Category Archives: Censorship

Under the decree, any media or individual must pay 500,000 Nepali rupees (3,720 euros) for a licence in order to be able to post videos online. In a country where the minimum monthly salary for a journalist is 25,000 rupees, creating an online media outlet will be impossibly expensive for ordinary citizens and journalists.

Proposed by the communications and information technology ministry and adopted by the cabinet on 3 March, the decree is an amendment to the ten rules issued under the 1993 National Broadcasting Regulations (NBR).

Under this 11th amendment, no person or entity can post a video online without first paying the required sum for a licence. This applies to any form of online video, including those on YouTube channels, which have many followers in Nepal.

Legal inconsistencies

In response to all the criticism of this 11th amendment, communications and information technology minister Gyanendra Bahadur Karki said the government was trying to do a good job, that it would discuss certain ambiguities with the various stakeholders and would provide additional explanations. But three weeks have gone by without any clarification.

Charging exorbitant sums to just create an online video channel amounts to imposing a disguised form of censorship on Nepals media, independent journalists and all ordinary citizens, said Daniel Bastard, the head of RSFs Asia-Pacific desk. We call on Prime Minister Sher Bahadur Deubas government to immediately rescind this amendment to the broadcasting law. As well as being legally questionable, it constitutes an outright attack on the right of Nepalese to obtain and disseminate independent information.

Among other legal inconsistencies, this 11th amendment to the NBR law offers no clear definition of online television. According to article C (6) of the law, this designates the act of producing and broadcasting audio-visual programmes regularly through the Internet.

Furthermore, Babu Ram Aryal, a lawyer specialising in new technology, told RSF that the executive has circumvented parliaments sovereignty by using a governmental decree to amend the law.

Aryal added: It seems the current ruling coalition wanted to insert into these regulations the same provisions that the previous [K.P. Sharma Oli] government tried to impose in its information technology bill.

Submitted to parliament in 2019, that bill reflected the previous Oli governments desire to control the content disseminated by media outlets, as RSF pointed out. These criticisms were shared at the time by the then opposition coalition, which has been in power since July 2021.

Nepal is ranked 106th out of 180 countries in RSF's 2021 World Press Freedom Index.

Go here to read the rest:
Nepali government wants to censor online videos | Reporters without borders - RSF

In 1970s Russia, censors with party membership cards and sharp communist vision sat in dank offices branding manuscripts unsuitable for publication, while I sat in my Leningrad apartment typing pages of forbidden books through four sheets of carbon paper. I typed banned verses by Anna Akhmatova, Osip Mandelstam, and my contemporary Iosif Brodsky, who had been incarcerated in an insane asylum only blocks from where I lived. I never asked where my friends got the poems for me to type; some were hand-written while others were faintly photo-copied. I only knew that I was fortunate to own a portable manual typewriter, the name Erika embossed in gold on the front. Those typed pages of my samizdat projects found their way into the hands of trusted friends who passed them on to their friends who also owned typewriters.

As I typed, I could only dream of reading other books that were impossible to get: Doctor Zhivago by Boris Pasternak, Speak, Memory by Vladimir Nabokov, Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman, Kolyma Stories by Varlam Shalamov. Those books remained banned until the late 1980s, when Mikhail Gorbachev initiated glasnost and perestroika, which further loosened the bolts holding together the progressively creaking Soviet skeleton. I didnt read them until I moved to the US. There was one special book that was published in a censored form in a Russian literary magazine in 1966over a quarter century after it was writtenMikhail Bulgakovs Master and Margarita. A friend lent it to me, but only for one day, before he had to pass it on to the next waiting reader. Since then, several editions of the book have found their way into my American home, where I can languish in Bulgakovs prose without ever glancing at the clock.

Tragically, in todays Russia, censorship has made a meteoric comeback, and with it have come restrictions on free speech and peaceful protests. The Iron Curtain has descended once again, holding millions of Russians hostage to the newest version of this totalitarian regime. In just a few days, Russia has been propelled back in time to repeat the darkest days of its communist history. How long will it be, I wonder, before we begin to dust off our aging Erikas and start typing forbidden books to pass along to friends?

*

Boris Pasternak, Doctor Zhivago(Vintage)

Completed in 1955, the novel did not appear in Russian bookstores until 1987, when Mikhail Gorbachevs perestroika was already in full sway and the new policy of glasnost, or openness, allowed the publication of this previously banned book.

Its plot is Byzantine and long, beginning in 1902 and marching through some of the most tumultuous times in Russian history. Young Yuri Zhivagos comfortable life is shattered when his mothers death ushers in an unknown future for him and his country. Soon Russia would become engulfed in the flames of the Bolshevik Revolution and the Civil War. (Zhivagos poems at the end of the novel were among those I typed through four sheets of carbon paper). The book ending is cheerless. Zhivago dies and Lara disappears into the Gulag, a nameless number of a list.

Vasily Grossman, Life and Fate(NYRB)

Grossman finished Life and Fate in 1959, but the book remained unpublished in Russia until 1988. The author, a military correspondent who spent three years reporting from the front lines, centered his novel around the Stalingrad battle, which, like the war itself, became the confrontation of two totalitarian regimes. Traveling with the Soviet Army across Europe, Grossman was among the first who entered the liberated concentration camps (his notes on Treblinka were used during the Nuremberg Trials). Despite the unimaginable suffering and destruction that go on for over 800 pages, the story has many moments of intense humanity and love. It ends on a note of hope: It was still cold and dark, but soon the doors and shutters would be flung open.

Varlam Shalamov, Kolyma Stories Sketches of the Criminal World (Further Kolyma Stories)(NYRB)

Varlam Shalamov wrote Kolyma Stories during the two decades after his release from a forced-labor camp in the Arctic region of Kolyma, where he spent over fifteen years in incarceration and exile. His books could not be published in Russia until the late 1980s.

Shalamovs stories are not only acts of witness to a monumental state-sponsored crime but also attempts to treat and heal the deep, horrendous wound. The crimes of Stalins regime were committed against its own citizens, a process where executioners became victims, and victims, by denouncing their family and friends, became executioners. As a result, until after Stalins death, no one was guilty because everyone was guilty.

One of the stories, Cherry Brandy, written in 1961, describes the last days of the condemned poet Osip Mandelstam. Another story, The Resurrection of the Larch (1966), resurrects a memory of the millions who were killed and tortured to death, who are laid in common graves to the north of Magadan. As Shalamov observes, The larch can see and shout out that nothing has changed in Russia, neither mens fates, not human spite, nor indifference. Indeed, todays Russia, unfortunately, is a tragic proof to this timeless observation.

Unlike Grossmans novel, Shalamovs stories do not provide any redemption; there is no heroism in survival. The author understood that Gulag, like a cancer, had metastasized through the whole body of Soviet society, and his stories are powerful and raw and feel as if they were ripped whole from his own camp experience.

Osip Mandelstam, The Selected Poems(NYRB Classics)

In 1965, twenty-seven years after Osip Mandelstams death in a labor camp, his wife Nadezhda sent the manuscript of her memoir Hope Against Hope to Varlam Shalamov. In his letter to Nadezhda Mandelstam, Shalamov wrote: The link between eras, between cultures has been broken; the exchange has been interrupted and our mission is to pick up the ends of string and tie them back together.

This task of tying together the connection between the two eras broken by communist dictatorship and terror was what Osip Mandelstam had already attempted in his poem The Age (Vek):

My age, my beast, who will look youstraight into the eyeAnd with his own life blood fuseTwo centuries vertebrae?

Although Mandelstam originally supported the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, his poetry continued to be personal and humanistic rather than celebratory of the new regime where the collective triumphed over the individual. He refused to bend to the insistence that poetry should serve the Bolsheviks political cause, for which he was arrested, exiled, arrested again, and finally swallowed by the Gulag. His death was reported in 1938. He was not fully rehabilitated until 1987.

Anna Akhmatova, Requiem(Swallow Press)

Written over a period of three decades, Requiem did not see the light of Russian bookstores until 1987. Dedicated to all the victims of Stalins terror and especially to the mothers, sisters, wives, and daughters of all political prisoners, this long poem was written by a woman who lost two husbands and a son to the Gulag. A Leningrad prison, surrounded by long lines of women, was where the protagonist of Requiem spent seventeen months awaiting her sons verdict. Leningrad in this poem is the city of prisons, bloody and black, and its residents are the families of those condemned who were tortured behind the prison walls, forced to confess to crimes they did not commit. At the end of Requiem, Akhmatova turns to images of crucifixion, shining light not on the tragedy of Christ but on the tragedy of mothers.

Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory(Penguin)

No works of Nabokov were allowed to be published in Russia until the late 1980s, when the ban was overturned. Speak, Memory, Nabokovs memoir, examines his Russian childhood in St. Petersburg, the Bolshevik Revolution that drove him into exile in 1919, and life in Europe before Nabokov and his family moved to the US. (Nabokov, his Jewish wife and his six-year-old son fled France in 1940 on the last French ship sailing for America).

The book is Nabokovs exquisite hymn to memory, which sometimes betrayed him (in the 1966 edition, after talking to family members in Europe, he revised the flawed recollections of the original). The lush narration has an episodic quality, shining light on characters and scenes the same way memory does when it provides a temporary anchor in a deeply anchorless and transient world. Throughout his life, Nabokov remained an exile without permanent residencehaving fled from the Bolsheviks and then the Nazisliving the last seventeen years of his life in a hotel in Switzerland. We are all here for only a moment, his memoir seems to say. It is the theme baked into the opening line of Speak, Memory: The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.

Mikhail Bulgakov, The Master and Margarita(Penguin Books)

Bulgakov completed The Master and Margarita in 1940, a few weeks before his death at the age of forty-nine, but he could never imagine that the novel would be published. A heavily censored version of the work was released in 1966 in a monthly magazine Moskva, whose 150,000 copies sold out within hours.

In this multilayered novel, Satan wreaks havoc in Moscow, exposing Soviet absurdities and bureaucrats duplicitous lives and finding an ally in Margarita. She sides with the dark forces to save the Master, her lover who had been taken away for writing a novel about Pontius Pilate and Jesus Christ. Manuscripts dont burn, proclaims Satan as he produces the novel the desperate Master had earlier tossed into the fire. Cowardice is the most terrible of vices is another Satans observation that instantly became proverbial among those who read the first magazine publication of the novel. In Bulgakovs surreal world of 1930s Russia, it is the Lord of Darkness who affirms the resilience and immortality of art.

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A Train to Moscow by Elena Gorokhova is available now from Lake Union.

More:
Russian Books That Outlived the Censors: A Reading List - Literary Hub

Russia has cracked down extensively on independent reporting within its borders since it invaded Ukraine last month, leading many outlets to cease publishing or pull editorial staff from the country entirely. Still, international and independent news outlets that would face official censorship within Russia are finding ways to distribute uncensored news to avid readers.

If youre a journalist or represent a news org looking to circumvent censorship in Russia, please reach out to Freedom of the Press Foundation we may be able to help.

In some cases, the solutions are high-tech. BBC and The New York Times, for example, both offer Tor onion services to make an encrypted connection to their site available to anybody with Tor browser access. Providing an onion address offers benefits above simply encouraging Tor usage for news sites, which weve explained in the context of tracking onion roll-outs and which security researcher Alec Muffett has recently described in more detail.

Importantly, these outlets didnt start offering onion addresses with the invasion rather, theyve long provided Tor access as one channel to read their reporting, meaning the onion URLs have already been widely distributed and would be harder to substitute with spoofs.

For services that havent always been available over Tor, offering a new onion service is still a welcome development. Twitter somewhat quietly rolled out a long-anticipated onion service this month.

Independent news outlets on the ground in Russia may not have the infrastructure to launch an onion service, but Meduza which long anticipated the ban that was issued against it this month was able to educate readers about using VPNs or other circumvention techniques to continue accessing the site, and offers a mobile app that has not been as straightforward to restrict. It has continued to produce valuable reporting since the new restrictions and is looking to non-Russian audiences to help fund its continued existence.

Some outlets have embraced the platform Telegram, which is popular in both Russia and Ukraine, to distribute news through designated channels. Last week, The New York Times announced that it would begin offering updates through the app.

In addition to the channels which provide a sort of newsfeed, Telegram is advertised as a secure messenger, though security researchers have long cautioned about some of its security design decisions. Earlier this month EFF provided a guide to harm reduction for users of the app. (For encrypted communication, we recommend Signal and maintain a guide to maximizing its security.)

Finally, some of the censorship-circumvention techniques being practiced in Russia are decidedly much more old-school. This month the BBC revived its regional short-wave radio broadcasts technology usually more associated with World War II than the Internet age and is transmitting World Service news into Russia and Ukraine for hours each day.

More:
How independent and international news orgs are circumventing censorship in Russia - Freedom of the Press Foundation

In May 2021, I published a list of Answers to 12 Bad Anti-Free Speech Arguments with our friends over at Areo. The great Nadine Strossen former president of the ACLU from 1991 to 2008, and one of the foremost experts on freedom of speech alive today saw the series and offered to provide her own answers to some important misconceptions about freedom of speech. My answers, when applicable, appear below hers.

Earlier in the series:

Assertion: Shoutdowns/hecklers vetoes are an exercise of speech rights, not censorship

Note: this answer refers to and assumes situations where audience members have attempted to shout down events and keep them from proceeding, as opposed to brief heckling that is itself protected speech. My colleagues at FIRE will be writing on how to distinguish protected brief heckling from unprotected hecklers vetoes/substantial event disruption in the near future.

Greg Lukianoff: This argument has been all over Twitter in recent weeks, following incidents where members of the audience shouted down speakers at UNT, UC Hastings, and, most recently, Yale.

The university is meant to be a place of uniquely open minds, where ideas even wrong and offensive ones are interrogated.

Shouting down a speaker to stop an event from proceeding is mob censorship, full stop. It gives the shouters the power to dictate what anyone else is able to say or to hear. The idea that a group or even a single individual pulling a fire alarm or banging a cowbell can decide what others can and cannot listen to is incompatible with pluralism. It replaces the free exchange of ideas with a system of might makes right, and it is especially egregious for this to happen in the university context where the free exchange of ideas and the freedom to seek out any information is most important.

This is so obvious that, I believe, those who make this argument either do so in bad faith, or have not thought through the implications of this position. For example, no one would argue that one has a right to go to a university orchestra concert and play electric guitar from their seat. It is equally hard to imagine that those sympathetic to shout-downs at Yale and Hastings would make the same argument if, for example, a pro-choice speaker was shut down by rowdy pro-life protestors, or if a student shouted down his professor for the duration of class. And yet all of these examples logically follow from the asserted free speech right for some audience members to take over an event.

In each of these cases, a government or university administrator stepping in to stop the individual or mob from dictating what can be said reflects a positive duty to protect freedom of speech. The necessity of free speech, and, in particular, the ability to voice unorthodox and unpopular views on a college campus, is something that I have written about so frequently and at such length, I will attempt to be brief here.

The university is meant to be a place of uniquely open minds, where ideas even wrong and offensive ones are interrogated. As I wrote in the previous part of this series:

Indeed, scholarship at its best is supposed to be a process of arguing, testing, researching, re-arguing, retesting all to via subtraction (a.k.a. via negativa) eliminate a larger and larger number of false assertions. While in everyday life among many people matters of preference and emotional state may be primary topics of discussion, the project of higher education is to help us understand what ideas may be false by aiming toward a better approximation of the truth, even if we never arrive there.

This process is short-circuited when some through shouting, noisemakers, or fire alarms prevent others from speaking and being heard by those who wish to hear them. Those who shut down events through disruption dont just deprive listeners who agree with the speaker from hearing speech: They also deprive those who disagree and want to interrogate the viewpoint with pointed questions, and those who want to listen with scholarly detachment to learn more about the view being expressed.

Its especially galling for this to occur at a law school the work of lawyers requires being able to argue effectively against opposing viewpoints. And responding effectively to opposing viewpoints first requires hearing them out.

Its not just the right to speak that is at issue in these cases. Justice Marshall pointed to a corresponding right to hear in his dissent in Kleindienst v. Mandel:

[T]he right to speak and hear including the right to inform others and to be informed about public issues are inextricably part of that process. The freedom to speak and the freedom to hear are inseparable; they are two sides of the same coin. But the coin itself is the process of thought and discussion. The activity of speakers becoming listeners and listeners becoming speakers in the vital interchange of thought is the means indispensable to the discovery and spread of political truth.

Justice Marshall was not the first to do so. Frederick Douglass wrote about the right to hear following the shout-down of an abolitionist event he organized in Boston 1860 by outraged members of the public:

There can be no right of speech where any man, however lifted up, or however humble, however young, or however old, is overawed by force, and compelled to suppress his honest sentiments. Equally clear is the right to hear. To suppress free speech is a double wrong. It violates the rights of the hearer as well as those of the speaker. It is just as criminal to rob a man of his right to speak and hear as it would be to rob him of his money.

If you are not persuaded by these philosophical arguments, here is a pragmatic one: If we continue down the path of allowing anyone with the ability to draw a big enough crowd to shut down any speech they do not like, it will have dire consequences for speech that you like. Whatever your political leanings, a shout-down opposite them has almost certainly occurred at some point. Normalizing this behavior and allowing it to go unpunished will incentivize more of it: There will always be parts of the country where it will be easier to assemble a mob opposed to your views than in favor of them.

I believe these shout-downs are often allowed to proceed, go unpunished, or even receive encouragement from administrators because some administrators dislike the particular speech being shouted down. But the bottom line is this: A university that allows or disallows speech based on the assumption that might makes right is one where speech isnt really free at all.

Nadine Strossen: Protesters who have disrupted speakers through loud, persistent shouting have argued that such tactics, far from violating freedom of speech, constitute exercises of such freedom.

To be sure, these tactics convey messages namely, disagreement with the suppressed ideas, and also rejection of the notion that the speaker and audience should have a right to convey and receive these ideas. Yet the Supreme Court rightly has recognized that the sole fact that conduct conveys a message is not enough for it to be treated as speech within the First Amendments ambit, let alone as speech that is immune from regulation or punishment. Were it otherwise, there would be a First Amendment defense to even the most heinous, harmful violent crimes, including the assassination of a political leader; after all, such assassinations surely convey the murderers abhorrence of the victims policies.

Ironically, many who assert this expansive concept of protected free speech when they defend speech-suppressive tactics such as shoutdowns assert a much narrower concept concerning the suppressed speech itself. Critics of the targeted speech often proclaim that the speech is violence, which has no claim to First Amendment protection. Most ironically, some who attack words as violence defend actual physical violence against those who utter such words. Alarmingly, recent surveys indicate that substantial percentages of college students condone physical violence against controversial speakers.

What are the actual First Amendment rights and wrongs in these situations?

Government may prohibit and punish any conduct including shouting that interferes with speakers and audience members exercise of their First Amendment rights.

First, some conduct is sufficiently expressive to be eligible for First Amendment protection. Classic examples include burning a U.S. flag in political protest and marching in a demonstration. To come within the First Amendments scope, conduct must both be intended to convey a particularized message and have a great likelihood that the message would be understood by those who viewed it. Even conduct that meets this standard may still be regulated, so long as the regulation focuses on the general conduct, rather than the specific message, and promotes an important public purpose. Accordingly, even if we assume, for the sake of argument, that a physical assault on a speaker triggered First Amendment analysis, the assailant could and should still be punished, to further the important public interest in physical safety.

What about speech-suppressive tactics that primarily consist of words, and hence are clearly eligible for First Amendment protection? The most common such tactic is shouting down the speaker, making it impossible for the audience to hear the speakers words.

The First Amendment clearly protects protesters who express their disagreement with a speakers message in a peaceful, non-disruptive manner, which does not substantially interfere with the speakers right to speak or the audiences right to listen. Non-disruptive protest tactics include: holding signs with messages (so long as the signs do not block the audiences view of the speaker); handing out leaflets; wearing T-shirts or other apparel with messages; walking out of the venue after the speaker is introduced or begins to speak; occasional and relatively quiet hissing and booing during the speakers presentation; and even occasional loud bursts of expression conveying disapproval of the speakers statements. In contrast, disruptive protest tactics substantially interfere with the speakers efforts to communicate to the audience for example, through sustained shouting.

In some situations, reasonable people can disagree about whether protests have crossed the line between non-disruptive and disruptive tactics. This is the case, for example, if protests solely delay an event, or temporarily interfere with the speakers delivery of a message, rather than completely halting the event. In many recent situations, the protesters clearly do aim to completely halt the event, and succeed in doing so either by shouting so persistently that the speaker gives up trying to talk, or by threatening physical violence against the speaker or others, thus prompting campus officials to cancel the event due to security concerns.

In accordance with general, sensible First Amendment principles, the government may impose content-neutral restrictions on any verbal disruption tactics. Such restrictions do not single out the speechs particular content or messages, but rather, they regulate the speechs time, place, or manner. For example, all expression during a speakers presentation could be limited to particular locations, durations, or decibel levels, to prevent undue interference with the speakers message. The First Amendment permits such content-neutral regulations so long as they promote an important public purpose and leave ample alternative channels for the regulated expression to reach its intended audience. The protection of First Amendment rights is indisputably a sufficiently important purpose, and protesters have ample non-disruptive means to convey their objections to speakers and audience members. Therefore, government may prohibit and punish any conduct including shouting that interferes with speakers and audience members exercise of their First Amendment rights.

The term hecklers veto has been used to describe the impact that disruptive protesters have on others free speech rights when the protesters speech (and other disruptive conduct) is not subject to punishment. In effect, the hecklers those who disagree with a speakers message are given veto power over the First Amendment freedoms of speakers and audience members. Because hecklers vetoes are likely to be exercised by individuals and groups who wield power in particular communities, they predictably tend to be targeted against relatively powerless, unpopular speakers and groups in those communities.

The term was coined by University of Chicago Law Professor Harry Kalven, in his classic 1965 book about the essential role that robust free speech rights played in the civil rights movement, The Negro and the First Amendment. In that historic context, hostile mobs too often sought to exercise a hecklers veto to silence pro-civil rights advocates, and law enforcement officials too often failed to punish the mob.

A 1951 case, which the Supreme Court later effectively overturned, illustrates this general pattern. In Feiner v. New York, the majority opinion allowed a hecklers veto, over spirited dissents by liberal Justices Black and Douglas. Irving Feiner, a young college student, was speaking at an open-air meeting in Syracuse, New York on behalf of The Young Progressives organization, to a crowd of about seventy-five or eighty people, both Negro and white. The Courts majority opined that one of Feiners statements triggered hostile demonstrators disruption and hence (assertedly) justified police officers demand that he cease speaking. According to the majority, Feiner gave the impression that he was endeavoring to arouse the Negro people against the whites when he said that black people dont have equal rights, and they should rise up in arms and fight for them. As Justice Black noted in dissent, this ruling meant that, as a practical matter, minority speakers can be silenced in any city.

On todays campuses, the hecklers are often following in Irving Feiners footsteps, insofar as they espouse progressive causes and castigate the denial of equal rights to black Americans. Yet too many of todays progressive students also follow in the footsteps of Feiners hecklers and censors, insofar as they seek to stifle views of which they disapprove. And too often campus officials follow in the footsteps of the officials who facilitated the silencing of Feiner: They fail to punish the hecklers and to protect the speakers and audience members. Paraphrasing Justice Black, todays hecklers vetoes can silence[] speakers espousing minority views in any [campus community]. Indeed, hecklers vetoes recently have been deployed against liberal speakers on campus by conservative protesters, as well as against conservative speakers by liberal protesters.

The historic record of hecklers vetoes, and their continued power to suppress marginalized voices and views, should give pause to anyone who might be tempted to defend this tactic as potentially promoting any progressive cause.

View original post here:
Shouting down speakers is mob censorship: Part 14 of answers to arguments against free speech from Nadine Strossen and Greg Lukianoff - FIRE -...

Amanda Darrow, director of youth, family and education programs at the Utah Pride Center, poses with books, including The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison and Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison, that have been the subject of complaints from parents in Salt Lake City on Dec. 16, 2021. Rick Bowmer/AP hide caption

Amanda Darrow, director of youth, family and education programs at the Utah Pride Center, poses with books, including The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison and Lawn Boy by Jonathan Evison, that have been the subject of complaints from parents in Salt Lake City on Dec. 16, 2021.

On a school night in late January, Stephana Ferrell, a 39-year-old mother of two elementary school children in Orange County, Fla., logged onto a virtual meeting with more than 200 other parents around the country who, like her, have been alarmed to see books pulled off the shelves of their children's schools.

Ferrell, a family photographer who owns a business, began dipping her toes in local activism for the first time in early 2021 when she lobbied her school district to continue COVID-19 precautions as mask mandates were being lifted. But her involvement ramped up later in the year. That's when she began organizing parents all around Florida to oppose calls to ban books that some conservatives have deemed too "divisive" or "pornographic" to be in schools and curricula.

Ferrell hoped her experience organizing a campaign against book challenges might be instructive to others who similarly oppose what she views as a politically-driven campaign at children's schools.

"Lawn Boy is not on the shelf right now, and then All Boys Aren't Blue says that it's in stock and available," Ferrell told the online participants. "We had a high school student go in there and try to ask for it and they said, 'Sorry, that book's not available right now for checkout.' So that's a shadow ban on All Boys Aren't Blue."

The session was the inaugural training of a national campaign called "Book Ban Busters," organized by a left-leaning grassroots network called "Red Wine & Blue." With the tagline of "Channeling the Power of Suburban Women," the group was established in 2019 and has extended its reach across the country. Founded with the purpose of activating primarily left-leaning moms around local and school issues, it also emphasizes a social component to organizing.

Prior to the pandemic, local groups affiliated with the network organized get-togethers at moms' homes or restaurants. During the past two years, much of their activity has been online.

This past year, many of these parents have watched their schools become battle turf over mask mandates, vaccines and inclusive education. Locally, conflicts over book bans are often framed simply as the next in that series of culture wars. But to some political science experts and historians, the book bans resemble censorship campaigns that could strike at the very heart of democracy.

"I called the organization Red Wine & Blue because when these women would get together there would be wine and there would be some pretty good snacks," says Katie Paris, the group's founder. Paris, a mom in suburban Cleveland, previously worked in Washington, D.C., for left-leaning causes. She established the group to build on the political engagement of suburban women who rejected former President Trump's attempts to win over "suburban housewives" during the 2018 midterm elections. She says the network now includes more than 300,000 parents.

"The suburbs [have] really been shifting and changing," Paris says. "They've always, traditionally in politics, been seen as these sort of conservative bastions. But the suburbs are becoming more diverse. They're shifting ideologically."

Katie Paris speaks to members of Red, Wine and Blue during a meeting, Monday, Sept. 28, 2020, in Cleveland. Tony Dejak/AP hide caption

Katie Paris speaks to members of Red, Wine and Blue during a meeting, Monday, Sept. 28, 2020, in Cleveland.

For many parents at the local level, the push to remove inclusive materials from schools looked, from the beginning, very different from the contentious debates over masks and vaccines.

"It seemed to happen everywhere, all at once. It was clearly organized," Paris says. "So we knew pretty much off the bat that this is an orchestrated effort."

That impression is born out in the data. More than 330 unique books were challenged from September through November last year, according to the American Library Association's Office for Intellectual Freedom. That's twice as many as the entire year before.

Paris says moms in the Red Wine & Blue network were among the first to see the effort take shape. Early last summer, several began surfacing questions to ask if anyone had heard about something called "Critical Race Theory." The term has been incorrectly applied by rightwing pundits seemingly to anything relating to race, diversity and equity. To some experts, the campaign carried all the hallmarks of a different controversy that played out years earlier.

"All of these organizations that appear to be 'grassroots parent organizations' that are outraged about what their [children] are learning, they all have ties to exactly the same donors that have been behind the campus free speech crisis," says Isaac Kamola, associate professor of political science at Trinity College in Hartford, Connecticut.

"It's the same network of people, the same funders that are kind of manufacturing this false narrative and then using this dense network ... in order to demand that society and the public take it seriously," he says.

Kamola, who co-authored the book Free Speech and Koch Money, says that many institutions and people connected to the CRT debate have ties to the Donors Trust and Donors Capital Fund. Those organizations have facilitated huge contributions from ultra wealthy libertarians toward rightwing think tanks such as the Manhattan Institute, policy outfits like the Goldwater Institute, media outlets and legal organizations to advance an extreme conservative agenda.

Ralph Wilson, who co-authored the book with Kamola and co-founded the Corporate Genome Project, has traced links between some of these entities and parents groups organizing to restrict instruction related to race in schools. As an example, he says that the group No Left Turn in Education offers model legislation with sections that closely mirror wording in an Academic Transparency Act proposed by the Koch-funded Goldwater Institute. No Left Turn in Education did not respond to questions from NPR.

Wilson says many parents in these organizations may not be aware that their activism is around an issue that was manufactured to serve the interests of wealthy, corporate elites.

"They view critical inquiry, free inquiry that's done in the academy as a threat to their wealth, they see it as a threat to the future of capitalism and free enterprise in this country," Wilson says. "The end political agenda that's being served doesn't actually help those parents that are involved in it. It doesn't actually help those children. It helps a larger political movement that's trying to capture the culture and ultimately capture the state."

Book challenges have a long history in the U.S., with calls for censorship coming from the left as well as the right. There also have been precedents for the kind of legislation that would restrict public speech about certain topics, says Eric Berkowitz, a human rights lawyer and author of Dangerous Ideas: A Brief History of Censorship in the West.

"In the 1830s, all discussion of abolition was barred from the House of Representatives," Berkowitz says. "It was for the purpose of 'restoring tranquility to the public mind.' So the notion of abolishing slavery was not only a political threat, but it was also advanced and, I suppose, sold on the belief that divisiveness, discomfort, things along those lines are bad for the public mind and a more docile population is a much more easily governed one."

The nonprofit education news website Chalkbeat has tallied 36 states as of early February that had adopted or were considering legislation to put limits around teaching about race or racism. But Berkowitz says history has shown that these type of "gag rules" rarely work in the long run.

"These kinds of ham-handed efforts to mold discourse through the banning of books or through the banning of movies or through the banning of entire subjects only causes greater interest in them," he says.

Political scientists, nonetheless, have been particularly troubled by how the recent spate of state legislation and policies to circumscribe discussion of race in schools has happened amid a tide of rising anti-democratic populism around the globe. The measures fall into a category called "memory laws," says Harvard government lecturer George Soroka.

"Memory laws, in the sense of official prohibitions on how the past can be talked about, are very much a modern phenomenon, and until quite recently, they were primarily a European phenomenon," Soroka says.

According to Soroka, who has helped build a database to track memory laws, there has been a relatively recent proliferation of this type of legislation particularly in post-communist European states. Countries such as Russia, Poland, Ukraine and Hungary have enacted measures to downplay the role some of their countrymen had in the Holocaust and to foster a single, heroic narrative about those countries' experiences in World War II. Soroka says there are parallels to the U.S., where so-called "anti-CRT legislation" and censorship ultimately may serve to whitewash the realities and legacy of slavery.

"Pluralist ideas about the past, multivocality of narratives are threatening ... when you are trying to foster a nation that is really exclusive in terms of its identity," he says.

Soroka says the rise of these measures in the U.S. and elsewhere signals a troubling political shift.

"This is part and parcel of a crisis of democracy," he says. "We see this with the rise of more xenophobic types of nationalism, this idea that how the past is remembered can be weaponized and can be specified by governmental decrees."

Back in Florida, Stephana Ferrell says she sees efforts to erase or minimize marginalized voices from the classroom as clear attempts to undermine the values of a pluralist democracy. Ferrell points to the recent passage of HB1557, which opponents have dubbed the "Don't Say Gay" bill, as an example. The legislation would restrict discussion about sexuality and gender in the classroom.

"They're leaving people out of the conversation completely," she says.

"We have whole swaths of communities completely excluded and teachers tiptoeing around what they can discuss about LGBTQ+ people and Black and Indigenous people here in this country."

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Suburban parents are fighting book bans because of the threat of censorship - NPR

There has been much in the news lately about censorship. The major media have been reporting on Vladimir Putins efforts to keep the Russian people from hearing the truth about his war against Ukraine and what President Biden has called war crimes.

Dictionary.com offers this definition of a censor: an official who examines books, plays, news reports, motion pictures, radio and television programs, letters, cablegrams, etc., for the purpose of suppressing parts deemed objectionable on moral, political, military, or other grounds. That official can be a head of state, like Putin, the head of a news operation, or even an individual reporter. Anyone who chooses to suppress a story or fails to investigate one because it does not conform to their worldview could be labeled a censor.

Which brings me to the Hunter Biden laptop story the discovery by The New York Times that his laptop and its contents are real, after all. Not only did the Times and other major and social media ignore the story, in some cases the story was deemed fraudulent and blocked on several platforms.

I think the more accurate explanation as to why the story was censored by these entities is that it was broken by The New York Post, which the mainstream media deem a conservative newspaper and by their standard, unreliable. The line favored by much of the suppression press was that the laptop story was Russian disinformation.

The real unreliable purveyors of disinformation (or no information) are those who failed to do their journalistic duty and investigate. That the story was not followed up on during the 2020 presidential campaign adds to the suspicion, especially among many conservatives, that the information suppression was deliberate. NPR last year, corrected an online article that falsely asserted that documents from first son Hunter Bidens laptop had been discredited by U.S. intelligence. The correction came after the election. It took the Times and others until this year to fess up. According to the NY Post, 51 intelligence officers who signed a public letter claiming the laptop story was Russian disinformation have so far refused to apologize.

Fact-checkers published what they said were lies told by Donald Trump. The Washington Postcalculated Trump had lied or uttered misleading statements 30,573 times during his four years in office. No such diligence has been conducted by the major media of Hunter Biden and his familys alleged business and personal relationships with nefarious individuals and corrupt governments.

For years the legacy media has seen itself as the only legitimate source of news. In a type of if a tree falls in the woods and no one is around, does it still make a sound? scenario, if The New York Times, The Washington Post, broadcast and some cable news networks dont report it, is it still news? Yes, it is and the source whether it be The NY Post, UK Daily Mail, or talk radio should not matter so long as the story can be independently verified.

That The New York Times failed to do so until now is a dereliction of newspapers journalistic duty. Had the information been known before the election, it conceivably might have changed votes in some states where Joe Biden won by narrow margins.

The tardy tacit admission by the Times that the NY Post was right will add to the view of many that todays journalism is driven mostly by agendas and not facts and when information goes against the worldview of reporters and their bosses it is to be ignored.

(c) 2021 Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

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The many forms of censorship | Opinion | jonesborosun.com - Jonesboro Sun

A bill that could limit conversations about race and sex at public universities passed the state Senate on Monday and in House earlier this month.

The bill, sponsored by Sen. Mike Bell (R-Riceville) and House Speaker Cameron Sexton (R-Crossville), is similar to legislation passed last year that limits divisive topics from being taught in K-12 schools. The prohibited topics of this years bill include 16 tenets, which are the same as the K-12 version with two additional points. Among them: An individual, by virtue of the individual's race or sex, is inherently privileged, racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or subconsciously, and An individual should feel discomfort, guilt, anguish, or another form of psychological distress solely because of the individual's race or sex. The bill states that students and employees cannot be penalized for their stance on any of the divisive topics employees cant be required to endorse them in order to get hired or promoted, and students cant be required to do the same in order to graduate.

The House and Senate versions of the bill are slightly different, and their differences need to be resolved before moving on to the governors desk for a signature. The House version of the bill requires a college or university to investigate related complaints, but the Senate version does not according to the latters summary, An individual who believes that a violation of these provisions has occurred, may pursue all equitable or legal remedies that may be available to the individual in a court of competent jurisdiction.

Additionally, the legislation states that colleges and universities cannot mandate training that includes any of the divisive concepts. They must also perform a biennial survey that measures campus climate with regard to diversity and campus freedom of speech. The Senate version of the bill would require institutions to present their findings to the General Assembly.

If the two versions of the bill are not resolved, then the legislation will go to a conference committee, and would ultimately be voted on again.

The whole bill is remarkably vague and to my mind, it's intentionally vague, Sen. Jeff Yarbro (D-Nashville) tells the Scene. As we saw with the K-12 version of this legislation, the way its actually communicated to the public and used by political actors takes advantage of that vagueness to challenge the curriculum thats used in schools.

Bill sponsor Sen. Bell noted in the Senate chamber on Monday that, unlike last years K-12 legislation, This bill is not directed at what can or cannot be taught, but it's directed at any adverse action that would take place against somebody who didn't conform to these ideas or didn't accept these ideas and concepts.

This legislation does not hinder endeavors within higher education aimed at combating discrimination, state House Speaker Cameron Sexton (R-Crossville) said in a statement. It is a proactive solution that puts guardrails in place to ensure any diversity efforts by our colleges and universities do not become divisive by casting shadows upon groups or individuals for circumstances that are beyond their control.

Though critical race theory is a term often used to describe these kinds of topics, its worth noting that CRT is a legal term meant to examine how racism can be perpetuated through legal frameworks. CRT is not specifically mentioned in the bill.

It puts a chilling effect on our professors and our universities, said Sen. Brenda Gilmore on Monday (D-Nashville). And I also think that we're taking a lot of the latitude and the freedom away from our professors and administrators to teach without feeling like they're going to be jeopardizing their funding in their colleges and their universities.

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College Censorship Bill Advances | Pith in the Wind | nashvillescene.com - Nashville Scene

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IrelandUruguay, Eastern Republic ofUzbekistanVanuatuVenezuela, Bolivarian Republic ofViet Nam, Socialist Republic ofWallis and Futuna IslandsWestern SaharaYemenZambia, Republic ofZimbabwe

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Cal Thomas: The many forms of censorship | Commentary - myheraldreview.com

Yesterday, Twitter suspended the account of satirical site The Babylon Bee for a post that jokingly named Rachel Levine, the transgender Assistant Secretary for Health, Man of the Year. Here, editor-in-chief Kyle Mann, co-author of The Babylon Bee Guide to Wokeness, explains why he isnt going to back down to the social media giants demands.

Well, it finally happened (were kind of surprised it didnt happen sooner): The Babylon Bee has been locked out of our Twitter account.

The satirical article that offended the Twitter overlords? The Babylon Bees Man Of The Year Is Rachel Levine. For the simple offense of labeling a biological man a man, through a satirical headline, we have lost access to all 1.3 million of our followers on Twitter.

A world where you can state a simple biological fact and face censorship, the loss of revenue and your livelihood, and excommunication from the public square for stating truth, no matter how satirical tongue-in-cheek your tone is, is a scary one indeed. As the famous Ron Paul saying goes, Truth is treason in the empire of lies.

Boy, are we feeling that today. (Can I still say boy or will that get me banned too?)

Of course, theres some nuance here: were satire. Were comedy. The primary goal of our satire is to bring levity and laughter to our audience. The fact that a purely comedic account can get banned for a joke admittedly one thats particularly spicy in our current cultural climate should worry everyone about the health of our society. When cultural revolutions happen, the comics and entertainers are the first to be targeted by the revolutionaries. Those looking to upend our society know the power of entertainment and satire, for they use it to great effect as they spread their ideas to the next generation.

Control the comedians, control the messaging, and you control the minds of the people.

And indeed, its control over our minds that Twitter wants. They cant just delete the offending tweet and let us back in. They want us to go into our account and click the delete button ourselves. We have to bend the knee, kiss the ring, bow to the towering statue of LGBTQ politics when the trumpets play, or we stay on timeout indefinitely. We have to promise to do better, implicitly agree that calling a man a man is hate speech, and then well be allowed the right to speak on Twitters platform.

Well, were not going to do that. Were fighting back. Well do whatever we have to do to retain our integrity here. As Orwell wrote, Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.

If we give that up, if we agree to succumb to their ideological madness simply to access a wider audience, were giving up our minds, the last holdout against tyranny. Well wait Twitter out, well appeal Twitters decision, well spread the message far and wide that weve been kicked out for hate speech simply for telling a joke Big Tech did not like.

Its time to take a stand, and that time is now. If we wait any longer, we may no longer have that chance. Weve been incredibly blessed at The Babylon Bee in that we have a healthy number of paying subscribers who help us keep the lights on, and were going to use that to stand firm here and do whats right. Well continue to spread our comedy and tell our jokes that communicate truth to a culture that hates truth on whatever platforms will allow us to, and were grateful for those who stand alongside us in this fight.

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Babylon Bee editor: We refuse to bow to Twitter's censorship of a joke - New York Post

The First Amendment applies to school classrooms.

That principle is foundational for Prof. Catherine J. Ross of George Washington University Law School in her explanation of the attempts by government bodies to limit what students can learn or even mention in public schools.

For decades, federal courts have dealt with disputes between school authorities and the people they serve and employ that is, students, families and teachers.

As Ross notes, Supreme Court decisions have provided guidance on when schools can restrict expression in the classroom. Based on a ruling made in 1969, schools are allowed to prohibit speech that materially and substantially interferes with appropriate discipline in the operation of the school.

In later decisions, the Supreme Court modified this basic principle, effectively allowing schools more authority to censor classroom speech. Schools cannot require students or teachers to forfeit freedom of speech altogether, but the limits to school authority are not perfectly defined.

As several states move to limit their schools curriculum on subjects like race and LGBTQ+ issues, Ross anticipates different federal appellate courts may reach contradictory decisions. And at that point, Ross explains, the Supreme Court could choose to take up the issue.

Find out more in the video above.

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Schools, censorship, and the law | TheHill - The Hill