priority of the Azerbaijani government against the media was to eradicate investigative journalism. As high levels of corruption in Azerbaijan are the main area of research for free journalism, the government first attacked investigative journalists and civil society and continues to do so. As it continues, investigative journalism will expand, and this expansion will lead to more pressure and arrests in the future.

Huseynov also decried the lack of freedom of information in Azerbaijan, especially from the Central Elections Commission.

They hide or change the addresses of individuals and officials. They call it a state secret or refer to state security". The closure of the database is designed to cover up corruption. There are almost no open resources for journalism in Azerbaijan.

For example, when preparing a study on the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan, I couldnt find access to any source. So I used open sources in neighbouring Georgia, where SOCAR also operates. On the basis of this information, I uncovered an example of SOCAR's corruption and presented it to the public.

Being an independent journalist in Azerbaijan is risky and it is dangerous. When corruption and crime are high in a country, the government moves to eliminate journalists and researchers who reveal these facts, Huseynov said.

And its becoming more and more dangerous. it's getting harder.

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Censorship and violence: the challenges to press freedom in the Caucasus in 2022 - OC Media

The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free, by Joel Simon and Robert Mahoney, Columbia Global Reports, 192 pages, $16

"We're not just fighting an epidemic," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, declared at the Munich Security Conference on February 15, 2020. "We're fighting an infodemic. Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus and is just as dangerous."

Joel Simon and Robert Mahoney expand on that concept inThe Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free. Since Simon is a former executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, where Mahoney currently serves as executive director, it is not surprising that they see state efforts to suppress inconvenient information as part of the problem that Tedros described.

That makes sense, since authoritarian governments in countries such as China and Russia contributed to the "infodemic" by censoring, discrediting, and intimidating journalists and other observers who tried to tell the truth about COVID-19. Meanwhile, these governments promoted their own version of reality, in which the pandemic's impact was less serious and the political response to it was more effective.

But folding censorship into the "infodemic" creates an inescapable tension, since democrats as well as autocrats were frequently tempted to address "fake news" about the pandemic through state pressure, if not outright coercion. The Biden administration, for instance, demanded that social media platforms suppress COVID-19 "misinformation," which it defined to include statements that it deemed "misleading" even if they were arguably or verifiably true.

The problem of defining misinformation is evident from the debate about face masks as a safeguard against COVID-19. After initially dismissing the value of general masking, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) decided it was "the most important, powerful public health tool we have." More recently, the CDC has acknowledged that commonly used cloth masks provide little protection, largely agreeing with critics whose statements on the subject had previously triggered banishment from platforms such as YouTube.

Simon and Mahoney make it clear that they do not favor state speech controls. But their concerns about the ways governments used the pandemic as an excuse to expand their powers are curiously limited. While they view censorship as beyond the pale, they are inclined to see other restrictions on freedomeven sweeping impositions such as stay-at-home orders and mass business closuresas justified by the public health emergency.

The authors try to reconcile this apparent contradiction by invoking Isaiah Berlin's distinction between "negative" liberty (freedom from government restraint) and "positive" liberty (self-realization or self-determination). Simon and Mahoney define positive liberty as "the ability to shape the destiny of [one's] own society and live by its laws," which is simultaneously narrower than Berlin's concept, more explicitly collectivist, and more clearly at odds with negative liberty. As they see it, your "ability" to obey democratically enacted laws advances positive liberty even when you view those laws as oppressive.

"The legitimacy of a government's efforts to restrict negative liberty is derived from the existence of positive liberty, as expressed through the consent of the governed," Simon and Mahoney say. "The right to speak, to listen, to express and exchange ideas, to communicate closely held beliefs, to criticize authorities, to demand accountability: these are the broad range of activities enabled by positive liberty."

That's a confusing way to describe freedom of expression, which at bottom is a kind of negative liberty: freedom from prior restraint and from punishment for reporting information or expressing opinions that the government views as dangerous. For example, Simon and Mahoney describe the experience of the independent Chinese journalist Chen Qiushi, who was arrested because of his reporting from Wuhana classic violation of negative liberty.

Restrictions on negative liberty, "even severe ones such as lockdowns, are legitimized through the existence of positive liberty," Simon and Mahoney write, because "the people impacted are able to express their views" and "ultimately if they so wish to compel the government to change course." In other words, as long as citizens have an opportunity to choose, criticize, and change their leaders, it is not inherently problematic to force them to follow public health edicts they view as unnecessary, unscientific, or draconian.

If you oppose censorship as a violation of negative liberty, by contrast, you do not value freedom of expression merely because it is useful around election time or when people are trying to decide what safeguards make sense in response to an airborne virus. And while you probably will agree that such a situation can justify government intervention, since disease carriers pose a potentially deadly threat to others, you may still object to specific policies on the grounds that they unjustifiably restrict other rights, such as freedom of movement, freedom of religion, or freedom to earn a living.

Simon and Mahoney suggest that such rights can be vindicated through the democratic process. But that solution is plainly inadequate, since a majority may support policies that oppress a minority. In any case, COVID-19 control measures in democratic countries were not necessarily supported by popular majorities. For the most part, they were not even imposed by legislative majorities; they were instead the work of executive-branch officials such as governors, presidents, and prime ministers.

Voters might eventually have a chance to express their displeasure at such decrees. In New Jersey, for example, Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy was dismayed by his surprisingly narrow reelection victory last fall, which motivated him to relax his pandemic-related restrictions. Republican Glenn Youngkin's upset victory in Virginia's gubernatorial election likewise was seen partly as an expression of frustration with COVID-19 policiesin particular, a statewide mandate forcing students in K12 schools to wear masks.

But between elections, citizens outraged by such edicts have little recourse unless they can persuade legislators to assert control, as happened in states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, or obtain relief from the courts, as happened with pandemic-inspired restrictions on abortion and religious gatherings. Those interventions acknowledged the threat that government officials pose to civil liberties when they claim the authority to exercise extraordinary powers in response to open-ended emergencies they themselves declare.

Simon and Mahoney seem mostly blind to that danger, except when it comes to censorship and especially invasive kinds of COVID-related surveillance. They note the "untold hardship" caused by India's lockdown, which left migrant workers stranded without any means to support themselves or their families. But they think the main problem was that the policy was implemented too suddenly, not that it went too far.

"The nationwide lockdown was an unprecedented restriction on the liberty that Indian citizens enjoy in a democracy," Simon and Mahoney concede. "But it had a public health rationale, and many citizens, including health experts, believed it was warranted."

While they give Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi a pass on his most dramatic and consequential response to the pandemic, Simon and Mahoney fault him for his "harsh reprisals" against journalists who questioned his policies. In addition to direct intimidation, Modi "relied on an army of online trolls who amplified his criticism of individual journalists, attacking them in the most personal and vile ways." In that respect, Simon and Mahoney say, Modi resembled Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and U.S. President Donald Trump, "democratic populists" who minimized the seriousness of the pandemic, promoted misinformation, and viewed criticism as an intolerable affront.

In Trump's case, portraying "online trolls" as minions taking their orders from him is misleading, since he often seemed to take his cues from them instead. Trump's reluctance to promote vaccination while he was in office can be explained by his fear that it would anger his supportersa realistic worry, given the hostile reaction he later received when he bragged about the vaccines his administration had expedited. And Trump initially supported lockdowns before declaring, presumably based on his reading of his base, that it was time to lift them.

If we imagine a polity where anti-vaxxers are in the majority, the already problematic idea that pandemic responses are validated by the democratic process becomes even harder to defend. And if the "infodemic" is mostly a spontaneous phenomenon, demands that governments do more to address it invite repressive responses similar to the ones that Simon and Mahoney rightly decry. The alternativecorrecting misinformation by citing the evidence that contradicts itis hardly a magic bullet. But at least it offers an opportunity to persuade people, which is how arguments are supposed to be resolved in a free society.

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Was Censorship the Greatest COVID Threat to Freedom? - Reason

There was a revealing town hall meeting of Twitter employees this week where they joined executives in open panic over what life would be like without their ability to censor others. Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal attempted to calm the obvious angst that (perish the thought) free speech could return to Twitter.

As clearly distressed employees peppered him with questions, Agrawal admitted Yes, we could have done things differently and better. I could have done things differently. I think about that a lot. For civil libertarians, the vague admission left us cold. Agrawal spent his entire time as CEO as someone who dismissed or marginalized the very relevance of free speech values to the company.

Agrawal was asked early in his time as CEO how Twitter would balance its efforts to combat misinformation with wanting to protect free speech as a core value and to respect the First Amendment. He responded dismissively that the company is not to be bound by the First Amendment and will regulate content as reflective of things that we believe lead to a healthier public conversation. Agrawal said the company would focus less on thinking about free speech because speech is easy on the internet. Most people can speak. Where our role is particularly emphasized is who can be heard.

Twitter continued its biased censorship program, including bizarre suspensions of satirical sites and one site that re-posted liberals speaking about themselves.

What was striking was the attitude of employees that the actual owners of the company were out of line in seeking a return to a free speech corporate philosophy. Twitter has underperformed for years because it made its name synonymous with censorship. In the meeting, one employee declared Im tired of hearing about shareholder value and fiduciary duty. What are your honest thoughts about the very high likelihood that many employees will not have jobs after the deal closes?

Another employee declared The PR speak is not landing. They told us dont leak and do a job you are proud of, but there is no clear incentive for employees to do this.

There is an incentive, of course. It is called employment . . . even if you do not view restoring free speech to be a noble purpose.

By the way, Twitter employees were not the only ones having a meltdown. Over at Apple, an open letter addressed to company leadership objected that telling employees to return to work in-person was furthering white dominance and privilege at the company. The company had suggested a hybrid approach requiring workers to simply come in three days a week. That was met with outrage:

Apple will likely always find people willing to work here, but being in the office at least 3 fixed days of the week will make Apple younger, whiter, more male-dominated, more neuro-normative, more able-bodied, in short, it will lead to privileges deciding who can work for Apple, not whod be the best fit.

That is not likely to amount to a viable EEOC complaint even in the Biden Administration. If anything, the Apple policy is more accommodating than it is required to be. It could legally demand a simple return to work in accordance with the new CDC guidelines.

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There is No Clear Incentive: Twitter Employees Complain About Life Without Censorship - Jonathan Turley

Mary Whitehouse was a British campaigner against what she saw as the growth of moral indecency in modern entertainment. She led well-funded, very loud, and extremely hypocritical campaigns against everything she considered bad for the kids. This mostly meant that she got a lot of airtime for preaching homophobia and lying about films she hadn't actually seen. She infamously sued the makers of the play "The Romans in Britain" for gross indecency because she thought an on-stage depiction of male rape was real (she hadn't actually seen the play and, no, an actor wasn't literally raped eight shows a week. Whitehouse lost the case then declared that God would deal with her legal fees). It didn't take long for this new age of horror on video to capture her attention.

Whitehouse sparked off a public campaign and coined the term "video nasty" to describe the films that fell under the vast umbrella of her wrath. Soon, she had a lot of powerful people on her side, from the right-wing tabloid The Daily Mail to various Conservative politicians. Member of Parliament Graham Bright led the charge in the British House of Commons, saying, "I believe there is research taking place and it will show that these films not only affect young people but I believe they affect dogs as well."

Soon, video sellers and casual movie fans were being prosecuted for selling or releasing tapes that were considered obscene. Shops were raided, as were people's homes. The Director of Public Prosecutions released a list of 72 films that they believed to violate the 1959 Obscene Publications Act, which defined certain materials as examples of illegal obscenity. Eventually, a second list was released that contained an additional 82 titles which were not believed to lead to obscenity convictions but could nonetheless be confiscated under the Act's vague protocols. "The Evil Dead" was on the list.

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How Sam Raimi Took On The Censors And Changed Horror Forever - /Film

The U.S. joined a new consortium of nations focused on keeping the global internet free from disinformation and censorship, largely a response to Russias physical and digital invasion of Ukraine, where internet infrastructure is being attacked as part of the ongoing war.

Announced on Wednesday in a National Security Council briefing, a senior administration official said that the U.S. is formally launching the Declaration for the Future of the Internet initiative in collaboration with over 50 other countries.

The declaration affirms fundamental principles regarding how countries should comport themselves with respect to the internet and to the digital ecosystem, the digital economy, that commits governments to promoting an open and free global, interoperable, reliable and secure internet for the world, the spokesperson said.

The Declaration for the Future of the Internet is modeled after principles belying other multinational organizations like the United Nations, World Trade Organization and the Group of Seven. Current member countries include Italy, Israel, Bulgaria, Canada, Belgium, Iceland, Luxembourg, Sweden, Spain, Taiwan, Uruguay and more.

The US and partners endorsing this declaration will work together in the weeks, months and years ahead to implement these principles to promote this vision globally, while respecting each other's regulatory autonomy within our own jurisdictions and in accordance with our respective domestic laws, international legal obligations, the spokesperson added.

Promoting human rights online is a priority of the initiative. The spokesperson said that the group has been in the making for about a year, as the U.S. worked in tandem with other like minded democratic countries to combat online misinformation.

The Declaration for the Future of the Internet is looking to welcome more countries into its membership as operations continue.

We believe that DFI will advance a positive vision for digital technologies anchored by democratic values, the spokesperson said. We look forward to working with governments, the private sector, international organizations, the technical community, academia and civil society and other relevant stakeholders worldwide to promote, foster and achieve the shared vision.

Among the authoritarian countries the Declaration for the Future of the Internet looks to work against are Russia and China, both of which have faced allegations of human rights abuses and censorship within their own internet networks.

The spokesperson said that the Biden Administration sees the coalition as a response to the divisiveness seen online amid global political turmoil and the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic that has fueled deep social rifts mirrored online.

We're not here to splinter the internet, but frankly to save it from splintering, the spokesperson said. The internet was originally a network of networks designed to interconnect everyone and we think there's extraordinary value in that and we're here to try to restore that vision.

While this group intends to foster unity within global internet connectivity, the U.S. has recently taken defensive digital measures as tensions between Russia heighted. In March, President Joe Biden issued a statement warning of a rising threat of cyberattacks on the U.S.s critical infrastructure sectors, and U.S. lawmakers have responded by proposing new legislation that would enhance cybersecurity in sensitive fields like health care.

Officials reiterated that the Declaration for the Future of the Internet is not a bilateral treaty or agreement. Rather, the consortium will work to dismantle violations of civil liberties like unlawful surveillance, internet connectivity interference and censorship.

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U.S. Enters International Initiative to Oppose Online Disinformation and Censorship - Nextgov

Legendary UK-based hip-hop artist and activist Kareem Dennis, aka Lowkey, uses his considerable talents as a musician to pay homage to the voices and struggles of the oppressed, from the plight of migrants that have fled to Europe, to the suffering of Iraqis and Palestinians in the Middle East, to the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017. His work, including his single Voices of The Voiceless with Immortal Technique, and Long Live Palestine (also known as Tears to Laughter), are hip-hop classics. His song Terrorist?, a searing condemnation of the hypocrisy of Washington and Western governments, was swiftly censored by many digital media platforms.

Hes long been a target of the Israel lobby in both UK and the United States, which blocked him from receiving a visa to perform. The University of Cambridge postponed his March 8 Zoom talk, The Israel Lobbys War Against You. The British press has engaged in an ongoing smear campaign against the rapper, and there is an organized effort to get his music removed from Spotify.

Chris Hedges interviews writers, intellectuals, and dissidents, many banished from the mainstream, in his half-hour show, The Chris Hedges Report. He gives voice to those, from Cornel West and Noam Chomsky to the leaders of groups such as Extinction Rebellion, who are on the front lines of the struggle against militarism, corporate capitalism, white supremacy, the looming ecocide, as well as the battle to wrest back our democracy from the clutches of the ruling global oligarchy.

Watch The Chris Hedges Report live YouTube premiere on The Real News Network every Friday at 12PM ET.

Listen to episode podcasts and find bonus content at The Chris Hedges Report Substack.

Chris Hedges: Welcome to the Chris Hedges Report. There are very few recording artists I admire more than Kareem Dennis, the legendary hip-hop artist known as Lowkey. He uses his considerable talents as a musician to pay homage to the voices and struggles of the oppressed, from the plight of migrants that have fled to Europe, to the suffering of Iraqis and Palestinians in the Middle East, to the victims of the Grenfell Tower fire in 2017. His work, including his single, Voices of The Voiceless with Immortal Technique and Long Live Palestine, also known as Tears to Laughter, are hip-hop classics. His song, Terrorist?, a searing condemnation of the hypocrisy of Washington and Western governments, was swiftly censored by many digital media platforms.

In 2011, the Jewish Chronicle described Lowkeys increasing influence and worldwide recognition as one of the most gifted lyricists in hip-hop as a potential nightmare for Israel and its Zionist supporters. He has long been a target of the Israel lobby in the UK and the United States, which blocked him from receiving a visa to perform in the United States. The University of Cambridge, under pressure from the Union of Jewish Students and the Israel lobby, postponed his March 8th Zoom talk, The Israel Lobbys War Against You. He was blocked from speaking and performing at the annual National Union of Students Conference in Liverpool. And British prime minister Boris Johnson, weighing in on the censorship campaign against Lowkey, said a few days ago that British University for far too long have been tolerant of casual or indeed systematic antisemitism, adding that he hope[s] that everybody understands the need for rapid, and indeed irreversible change, before announcing that the United Kingdom needed a new antisemitism task force, in his words, devoted to rooting out the problem at all levels of the education system.

The Cambridge Palestine Solidarity Society says it now fears it will be banned, as have many students for justice in Palestine groups in the United States. The British press has engaged in a daily smear campaign against the rapper. And there is an organized effort to get his music removed from Spotify. As the crimes of the Israeli state become more and more apparent to the public, as even leading Israeli intellectuals can see that Israel has cemented into place a brutal system of apartheid, as a new generation of Jews in the West no longer feel an emotional attachment to Israel, the Israeli state has adopted harsher and harsher methods to silence its critics, including an attempt to criminalize those of us who support the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement against Israel.

Joining me to discuss the fierce Israeli censorship campaign that is being waged against him is Kareem Dennis, or Lowkey. So Kareem, just lay out what theyve been doing recently. Its pretty fierce.

Kareem Dennis: Thank you very much, Chris. Its an honor to be here with you. Im a big fan of yourself and The Real News, of course, for very many years. Now, the important thing for us to point to when talking about the latest aspect of this campaign against me is that the organization which is calling for my music to be removed from Spotify is the Britain Israel Communications and Research Center, which is led by Richard Pater. Now, Richard Pater previously was an employee of the Israeli prime ministers office. And he currently, while simultaneously leading BICOM, is in the reserves of the Israeli occupation forces. The lobby group is bankrolled by its chairman and donor to the Conservative Party, Poju Zabludowicz. His wealth, of course, comes from his father who founded Soltam Systems, an arms company, which was later subsumed by Elbit Systems, the largest arms company in Israel.

Now, BICOM works closely with AIPAC, the very world famous lobby group in the United States. According to the former director of BICOM, Daniel Shek, AIPAC assisted BICOM with developing grassroots networks. And one of those networks would be this particular project We Believe In Israel. Two of the fellows at BICOM, Michael Herzog and Tal Becker, are also fellows of the AIPAC think tank, The Washington Institute for Near East Policy. And that director that I mentioned, Daniel Shek, later went on to be the Israeli ambassador to Paris.

Just to articulate quite how deeply entrenched BICOM is within the British media atmosphere, you had a former editor from BBC, Mark Berg, appointed as its director not long after the founding. And not only did he work for the BBC before he worked for BICOM. After he left BICOM, he went back to working for the BBC on some of its most famous flagship shows like Hard Talk.

Another figure who is prominent in BICOM is Ruth Smith, who was instrumental in the campaign against Jeremy Corbyn in the Labor Party. She was appointed as the director of public affairs and campaigns. Now, Ruth Smith was identified in a US embassy cable that was released by WikiLeaks as being a strictly protect informant of the US embassy. And her husband is a key figure at the British American Project, which is an organization funded by the US embassy and BAE Systems, and works to steer the left in this country towards the orthodoxies of NATO.

Also, BICOM were revealed to have worked very closely with the Israeli embassy on the campaign against the academic boycott at the University and College Union. You even had somebody like Tim Llewellyn, who was a former BBC correspondent, say of BICOM that organizations such as BICOM have hundreds of thousands of pounds at their disposal, much of it coming directly from the United States, which sends a third of its whole global foreign aid budget to Israel. This great flow of funds bypasses most ordinary Israeli citizens and goes straight to the projection of Zionist causes and colonialism wherever it might be needed. These funds prop up, here in the United Kingdom, not just BICOM, but organizations like Labor Friends of Israel.

When we look at the particular group from BICOM, it was cultivated by BICOM, is still in the same office as BICOM, and is part of BICOM, which is working on removing my music from Spotify, its We Believe In Israel. Now, this is led by a gentleman by the name of Luke Akehurst whos actually on the NEC of the Labor Party. This is a key decision making body within the Labor Party. Now, he describes himself as previously being a political consultant to defense companies about their sales to the ministry of defense. He was a consultant to Finmeccanica, which was an Italian arms company that had a $1 billion deal to supply training jets to the Israeli Air Force according to the Financial Times. It later became Leonardo, which today is the ninth largest arms company in the world and is a longstanding partner of Rafael, the Israeli-owned arms company.

Now, the allegation is that my music incites violence, and what we can clearly see is the extension of the type of policies which are aimed towards Palestinians in the occupied West Bank and in Gaza. So, the Palestinian Prisoner Studies Center found that between 2015 and 2018, 500 Palestinians, among them children, many children, were arrested for the crime of incitement because of things that they had posted on the internet. You have the example of Tamara Abu Laban in Jerusalem who merely put the words forgive me on her Facebook, and then her house was raided and she was arrested. A 15 year old child were talking about. You also have, of course, the case of Dareen Tatour who wrote her poem Qawem Ya Shaabi Qawemahum, Resist, My People, Resist Them. For that, she went through three years of prosecution, which entailed house arrest, and also entailed being put in prison for at least five months. When Dareen Tatour was released from prison, she was actually given an Oxfam Novib prize for freedom of expression at the Hague, but of course that has not been emphasized in any of the reports.

So as we see, an extension of the war against the Palestinians and their right to speak about what is happening is now being aimed in my direction, along with thousands of others in this country, as we speak.

Chris Hedges: Lets talk about the campaign. You alluded to the vast amount of money these people can use to perpetuate the campaign against you, but how does it work? Is it primarily done through the press? I mean, what are the mechanisms they use to essentially attempt to marginalize you?

Kareem Dennis: Well, its through the press, of course. And we have very clear lines of communication that have been fortified massively throughout the war against Jeremy Corbyn. There are several proxy organizations that have clear links, whether its the board of deputies, which said in its trustees report that he has a close working relationship with the Israeli embassy, the Ministry of Strategic Affairs, and the IDF. This was a key group working against Jeremy Corbyn. Or it could be an organization like the campaign against antisemitism, which is led by Gideon Falter, who, simultaneous to leading that organization, is one of the directors of the JNF, which builds settlements in the West Bank and in other parts of Palestine, too.

These are organizations that have very clear links to the Israeli state and what they have sought to do throughout the Corbyn years was build up this communication between them and the media. As I stated, BICOM was primarily focused on the media war, and it has several well placed journalists that work with it at the major newspapers. And you have seen tens of articles published about me, strongly implying that I am That theres an irrationality behind what Im saying. Some type of irrational motivation. Youve also seen me spoken about in Parliament two days running. And, of course, in Parliament, the MPs enjoy parliamentary privilege, which means that they cannot Nothing they say is legally actionable. So I could not sue anybody for calling me a racist in Parliament.

The crux of this when we get down to it is that they are trying to reconfigure the idea of anti-Zionism as somehow antisemitic. When the actual peer of Theodor Herzl by the name of Nathan Birnbaum, who is Very little is known about him, actually, because hes largely been written out of history, but there are a few great books about him He was the person credited with coining the term Zionism. He was a peer of Theodor Herzl and Leo Pinsker, the earlier Zionist thinkers.

Now, he later became an anti-Zionist. So the implication here is that somebody who coined the phrase Zionism and was one of the earliest Zionist thinkers is now somehow antisemitic because he became an anti-Zionist later on. Also, when you look at the amount of citizens that you have within this state, six million of them are Jewish people, meaning that only six million Jewish people are actually believers in the idea of Israel in so far as theyve taken citizenship. But theres 15 million Jewish people in the world, strongly implying that the vast majority of Jewish people are actually not Zionists. And so, this really is about that key issue and trying to force through the IHRA definition, whether that is on private companies like Spotify or in public institutions like universities. That is what this is about. It is about quelling the freedom of speech of not only Palestinians, but their supporters.

Chris Hedges: Lets talk about the character assassination that theyve engaged in. What are the kinds of things that youve heard said about you?

Kareem Dennis: Well, again, its about attributing an irrationality to my ideas. Of course, Ive come under fire for saying that the heritage of Zelenskyy in Ukraine has been weaponized to stave off genuine inquiries into the nature of the far right groups which are involved in the fight in Ukraine and are directly being armed and trained by the government I pay taxes to. So, actually, Im being depicted as somehow antisemitic because I have a problem and an objection to the arming and training of explicitly Nazi organizations. So, its quite the acrobatics are being played with these things, of course.

Chris Hedges: So, youve long been a target. It was a few years ago that you were denied a visa to the United States in order to perform. Why does an artist like you frighten them so much?

Kareem Dennis: Well, I mean, at that time I was booked to perform and speak at the Left Forum and my visa was refused. I think the reason why my music would be quite worrying is because it does not have any strings attached to it which say what I can or cannot talk about. Im also and have been involved in many different political movements. Im a patron of what the British state would consider some of the most subversive organizations, possibly, in this countrys history. Im involved in those campaigns. The key to my music was always about mobilizing people to build critical mass, and also Im a person who has political ideas which have rendered me disqualified from the very narrow parameters of political choice within this country, and Im not afraid to talk about it. Also, seeing my neighbors die in the horrific circumstances that they did at Grenfell Tower. People Ive known since they were children died in there.

And being a witness, an eyewitness, to that. Being an eyewitness to what happened after it. Having the cladding and the ashes in my hair and all over my body and having to wash them off. That in and of itself would render me to be a person of interest to the state, and somebody certainly worthy of quite close surveillance. But then when you add on top of it that this music is quite subversive, that this music is directly challenging people, that it attempts to bring together the micro and the macro, to bring together the criminals with the victims of their crimes, its no surprise that this type of opposition is what I have faced.

Chris Hedges: Right. Well, what they call subversive we call truth. For people who dont know what happened at Grenfell, and I remember walking around that neighborhood one afternoon with you, because its really horrific. But I think its, again, the way the poor have been abandoned and discarded in neoliberal societies. Just tell us what happened there.

Kareem Dennis: So, essentially, you had an orthodoxy, a bipartisan orthodoxy of neoliberal necro-politics in this country across, essentially, the last 50 years. What that meant was the deregulation of so many different industries, and the key one being the construction industry. And that meant that it opened up the creative ambiguity for these companies, particularly Arconic is the company that made the flammable cladding which was placed around Grenfell Tower. The top shareholder in Arconic, of course, being BlackRock. We cant forget that the reason for the insulation and the cladding being placed on buildings was to lower carbon emissions after the Kyoto agreements. But then, the truth of the matter is that the top shareholder in this company, Arconic, who benefited so greatly from it, is BlackRock, who are also the top shareholder in Shell. So this is one of the ways in which power reproduces itself, and what theyve put on these buildings is solidified petrol. So at six millimeters of polyethylene in the material that was placed on the side of this building next door to me. And of course, prior to that, we had understood that all of the blocks including the one I lived in were due to be demolished.

Now, the only block that we understood to not be ready to be demolished in the march of gentrification was going to be Grenfell. And the reason why it wasnt going to be demolished was because it had the refurbishment that placed the cladding on the outside of it. So, one of the most twisted ironies of this is that we considered everyone that lived in Grenfell to be safe from regeneration and to not be likely to be moved from the neighborhood, whereas the rest of us all felt we were on the verge of being moved from the neighborhood. And then the fire happens and the council backs off because they knew it wouldnt be tenable to demolish all of our blocks.

Now, what happened on the night of the 14th of June, 2017, is that a fridge exploded. Again, there wouldve been a background of deregulation within this particular industry that would mean you could have a faulty fridge just explode randomly. But then that fire then spread to the outside of the building and spread across the building in a really unnatural way and led to many people dying of asphyxiation. A young child died being trampled on the stairs. A man jumped from the 15th floor. His body was then taken into the block next door to Grenfell, and a gentleman by the name of Omega came out of his front door and took a picture of the body on the floor outside of his house. Now, he then uploaded that picture onto the internet. And what happened was he was then contacted by a journalist who asked to meet him, who then set him up to be arrested. And Omega spent three months in prison because he took a picture of that dead body which was placed outside of his door.

And it is my conviction that when history speaks, it will say that we as the community were far more criminalized by the British state than any of the companies involved in this refurbishment that killed neighbors and loved ones close to us.

Chris Hedges: And I should be clear, as you told me, this was something you witnessed. I mean, you watched it.

Kareem Dennis: Yes. Yeah. I was there on the night through everything. At one point, there were three generations of one family that died in there from the grandmother to the granddaughters. And at one point they were waving out of the 21st floor at us. We saw the helicopter move towards them, within about 100 meters of them, take a picture of them, which was on the front page of the Evening Standard the next day. The Evening Standard was led at that time by George Osborne. George Osborne, of course, was the chancellor of the Exchequer responsible for the austerity program which cut 10,000 jobs from the fire service, which cut the local fire brigade. And, of course, people within the building were saying, we see [inaudible 00:22:00]. We see the helicopters and we think they might be able to help us and save us. And so, these people were waving at the helicopters to be saved by them. The helicopters just turned around and went in the other direction. And that the three generations of that family, Choucair family, died in the building that night. And we saw it all in front of us and were shouting back and forth to people within that building. So, certainly, coming from a community like this, you would definitely see my music be carefully monitored.

Chris Hedges: But they demonized the families that survived and those in the neighborhood in the same way theyre demonizing you now.

Kareem Dennis: Yeah. I mean, well put. What you saw was the attempt by the mainstream media. You have to remember that what Grenfell revealed was a national scandal, but it was camouflaged as a local scandal. And it was exceptionalized when it should have been generalized. Meaning that you have hospitals, cinema, schools, and houses across the country, and blocks that are lived in and have the same kind of flammable insulation and cladding across it. You have a primary school just a mile away from Grenfell that was built within four years after the fire with flammable insulation that was made by one of the same companies that made the flammable insulation on Grenfell.

So, what had to happen in that early stage was that the local community had to be seen as different from the rest of British society. And people often talk about racism and Grenfell, but I think the way that racism and Grenfell worked was that it said to the rest of the population, you have nothing to do with this community. They are a Prevent priority community, which is, Prevent is the British governments, one of its counter-extremism programs, which basically allocates funding to local government depending on the proportion of the population which are Muslim. So meaning that you had to depict this community as somehow different from the rest of society, so you couldnt have that real horizontal solidarity which needed to happen. And so what weve seen, really, is this massive US company in Arconic, French company in Celotex, theyve been able to get off completely scot-free while the so-called nationalists can puff out their chests saying that somehow they have more in common with the interests of a massive US construction company like Arconic than they do with people that live in neighborhoods very similar to their own.

Chris Hedges: To what extent did the attacks against Jeremy Corbyn Of course, that was, again, orchestrated around the charge that he was an antisemite, and of course successfully. And much of that came from the Blairites within the Labor Party itself. How has that weakened, if it has, the people like you? I mean, to what extent has that kind of knocked out props that might offer support?

Kareem Dennis: Well, it sets up the infrastructure through which the witch hunt can take place. You know, this is McCarthyism 2022. And you set up these bodies whereby their entire purpose is to monitor the social media output of people and to basically match them against a criteria for political subjectivity. It basically established a hierarchy of political subjectivity in this country. Meaning that if you are on the close to 80% of the population who believe that the railway should be nationalized, if you are part of the 78 or so percent of the population who believe that water and household utilities should be nationalized, if you are part of the, again, close to 80% of the population who believe that we should not have nuclear weapons, then you are disqualified from the right to be a participant in the political process in the country.

And the subterfuge through which that was done is pro-Palestinianism. So, if you support the Palestinians, if you assert the humanhood of Palestinians, then you are you very likely And thousands of people. I am one of the fortunate people. When I have had this campaign against me, Ive had the support in the public letter that weve signed and put out to Spotify, the support of a former UN special rapporteur for housing. Ive had the support of a princess of Jordan. Ive had the support of Mark Ruffalo in Hollywood. Ive had the support of yourself. Ive had the support of so many very influential people, but thousands of people during this period did not have their right really looked at and supported by people in a major way. They were kept anonymous. And again, many of them lost their livelihoods, but mostly it was focused on stopping them having any right to be politically active within this society. And that was done through the project of Corbynism. And thats the simple truth of this.

Chris Hedges: Great. Were going to close the show with Long Live Palestine III by Lowkey.

Excerpt from:
The Chris Hedges Report: Hip hop, censorship, and Palestinian resistance - The Real News Network