Category Archives: Censorship

The U.S. Supreme Court on Monday considered dueling interpretations of the Biden administration's interactions with social media platforms regarding content it viewed as dangerous to public health, democracy, or national security. During oral arguments in Murthy v. Missouri, Louisiana Solicitor General J. Benjamin Aguinaga said those private contacts, combined with public statements condemning the platforms' failure to suppress "misinformation," amounted to government-directed censorship. U.S. Principal Deputy Solicitor General Brian Fletcher disagreed, saying neither crossed the line "between persuasion and coercion."

If the federal government coerced platforms to censor speech by threatening them with "adverse government action," Fletcher conceded, that would be a clear violation of the First Amendment. But "no threats happened here," he argued, because White House officials merely "use[d] strong language" while encouraging the platforms to suppress speech that offended them and "referred in a general way to legal reforms in response to press questions." Any attempt to enjoin the government from privately pressuring Facebook et al. to crack down on controversial speech or publicly castigating them for failing to do so, he warned, would interfere with constitutionally permissible information sharing, "provision of advice," and federal officials' use of "the bully pulpit" to "call on the platforms to do more."

Aguinaga argued that federal officials went far beyond providing information that might help the platforms enforce their own content rules. He said officials persistently pressured the platforms to broaden those restrictions and enforce them more aggressively, and the platforms responded by changing their policies and practices. "As the 5th Circuit put it," Aguinaga said, "the record reveals unrelenting pressure by the government to coerce social media platforms to suppress the speech of millions of Americans." And most of that pressure, he emphasized, was applied behind closed doors, coming to light only as a result of discovery in this case.

"The government badgers the platforms 24/7," Aguinaga said. "It abuses them with profanity. It warns that the highest levels of the White House are concerned. It ominously says that the White House is considering its options, and it accuses platforms both of playing 'total Calvin Ball' and of 'hiding the ball'all to get the platforms to censor more speech. Under this onslaught, the platforms routinely cave.Pressuring platforms in back rooms shielded from public view is not using the bully pulpit at all. That's just being a bully."

Fletcher and Aguinaga both invokedBantam Books v. Sullivan, a 1963 case in which the Supreme Court held that Rhode Island's Commission to Encourage Morality in Youth violated the First Amendment by pressuring book distributors to drop titles it deemed objectionable. Notably, the commission itself had no enforcement authority, and at least some of the books it flagged did not meet the Supreme Court's test for obscenity, meaning the distributors were not violating any law by selling them. The Court nevertheless concluded that the commission's communications with book distributors, which ostensibly sought their "cooperation" but were "phrased virtually as orders," were unconstitutional because they aimed to suppress disfavored speech and had that predictable result.

Last September, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit ruled that some of the Biden administration's communications with social media platforms qualified as coercion under the Bantam Books test. It also held that some of the interactions amounted to "significant encouragement" under the Court's 1982 ruling inBlum v. Yaretsky. Although that case involved due process rather than freedom of speech, the Court held that private decisions can amount to "state action" when the government has "provided such significant encouragement, either overt or covert, that the choice must in law be deemed to be that of the State." That holding jibes with the general principle that the government may not indirectly do something that the Constitution forbids it to do directly.

In this case, the 5th Circuit held that the White House, the FBI, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency were so heavily involved in content moderation decisions that their "advice" qualified as "significant encouragement" under Blum. As the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression put it in a brief asking the Supreme Court to uphold the 5th Circuit's decision, federal officials "became so entangled with social media platform moderation policies that they were able to effectively rewrite the platforms' policies from the inside."

Fletcher urged the justices to focus on the persuasion/coercion distinction supported by Bantam Books rather than the question of "significant encouragement," which he said "risks turning the platforms and lots of other entities that are interacting with the government into state actors," thereby "restricting their editorial choices under the First Amendment." And on the question of coercion, he said, it was not enough to show that some federal officials were talking about antitrust action, regulation, and increased liability for user-posted content as ways of holding platforms "accountable" at the same time that others were urging the platforms to banish specific speakers, delete particular posts, or suppress certain kinds of content.

Justice Samuel Alito suggested that the Biden administration treated social media platforms differently than it would treat news outlets such asThe New York Times,The Washington Post, and the Associated Press. "The White House and federal officials are repeatedly saying that Facebook and the federal government should be partners," he said. "'We are on the same team.' Officials are demanding answers. 'I want an answer. I want it right away.' When they're unhappy, they curse them out. There are regular meetings. There is constant pestering of Facebook and some of the other platforms[Officials] suggestrules that should be applied and [ask], 'Why don't you tell us everything that you're gonna do so we can help you and we can look it over?' And I thought, 'Wow, I cannot imagine federal officials taking that approach to the print media.'If you did that to them, what do you think the reaction would be?"

At the same time, Alito said, the federal government had "these big clubs" to encourage compliance, including potential legal reforms that would expand the platforms' civil liability. "So it's treating Facebook and these other platforms like they're subordinates," he said.

The cursing to which Alito alluded, Fletcher noted, came in the context of a complaint about problems with President Joe Biden's Instagram account. "Are you guys fucking serious?" Deputy Assistant to the President Rob Flahertysaid in an email to Facebook. "I want an answer on what happened here and I want it today." That exchange, Fletcher said, was "not about moderating other people's content."

Fletcher nevertheless conceded that White House officials often adopted a harsh tone when they demanded that platforms suppress messages they viewed as discouraging vaccination against COVID-19. "There's an intensity [to] the back and forth here, and there's an anger that I think is unusual," he said. "But the context for that, I think, is that these platforms we're saying publicly, 'We want to help. We think we have a responsibility to give people accurate information and not bad information, and we're doing everything we can to meet that goal.' That's where this language of partnership comes from. It's not just from the White House; it's these platforms, which are powerful, sophisticated entities, saying, 'We're doing the best we can.'The anger is when the officials think that the platforms are not being transparent about the scope of the problem or aren't giving information that's available."

Justice Clarence Thomas, who joined Alito and Justice Neil Gorsuch in dissenting when the Court stayed the 5th Circuit's preliminary injunction in October, suggested that even amicable cooperation between the government and social media platforms could run afoul of the First Amendment. He asked Fletcher whether the government could "censor someone" by "agreeing with the platforms, as opposed to coercing the platforms." Suppose the platforms agreed that "we're on the same team" and "work[ed] together" with the government "to make sure that this misinformation doesn't gain sort of any following," he said. "The government can't censor by coordinating with private parties to exclude others' speech?"

Gorsuch likewise made a few points that might support a ruling against the government. He said suppression of a given plaintiff's speech could be deemed "traceable" to the government's conduct if the latter was "a motivating factor" in that particular moderation decision, even if it was not "a proximate cause." And he suggested that "a threat or an inducement with respect to antitrust actions" or protection from civil liability for users' posts, both of which could be relevant here, might "qualify as coercion." Likewise "an accusation by a government official that unless you change your policies, you're responsible for killing people"a description that fits what Biden said about Facebook and other platforms.

While Fletcher focused on coercion and defined it narrowly, Aguinaga argued that any contact in which a public official urges a platform to take down objectionable content carries an implicit threat because of the power that the government wields. If "my dear mother" complains to a platform about a post, he said, "they don't know her from Adam," so "they don't care, but they do care if it's the government."

Aguinaga drew a distinction between rebutting misinformation and demanding its censorship. "If the government thinks there's false speech out there, the remedy for that is true speech," he said. "Nothing prohibits the government from going to that platform and saying, 'We've seen a lot of false information about election activity and COVID and vaccines.'.Nothing prohibits the government from saying, 'Here's a list of everything we say is true. That is true in our view, and you should amplify our speech. And anytime that false speech arises, you should put our posts right there next to it, saying this is the government's view on this issue.'"

Aguinaga, who described himself as "a purist on the First Amendment," suggested that would be the right approach even when the government is responding to "factually erroneous information" about actions by U.S. troops (a hypothetical posed by Justice Brett Kavanaugh) or a social media "challenge" involving "teens jumping out of windows at increasing elevations" (as imagined by Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson). But he noted that suppression of some online speech, especially in the context of national security, would be constitutional if it withstood "strict scrutiny," meaning it was the least restrictive means of serving a compelling government interest.

"If you're concerned with the breadth of our arguments, that's one fail-safe," Aguinaga said. "No matter how broad the standard [that] the Court adopts, there's always gonna be strict scrutiny at the end of the line to save the government in times where it desperately needs to do the things that you're outlining."

Justice Elena Kagan questioned whether any of the individual plaintiffs who joined Louisiana and Missouri in this lawsuit could prove their speech was suppressed as a result of government pressure rather than independent decisions by social media platforms. "There's just nothing where you can say, 'OK, the government said, take down that communication,'" she told Aguinaga. "The government is making some broad statements about the kinds of communications it thinks [are] harmful. Facebook has a lot of opinions on its own about various kinds of communications." Based on "standard ideas about traceability and redressability," she said, "I don't see a single item in your briefs that would satisfy our normal tests."

Justice Sonia Sotomayor complained that Aguinaga's brief was misleading. "You omit information that changes the context of some of your claims," she said. "You attribute things to people who it didn't happen to." In one case, she said, "it was [a plaintiff's] brother that something happened to, not her. I don't know what to make of all this.I'm not sure how we get to prove direct injury in any way."

Aguinaga apologized. "If any aspect of our brief was notas forthcoming as it should have been," he said, "I would take full responsibility for that." He cited a couple of examples that he thought "prove direct injury," but Kagan and Sotomayor remained skeptical. And Fletcher argued that the timing of government communications and moderation decisions affecting the plaintiffs does not support an inference that the former resulted in the latter.

Aguinaga emphasized that the government's intervention resulted in the suppression of speech that otherwise would have been allowed. To illustrate that point, he cited an email from Meta executive Nick Clegg to Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who had joined Biden in publicly charging Facebook with complicity in the deaths of unvaccinated Americans and urged a "whole-of-society" effort to combat the "urgent threat to public health" posed by "health misinformation," which he said might include "legal and regulatory measures."

After thanking Murthy "for taking the time to meet,'" Clegg said, "I wanted to make sure you saw the steps we took just this past week to adjust policies on what we're removing with respect to misinformation, as well as steps taken to further address the 'disinfo dozen' [users the government has identified as major purveyors of anti-vaccine messages]: we removed 17 additional Pages, Groups, and Instagram accounts tied to the disinfo dozen." Later Clegg told Murthy that Facebook "will shortly be expanding our COVID policies to further reduce the spread of potentially harmful content on our platform." Such exchanges, Aguinaga said, show that platforms like Facebook were "moving beyond what their own policies require[d] because they felt pressure to take more action and to censor more speech."

In Fletcher's telling, however, federal officials were simply providing information and encouraging voluntary collaboration. Aguinaga "started by saying that this is a massive attack on free speech," Fletcher said during his rebuttal. "The lower courts called it a coordinated censorship campaign. I want to be clear [that] if those things had happened, they would be reprehensible. It would be a huge problem." But under "a rigorous analysis of the facts and the law," he said, "we don't think that's [what] happened here. We don't think that's supported."

[This post has been updated with comments from Thomas and Gorsuch.]

Link:
SCOTUS Ponders Whether Biden Administration Coerced Social Media Platforms To Censor Speech - Reason

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Dear Senator Schumer,

I am writing to give you a different perspective on the bill now in front of the Senate. The bill forces TikTok to decouple from Chinese ownership and, barring some miracle, will effectively ban it in the United States.

As a Ph.D. student and media scholar at the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University studying social media behavior, I concur with you a lot about TikTok that you already know. TikToks proprietary For You algorithm is designed to build a personality profile around you and serve you with only the most instantly mesmerizing content. Its made TikTok the most successful app in history, surpassing Google as the worlds most visited web domain.

And for many students here at SU, its become an addiction akin to nicotine. I did a study last year, and many students admitted they can spend up to five hours a day watching TikTok videos. Research also shows that excessive TikTok watching leads to digital dementia, causing anxiety, depression and the loss of attention span.

I am not a big fan of TikTok, but I am against banning it. Before returning to school, I lived and worked in China for 17 years as an advertising executive in American and British firms. I personally witnessed the growth of Bytedance and the dominance of Douyin, TikToks sister platform in China. During that time, I also saw the dramatic rise of Facebook, Google, Twitter, YouTube and online news platforms such as The New York Times and The Washington Post, which the Chinese government all effectively blocked because they didnt follow the Communist Party line.

It is for this reason that I am opposed to the bill banning TikTok. It is fundamentally un-American and we are simply following Chinas censorship playbook. Blocking TikTok in any way effectively stops one of the core values that both you and I hold dearly, which is also our strength: openness. Are we willing to follow China and apply it here? America is better than this.

The argument is that the Chinese Communist Party is extracting data from us. If the Chinese government wanted to get our data, they could find many different ways. They could take a chapter from Russia and simply go to X, formerly known as Twitter, or Meta and do not need their own platform. Fueled by artificial intelligence, our American social media platforms are so porous and flawed, but our congressional leaders seem to do little about them despite hearings after hearings. And Americans simply do not value data privacy compared to other countries. Your bank credit score knows more about you than any piece of data that the CCP knew about me back in China.

There has only been speculation of a massive TikTok data breach without much hard evidence, only to say, they could if they wanted to. And given easily accessible data alternatives, why would the CCP jeopardize a highly-profitable company? TikTok is a cash cow, and it would be bad business to disrupt it, especially now that the Chinese economy is experiencing a slowdown.

There are better solutions than what Congress is proposing. What ever happened to Project Texas, the plan to house TikTok data in Oracle servers which would be Apples equivalent in China under their data localization laws? Project Texas would have been a reasonable compromise if we were worried about data leaving our shores.

Some have also argued that the CCP is using TikTok to spread anti-American propaganda. If this were the case, it wouldnt seem to be working. Why wouldnt the CCP use TikTok to improve American opinions on China? American opinions on China are now at an all-time low.

Why is Congress doing this? Its an emotional reaction to our governments failure to control social media. If TikToks addictive and potentially harmful algorithm leaves our youth due to the ban, platforms like Meta will pick up the slack.

We are so worried that the CCP will undermine democracy, so what do we do? Block or ban a social media platform. I have lived under a censorious regime, and I can tell you it is not something we want for our country.

Published on March 18, 2024 at 9:44 pm

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No matter how you view TikTok, banning the platform would be censorship - The Daily Orange

They say bad facts make bad law. But bad hypotheticals make even worse law, especially when they come from a clueless set of judges considering the most important free speech case in years.

That thought repeatedly crossed my mind as I listened to the U.S. Supreme Court make a mockery of free speech in Mondays arguments in the Murthy v. Missouri censorship case.

Make no mistake: The actions that led the attorneys general of Missouri and Louisiana to sue the Biden administration were not normal. They were unprecedented, both in the extremes to which government officials went in their effort to pressure tech companies into censoring viewpoints they did not like and in the way the companies submitted to the governments pressure. To use White House official Rob Flahertys word, they became partners in an Orwellian scheme to remove speech the government deemed false, misleading, or, in a perfect reflection of our elites beloved new nanny state, harmful to society.

The institutionalists on the Supreme Court appeared not to care. They seemed more concerned about chilling the governments ability to criticize media outlets that print stories they dont like something that, without attribution, Justice Elena Kagan said happens thousands of times a day in the federal government and which Kagan said she does herself. The institutionalists appeared more worried about a hypothetical of restricting law enforcement from informing a tech company (they always use the benign term inform) that people were using its platform to promote a teen suicide game.

Poor Benjamin Aguiaga, the Louisiana solicitor general, had to deal with that and other absurd hypotheticals throughout the argument. At one point, Justice Samuel Alito came to Aguiagas rescue, noting that some of your most recent colloquy with my colleagues have gotten off into questions that I didnt take it from your brief we you think we actually need to decide in this case. Alito correctly observed that your principal argument was that whatever coercion means, it what happened here is sufficient and that coercion doesnt mean only it doesnt apply only when the government says do this, and if you dont do this, there are going to be legal consequences when it says that in this same breath, but that its a more flexible standard and you have to take into account the whole course of the relationship regarding this matter.

That point went missing throughout the Murthy argument. The lawyering did not help. Ive faced my share of hostile panels, so I sympathize with Aguiaga. But he did not rise to the occasion. He got pulled down a rabbit hole with hypotheticals that he could not win. He failed to mention that the state action question that is, the question of whether censorship by a private technology company should be held to constitutional scrutiny because it is traceable to the government is not the end of the inquiry. Even if the plaintiff shows that private action constitutes state action, he or she must still show that the challenged action violates the Constitution.

That is easier said than done. Take the hypotheticals that Justices Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson offered. No judge would find the removal of a teen suicide video to violate the First Amendment, or any other law, because the First Amendment does not protect incitement or speech integral to criminal conduct. For the same reason, no judge would find the removal of terrorist recruitment videos, or child pornography, to violate the First Amendment. Indeed, Congress gave tech companies the power to remove such content in Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act of 1996.

The state action doctrine matters in this case because the challenged action the removal of speech based on its viewpoint is so noxious. It is precisely what the founders drafted the First Amendment to prohibit. It is always subject to strict scrutiny especially when, as here, it involves matters of public concern, including public health policy.

That is why Kagan and Jackson had to create strawman arguments based on extreme examples involving speech that gets less (or no) protection under the First Amendment. And while Aguiaga obliged them, he did so in a way that left several of the other justices, especially Amy Coney Barrett, confused about what standard he was discussing.

Aguiaga also failed to emphasize the key point of how the lower courts decided this matter: a preliminary injunction issued after extensive discovery that generated a massive factual record and a detailed opinion that the 5th Circuit largely affirmed in a 3-0 opinion. Appellate courts usually show great deference to such decisions.

Aguiaga should have mentioned that. He could have evaded the bizarre hypotheticals thrown out by Kagan, Jackson, and Sonia Sotomayor by explaining that those facts would result in a different factual record that would likely yield a different result.

In fact, lets be honest: Those records wouldnt exist because nobody would file those lawsuits. The attorney general of Louisiana certainly wouldnt sue the federal government for trying to combat the circulation of teen suicide videos. Nor would the Louisiana AG sue the federal government for telling Big Tech that you are hosting a lot of terrorist speech, which is going to increase the chances that theres going to be some terrible harm thats going to take place, another absurd hypothetical Kagan proffered.

The states involvement made this unique. What also made this case special the reason Judge Terry Doughty issued his opinion on Independence Day was the fact that the federal government was not targeting specific content that it could show posed an imminent threat of harm (like the terrorist videos or teen suicide videos in the justices hypotheticals) but was pressuring Big Tech to remove entire viewpoints about matters of public concern. And not just any viewpoints but those that disagreed with, or merely questioned, the governments viewpoint on certain topics. In other words, the government was pressuring the tech companies to silence dissent.

To his credit, Aguiaga tried to make that point a few times, but he did not do it nearly enough. Like the lawyers in the NetChoice cases, he also failed to challenge the justices casual use of the term misinformation and their assumption that tech companies are only censoring the bad stuff that appears online (whatever that means).

That is one of the most troubling aspects of these cases. After all, what is misinformation? In the context of public health, I assume the Supreme Court would say anything that public health officials say is false, misleading, or harmful.

But why should the government get to define what is true and what is false? Why should the government get to define what speech is misleading? Why should the government define what speech is harmful?

Those should be the central questions in these censorship cases. That is why the Missouri and Louisiana AGs filed this case. After all, speech that the government calls misinformation and which it has successfully pressured Big Tech to block often turns out to be true. Take, for example, the authenticity of Hunter Bidens laptop and the efficacy of the Covid-19 shots.

That is why the Supreme Court has never required that speech be true to be protected by the First Amendment. It has also rebuffed efforts to reduce the legal protection given to offensive (or some would say harmful) speech, including obscenity. Indeed, although obscenity is widely assumed to be unprotected by the First Amendment, the constitutional analysis is more nuanced.

The Murthy argument showed a Supreme Court that is headed in a very different direction. Justices Alito and Neil Gorsuch were the lone bright spots. They were the only ones who asked probing questions of both sides and seemed to care more about protecting the rights of ordinary Americans than unnamed federal bureaucrats.

Following Justice Antonin Scalias death, Justice Clarence Thomas has also become a leading voice for the courts originalists, even during oral argument, a practice he once seemed to disdain (I was there on Feb. 22, 2006, when Thomas asked a question in Holmes v. South Carolina; he did not ask another question until 2016).

Of course, there may still be a way to convert the courts three leftists back to the free speech side of society. Just a few years ago, in Manhattan Community Access Corporation v. Halleck, Kagan took the side of free speech when dissenting from a decision written by Justice Brett Kavanaugh that ratified a private companys refusal to broadcast a controversial documentary. Perhaps the leftists would change their tune if it was Donald Trumps White House that was pressuring tech companies to remove the speech of their political opponents.

What if Google decided that abortion is murder, and harmful to women who go through it, so it decided to remove speech that promotes abortion and abortion rights from YouTube? Would Kagan really have no problem with that? Would she be OK with Google removing videos of her criticizing the Dobbs decision from YouTube?

Or suppose Trump wins the 2024 election and his administration takes a hard stand against transgenderism. Under government pressure, Google decides that trans ideology is dangerous and harmful to children (it could cite plenty of evidence for support, of course) and says pro-trans videos should be removed from YouTube. Thats fine? We are supposed to believe that Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson not to mention untold numbers of Democrat-appointed judges across America would go along with that?

I think not. Aguiaga should have said so. Instead, he showed little resistance to a hostile bench that we knew was coming and that could render one of the most destructive constitutional decisions since the 19th century.

Scott Street is a Democratic lawyer and consultant in Los Angeles. He regularly writes about legal and political issues.

The rest is here:
Supreme Court Makes A Mockery Of Free Speech - The Federalist

Feel strongly about these letters, or any other aspects of the news? Share your views by emailing us your Letter to the Editor at [emailprotected] or filling in this Google form. Submissions should not exceed 400 words, and must include your full name and address, plus a phone number for verification. Shortly after Taiwan elected independence-leaning candidate William Lai Ching-te as leader, Chinese President Xi Jinping said the Chinese Communist Party must win the hearts of people in Hong Kong, Macau and Taiwan by strengthening patriotic and reunification forces.

Although this election could be seen as merely a regional issue, its impact extends far beyond the islands coast. How can China win the hearts of Chinese inside and outside of mainland China?

Censorship and propaganda are becoming less effective in ensuring social harmony. A globalised China in a digitalised era means that the government can no longer completely control information. Many mainland Chinese gained full access to information related to the Taiwanese election via the internet. Some even flew to Taiwan to observe the election.

Therefore, China cant return to the closed-door policy and maintain its stability merely through propaganda and censorship.

Censorship and economic power are not enough to win Chinese hearts. In an ever-changing environment, China has to change.

Christophe Feuille, Bordeaux, France

Joseph Chan, chairman, Silk Road Economic Development Research Centre

Chief Executive John Lee Ka-chiu commences a very public display regarding the implementation of Article 23 legislation, vowing to actively explain it. Is this to be done in a similar manner to local elections, where English was barely used? Are we to assume non-Chinese-speaking residents of Hong Kong are exempted? Laws are implemented to serve all and one hopes to see a multilingual discussion of Article 23.

Mark Peaker, The Peak

Continue reading here:
China must look beyond censorship and economic power to win hearts and minds - South China Morning Post

Chinas top intelligence agency issued an ominous warning last month about an emerging threat to the countrys national security: Chinese people who criticize the economy.

In a series of posts on its official WeChat account, the Ministry of State Security implored citizens to grasp President Xi Jinpings economic vision and not be swayed by those who sought to denigrate Chinas economy through false narratives. To combat this risk, the ministry said, security agencies will focus on strengthening economic propaganda and public opinion guidance.

China is intensifying its crackdown while struggling to reclaim the dynamism and rapid economic growth of the past. Beijing has censored and tried to intimidate renowned economists, financial analysts, investment banks and social media influencers for bearish assessments of the economy and the governments policies. In addition, news articles about people experiencing financial struggles or the poor living standards for migrant workers are being removed.

China has continued to offer a rosy outlook for the economy, noting that it beat its forecast for economic growth of 5 percent last year without resorting to risky, expensive stimulus measures. Beyond the numbers, however, its financial industry is struggling to contain enormous amounts of local government debt, its stock market is reeling and its property sector is in crisis. China Evergrande, the high-flying developer felled by over $300 billion in debt, was ordered into liquidation on Monday.

The new information campaign is wider in scope than the usual work of the governments censors, who have always closely monitored online chatter about the economy. Their efforts now extend to mainstream economic commentary that was permitted in the past. The involvement of security agencies also underscores the ways in which business and economic interests fall under Mr. Xis increasingly expansive view of what constitutes a threat to national security.

In November, the state security ministry, calling itself staunch guardians of financial security, said other countries used finance as a weapon in geopolitical games.

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How China Censors Critics of the Economy - The New York Times

Even so, a little more than two weeks after publishing its investigation into Appin Technology, on December 5, Reuters complied with the Indian court's injunction, removing its story. Soon, in a kind of domino effect of censorship, others began to take down their own reports about Appin Technology after receiving legal threats based on the same injunction. SentinelOne, the cybersecurity firm that had helped Reuters in its investigation, removed its research on an Appin Technology subsidiarys alleged hacking from its website. The Internet Archive deleted its copy of the Reuters article. The legal news site Lawfare and cybersecurity news podcast Risky Biz both published analyses based on the article; Risky Biz took its podcast episode down, and Lawfare overwrote every part of its piece that referred to Appin Technology with Xs. WIRED, too, removed a summary of Reuters' article in a news roundup after receiving Appin Training Centers' threat.

Aside from the injunction that Appin Training Centers has used to demand publishers censor their stories, Appin cofounder Rajat Khare has separately sent legal threats to another collection of news outlets based on a court order he obtained in Switzerland. Two Swiss publications have publicly noted that they responded to court orders by removing Khares name from stories about alleged hacking. Others have removed Khares name or removed the articles altogether without a public explanation, including the Bureau of Investigative Journalism, the UKs Sunday Times, several Swiss and French news outlets, and eight Indian ones.

This is an organization throwing everything against the wall, trying to make as many allegations in as many venues as possible in the hopes that something, somewhere sticks, says one person at a media outlet that has received multiple legal threats from people connected to Appin Technology, who declined to be named due to the legal risks of speaking out. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesnt. Unfortunately, in India, its worked.

Even before the EFF, Techdirt, MuckRock, and DDoSecrets began to push back against that censorship, some had immediately resisted it. The New Yorker, for instance, had mentioned a subsidiary of Appin Technology and Rajat Khare in a feature about India's hacker-for-hire industry in June of last year. It was sued by Appin Training Centers, but has kept its piece online while the lawsuit proceeds. (The New Yorker and WIRED are both published by Cond Nast.) Ronald Deibert, a well-known security researcher and founder of the University of Toronto's Citizen Lab, a group that focuses on exposing hackers who target members of civil society, had also mentioned Appin Technology in a blog post. Deibert received and refused Appin Training Centers' takedown threat, posting a screenshot of its email to his X feed in December along with his response: seven middle-finger emojis.

As the backlash to the censorship of reporting on Appin Technology's alleged hacking snowballs, however, it may now be going beyond a few cases where Appin Training Centers and Rajat Khares censorship attempts have failed, says Seth Stern, director of advocacy for the Freedom of the Press Foundation, who has written about the censorship campaign. Instead, it may be backfiring, he says, particularly for Appin Technology cofounder Rajat Khare. It does seem like a sort of dubious strategy to be stirring this up now, and I do wonder if he is starting to regret that given the coverage it's getting, says Stern. You could easily see that it'll do more reputational harm than good for Khare and for Appin.

MuckRock's Morisy says that attention is exactly the intention of his move, along with Techdirt and the EFF, to put a spotlight on the legal threats they've received. Its leveraging the Streisand effect to an extent. But also just finding ways to push back, says Morisy. There needs to be a cost for groups that are trying to silence journalists.

Read more from the original source:
A Startup Allegedly 'Hacked the World.' Then Came the Censorshipand Now the Backlash - WIRED

By: Mark Glennon*

This shouldnt be hard to understand: If you think government should have the power to censor what it says is false, then you dont believe in the bedrock of a democratic republic free speech.

But a group of state attorneys general apparently think government should have that power because thats exactly what they recently asked the U.S Supreme Court to make the law of the land.

Its in an amicus brief signed by 22 state attorneys general in what will be a historic case now pending before the Supreme Court on whether the government can bypass the First Amendment using private sector tech platforms as its agents to censor what the government doesnt like. Illinois Attorney General Kwame Raoul is among the signers.

The case is Murthy v. Missouri, formerly called Biden v. Missouri.

The Supreme Court has rarely been faced with a coordinated campaign of this magnitude orchestrated by federal officials that jeopardized a fundamental aspect of American life, wrote the federal appellate court in its ruling against the government.

In a fitting and splendid gift to America last Independence Day, a federal trial judge issued a 154-page ruling on the case laying out the facts against the government in detail. The evidence of tech manipulation directed by the government was so strong and the matter so important that the judge issued a temporary, sweeping order barring the Biden Administration and the rest of the federal government from most all contact with social media platforms.

The federal appellate court upheld the ruling though it changed the wording of the order.

Now comes the Supreme Court, which will hear the case this spring.

And enter the group of state A.G.s

The government will lose. The lawsuit will not be vacated. The only real issue is on what terms they will lose, which is what the A.G.s should have addressed. The evidence is simply too overwhelming to deny. The Biden Administration, including the FBI and the Center for Disease Control, strongarmed social media platforms to squelch unfavorable stories and elevate its narrative of the news about the Hunter Biden laptop scandals, Covid, President Biden, election integrity and more. Its all laid out in the trial courts ruling. Thousands of pages of evidence showing it are summarized therein. Read the trial courts memorandum yourself.

In a ruling of such importance and with such broad consequences, however, theres reasonable disagreement over exactly how to write out what the government must not be allowed to censor.

But the A.G.s brief doesnt do that, asking the Supreme Court to throw the case out entirely: Vacate the lower courts ruling entirely, the brief expressly requests.

Censor away, in other words.

To be specific, this is about stopping the government from skirting its First Amendment obligations by outsourcing censorship to private parties not bound by the First Amendment, like tech platforms, that can censor what they choose if acting on their own.

Government often publishes guidelines and information on foreign travel warnings, cybersecurity threats, scam artists, public health and the like. No problem. But free speech is denied when the government imposes its messaging on private news platforms to suppress competing viewpoints. Those efforts usually travel under the label of combatting misinformation, hate speech or the like.

The line can be difficult to draw. When does the government wrongly coerce and encourage censorship by tech platforms?

Suppose the FBI suggests you censor something. Maybe it would be like saying this, as one of the appellate judges put it perfectly during oral arguments: Thats a really nice social media platform you got there it would be a shame if something happened to it.

The appellate court drew the line between harmless government guidance and unconstitutional strongarming by issuing an order saying this:

The appellate court Defendants, and their employees and agents, shall take no actions, formal or informal, directly or indirectly, to coerce or significantly encourage social-media companies to remove, delete, suppress, or reduce, including through altering their algorithms, posted social-media content containing protected free speech. That includes, but is not limited to, compelling the platforms to act, such as by intimating that some form of punishment will follow a failure to comply with any request, or supervising, directing, or otherwise meaningfully controlling the social-media companies decision-making processes.

It reached that conclusion based after a long analysis in its opinion of court precedent, logic and practicality. That temporary order was put on hold by the Supreme Court pending its review, but its all but certain to be made permanent in some fashion, the appellate court concluded, and thats surely true subject only to whatever adjustments the Supreme Court sees fit.

How does the A.G.s brief justify throwing out the case entirely, disregarding rafts of evidence and precedent?

It doesnt.

It resorts to red herrings, first with a big list of ways government publishes routine guidance that should be permissible on matters that nobody has a problem with.

When it comes to whats at issue actually censoring what the government doesnt like Raouls brief claims the appellate court ruled that the mere existence of government amounts to coercion, and that it relied on a vague entanglement standard about government involvement with tech companies.

Those, too, are red herrings. Those factors had little role in the appellate courts ruling. Insofar as they were part of the analysis and should be downplayed, fine, tweak the ruling to fix that. The A.G.s might plausibly have argued for the Supreme Court to do that.

Instead, they asked the Supreme Court to throw out the whole lawsuit.

That result would gut free speech and lobotomize democracy.

For a more scholarly summary of the First Amendment infractions in Raouls brief, see the recent column here by my brother, Mike, a law prof. Better yet, read his new book on the full subject of the modern assault on free speech: Free Speech and Turbulent Freedom: The Dangerous Allure of Censorship in the Digital Era.

Illinois is among the worst offenders in that modern allure of censorship. Its long train of abuse and usurpations is often flagrant, listed in the columns linked below. Making that assault on free speech more terrifying is the abandonment by most media of its traditional role defending free speech. You will find little if anything in Illinois legacy media on the matters in that list.

Above all, know this: Your rights include the right to hear. The right to hear what the government doesnt want you to hear is a corollary of your First Amendment right to free speech, as the courts long ago ruled. Its that right to hear that is being stolen from you, and that right is directly at issue in Murthy v. Missouri.

That right was not given to you by the anybody in any level of government. Give it up and youve given up your democratic republic.

*Mark Glennon is founder of Wirepoints.

Illinois recent, long train of free speech abuses:

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Let The Government Censor Away Through Agents It Controls, Say Cabal Of A.G.s To U.S. Supreme Court Wirepoints - Wirepoints

The Norwegian Government Pension Fund Global, also known as the Oil Fund, had a good year. The fund that is managed by the Norwegian Central Bank on behalf of the countrys Ministry of Finance in 2023 returned 16,1 percent, equivalent to 2,222 billion kroner (195 billion), CEO Nicolai Tangen of Norges Bank Investment Management announced this week.

As of 31st of December 2023, the fund had a value of 15,765 billion kroner (1,383 billion), of which 70,9 percent was invested in equities. The Oil Fund now holds about 1,5% of all of the worlds listed companies. It is the worlds largest single sovereign wealth fund.

Despite high inflation and geopolitical turmoil, the equity market in 2023 was very strong, compared to a weak year in 2022, Tangen said.

To a great extent, that turmoil is triggered by Russia and its war against Ukraine. Still, the Norwegian government fund continues to own a significant part of Russias leading companies. According to the list of holdings, there are 52 Russian companies in the portfolio.

The most valuable holdings are in the field of oil and gas, and especially the companies Gazprom and Lukoil, worth respectively 232 million NOK and 288 million NOK. The Fund also owns a 0,72 percent stake in Sberbank that has a value of 326 million NOK.

The Fund also owns more than one percent of companies such as Phosagro, Segezha Group, Rosseti, Bank St Petersburg PJSC and more. On the list are also companies sanctioned by the USA and EU, such as Sberbank and diamond producer Alrosa.

In addition, the Norwegians owns shares in several of the companies actively exploited by the Kremlin to censor and streamline public opinion.

The Oil Fund owns 0.47 percent of VK Holding, the technology company that operates social media vKontakte (VK). The social media now has more than 650 million accounts and is one of the most popular websites in Russia. In late 2021, Russian state-owned bank Gazprombankand insurance company Sogar acquired 57,3 percent of the VK shares and consequently secured full control over the company.

Few years earlier, founder and CEO Pavel Durov had been forced out of the company, reportedly following his refusal to hand over personal details of users to the FSB and his refusal to shut down a VK group dedicated to anti-corruption activistAleksei Navalny.

Over the last few years, the VK has blocked hundreds of accounts operated by independent journalists, civil society activists and other Kremlin critics. In 2022, the company blocked the pages of Aleksei Navalny, Ilya Yashin, as well Mikhail Khodorkovsky and media companies Meduza, MediaZona, Dozhd, Echo Moscow, Current Time and others.

On the list of ownership is also Yandex, the Russian tech company that is most known for its internet search engine. The Oil Fund owns 0,96 percent of company that is considered Russias biggest technology company.

One of the founders of Yandex was Arkady Volozh, a man who in 2017 showed Vladimir Putin around in the fancy downtown Moscow offices, but who five years later emigrated to Israel following war and Kremlin crackdown.

According to Meduza, the tech company was in 2023 taken over by a group of Kremlin-loyal oligarchs. It is now controlled by Vladimir Potanins Interros, Aleksei Mordashovs Severstal, Vagit Alekperovs Lukoil and bank VTB.

The Norwegian Oil Fund also owns minor shares in telecommunications companies MTS and Rostelecom.

The latter is Russias biggest state telecom company. Recently, the company has been busy developing an electronic distant voting system that is to be applied in the upcoming Russian presidential elections, company CEO Mikhail Oseevsky told Putin in a meeting in June 2023.

The most valuable Russian holding of the Norwegian Fund is Sberbank. The Norwegians own 0,72 percent of the company that is Russias biggest bank and one of the countrys major technology developers.

Sberbank is actively working in a wide field of tech development, including in artificial intelligence. When Putin visited the Rossiya exhibition on the 1st of February this year, he had a stop at Sberbanks stand.

In his meeting with Sberbank CEO German Gref in March 2023, Putin revealed that he is in constant contact with the Sberbank leader.

The 52 Russian holdings total only a tiny share of the Norwegian Oil Fund. Whereas the assets had a value of more than 31 billion NOK (2,72 billion) in 2019, they were in 2023 worth less than 1,5 billion NOK (131 million).

But the symbolic effect and moral aspect of holding stakes in Russias war economy and the system of repression, propaganda and censorship is significant.

In a comment to the Barents Observer, Communication Chief at the Norges Bank Investment Management Line Aaltvedt says that the investments in Russia are currently frozen, but that the goal of the Norwegian government is to sell all the holdings.

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Norway owns a part of Putin's propaganda and censorship machine - The Independent Barents Observer

According to a report from the Korean media site Herald Corporation on February 4, 2024, the South Korean government intends to make it mandatory to restrict smoking scenes in OTT platform shows, such as Netflix. The government has raised concerns about the portrayal of smoking in these shows without implementing any safety measures.

The authorities are particularly worried about the influence of such scenes on underage audiences, fearing that they may encourage and support smoking among preteens and teenagers in South Korea. The South Korean government is reportedly planning to propose restrictions on the depiction of smoking scenes, aligning with guidelines from the World Health Organization (WHO).

Recently, OTT platforms such as Netflix, Disney Plus, and more have released outstanding K-drama original series on their platforms. However, concerns have been raised regarding certain series, such as The Worst of Evil, starring Ji Chang-wook and Wi Ha-joon, and the Netflix original series Doona!, where the main protagonist, Bae Suzy, is frequently seen smoking cigarettes.

Traditionally, in K-drama and films, where sequences involving the usage of cigarettes or tobacco are either left out or subtly obscured, OTT platforms are seen to present such scenes without any restrictions. In an attempt to emulate the original webtoon, media outlets are using the Netflix drama Doona! as a case in point, in which Suzy's character is often seen smoking.

The South Korean government has hence expressed its reservations about such scenes, stating that they would influence teenagers into consuming them.

Meanwhile, several other K-dramas have shown scenes of actors lighting their cigarettes and taking a drag without censorship on OTT platforms, such as Han So-hee's My Name, Song Hye-kyo's The Glory, Song Kang's Nevertheless, Squid Game, and many more. Many people expressed the view that in Korea, cigarettes are often associated with themes of violence, drug abuse, and alcohol consumption.

Bar-themed television series are popular even though authorities have often warned against them for "promoting drinking culture." On tvN's night discussion program Life Bar, three show hosts and star guests openly share their life experiences over cocktails. Wide audiences are exposed to its live drinking situations.

Its top viewership rate was about 3%, while its average rating was approximately 1%. In December 2018, the Korea Communications Standards Commission (KCSC) sent the program its most recent warning for including a scenario involving alcohol consumption.

At present, scenes including drinking are more prevalent in South Korean dramas such as Marry My Husband, Doctor Slump, WWW, Extraordinary Attorney Woo, Vincenzo, Shooting Stars, and more. Talk shows such as BTS member Suga's Suchwita revolves around the concept of drinking with the guest while discussing various topics.

Certain Korean content, such as rapper Lee Young-ji's My Alcohol Diary (Nothing's Much Prepared) and BTS member Kim Seok-jin's Drunken Truth with celebrity chef Baek Jong-won, has been noted for not requiring censorship or facing bans on its sequences involving smoking.

Only 3.5% of Korean women over the age of 15 smoke regularly, compared to 32% of Korean males over the age of 15. TV smoking sequences have been subject to self-regulation by the transmitting station since 2002 due to concerns about their impact on children.

Even in K-dramas or Korean films, actors are often seen to take a fag out of the pack, but they never light it up. It is challenging for filmmakers to incorporate any sequences with smoking because the government has tightened its laws and restrictions.

While drinking and tobacco consumption are among the leading causes of millions of avoidable deaths, alcohol consumption is not strictly regulated since certain TV series with a bar theme are running, which encourages drinking. However, Tobacco TV commercials are prohibited.

However, the 10th Conference of the Parties to the WHO Framework Convention on Tobacco Control (FCTC), which is set to take place in Panama from February 511, 2024, will have an entourage from South Korea attending.

The contingent will call on the Secretariat and the convention's organizing parties to restrict the amount of tobacco and smoking sequences that are portrayed on over-the-top (OTT) platforms, such as Netflix series and Korean dramas, during the conference.

They will also stress the importance of working together to adapt to the shifting prevention of tobacco use landscape. That entails the introduction of new tobacco products as well as the expansion of tobacco advertising and promotional activities through international media channels.

However, Korean internet users think that if limitations are implemented, there should be equal limitations across various forms of intoxicants, including tobacco usage or cigarettes, alcohol, and drugs.

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South Korean government reported to announce plans for smoking scene censorship from K-dramas and films at the ... - Sportskeeda

HONG KONG Nicole Kidmans latest project is set in Hong Kong, but people who live there are blocked from seeing it, prompting speculation about censorship in a city where civil liberties are shrinking fast.

The first two episodes of Expats, a six-episode drama about expatriate women, were released on Amazon Prime on Jan. 26. But when viewers in Hong Kong try to watch it, they instead get a message saying that this video is currently unavailable to watch in your location.

Read More: Lulu Wangs 'Expats' Is the First Must-See Show of 2024

The city has hardened its controls over political speech after 2019 anti-government protests rocked the city.

In 2020, China passed a National Security Law that criminalized political activities, such as protesting for independence. Since then, hundreds of activists have been arrested or driven into exile, while opposition-leaning media have been forced out of business.

Expats is based on a book by Hong Kong-born American writer Janice Y.K. Lee, and is directed by China-born American director Lulu Wang. The first episode includes a brief scene in which people at a rally chant in Cantonese I want real general elections. The trailer for the show also features a crowd holding umbrellas, a reference to the 2014 Umbrella Movement, when protesters demanded the right to choose the citys Chief Executive.

Previously, the Walt Disney Co. removed an episode of the cartoon series The Simpsons that included a reference to forced labor camps in China from its Disney Plus streaming service in Hong Kong. In both cases, its not clear whether authorities were involved in the decision to pull the content or companies acted on their own.

In June 2021, the citys government changed the Film Censorship Ordinance to give them the power to remove films which include portrayal, depiction or treatment of any act or activity which may amount to an offense endangering national security.

Read More: Killing of Winnie the Pooh Flick in Hong Kong and Macau Raises Chinese Censorship Concerns

A spokesperson at the Culture, Sports and Tourism Bureau said the government was not commenting on the issue, and directed questions to Amazon.

Representatives of Amazon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Kidmans role in the series prompted controversy in 2021, during the height of the pandemic, when the government gave her permission to skip a mandatory quarantine when she came to Hong Kong to film the series, according to local media outlet HK01.

On Tuesday, the Hong Kong government announced plans to enact a local version of the 2020 National Security Law.

Read more here:
Prime Video's 'Expats' Was Filmed in Hong Kongbut You Can't Watch It There - TIME