Category Archives: Censorship

Washington, May 3:

Chinese President Xi Jinping today figured in a US press censorship list, which also included an al-Qaeda linked Syrian terror group, Muslim Brotherhood supporters and Pakistans Baloch armed groups.

Myanmar President Thein Sein marked an exit from the list of Predators of Freedom of Information for the year 2013 for his countrys efforts towards press freedom in recent times.

The list was released today by Reporters Without Borders (RWB) on the occasion of the World Press Freedom Day.

The updated list of 39 predators of freedom of information includes state heads, politicians, religious leaders, militias and criminal organisations involved in censoring, imprison, kidnap, torture and killing journalists and other news providers.

These predators of freedom of information are responsible for the worst abuses against the news media and journalists, RWB Secretary-General Christophe Deloire said.

They are becoming more and more effective. In 2012, the level of violence against news providers was unprecedented and a record number of journalists were killed, Deloire added.

The five new predators that have been added to the list include new Chinese President Xi, Syrian Jihadi group Jabhat al-Nusra members and supporters of Egypts Muslim Brotherhood, Pakistans Baloch armed groups and Maldives religious extremists.

Four predators who have marked an exit are former Somali information and communications minister Abdulkadir Hussein Mohamed, Burmese President Thein Sein, the ETA group and the Hamas and Palestinian Authority security forces.

It is no surprise that Xi Jinping his predecessor Hu Jintaos place as predator. The change of person has not in any way affected the repressive system developed by Chinas Communist Party, RWB said in a statement.

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Chinese premier figures in US press censorship list; Thein Sein marks exit

Ankush Arora, May 2, 2013:

Getting directors, producers and activists into a room to figure out Indian cinemas connection to violence toward women, rape and crudeness in society can be like a family gathering. People shout, get angry and fail to solve fundamental problems because they cant agree on anything.

The Siri Fort auditorium in New Delhi recently presented the latest forum for the debate. Indias Ministry of Information and Broadcasting held a six-day festival there to celebrate 100 years of moviemaking, and there was little agreement on how much responsibility Bollywood and the film industry bear for the poor attitude toward women that many people evince. It was perhaps a more pressing discussion than usual, given the name of the three-day workshop, Cut-Uncut, which dealt with official censorship in India, the role of sex and violence in movies and the influence of films on society.

To be fair, its a question with no apparent answers. Indian films are wildly popular. Storylines and songs become part of the thread of everyday life in a way thats different than nearly everywhere else in the world. They also reflect a strange prudishness when it comes to love scenes with dance numbers as a substitute strange because the dance numbers can seem infinitely more erotic than any kiss on the lips or lovemaking scene that theyre supposed to be representing.

Then there is the premise, debated for years in the United States by the music and movie worlds, that these images and the attitudes behind them in cinema reinforce a mindset toward women that brought us horrific stories in the past several months such as the Delhi gang rape and the rape of a Swiss tourist in Madhya Pradesh. Verdict? No answer.

You want to tell me that rapes are happening in the society because of item numbers? Are you kidding me? said Luv Ranjan, the director of Pyaar ka Punchnama (2011), speaking on day two of the workshop. Helen was doing item numbers 40 years back. No one was talking about it then.

Men sit beside posters of Indian films in Mumbai in this picture taken March 21, 2006. REUTERS/Adeel Halim/Files Ranjans comment highlighted one of the common themes: you cannot connect item numbers featuring lightly clad women dancing provocatively and singing saucy lyrics to an impulse to rape or to take sexual advantage of women perceived as loose. To censor art as a result is to destroy artistic freedom and vision.

Another argument: women do not need to be treated as property or hidden away lest men lose their control to their lustful passions.

Stop your men. Dont just cover your women. Theres a bigger problem with the mentality of the men in this country, said Ekta Kapoor, who co-produced The Dirty Picture (2011), speaking on day two. The controversial National Award winning film about the late, legendary softcore pornography actress Silk Smitha, took 59 cuts before the censor board allowed it to show on Indian television.

K. Hariharan, a National Award winning director, said on the first day of the workshop that cinema is not a source of decadence. Cinema informs. It doesnt tell you to do this or that. Are we teaching you how to be criminals? Come on! Nobody watches movies for a manual on how to do things.

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No consensus on sex, violence and censorship in Bollywood

New Delhi, April 30 (ANI): The Supreme Court has agreed to examine the validity of Information Technology Rules making it mandatory for a website owner to screen content and exercise online censorship of contents posted on the portal.

A two-judge bench of the apex court, comprising of Mr. Justices T.S.Thakur and S.J. Mukhopadhaya has issued notices to the Central Government and all state governments on a public interest litigation (PIL) filed by a company Mouthshut.com(India) Pvt, which runs a portal mouthshut, challenging the Information Technology (Intermediaries Guidelines) Rules, 2011.

The company pleaded with the apex court that the rules be declared as illegal, null and void as they are ultravires of the Constitution.

"It is submitted that the impugned Rules impose significant burden on it forcing it to screen content and exercise online censorship which in turn impacts the freedom of speech and expression of its customers thereby risking a loss of its large consumer base or incurring legal costs and facing criminal action for third party user-generated content," the petitioner said. (ANI)

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SC to examine validity of IT rules to make online censorship mandatory for portals

New Delhi, Apr 28, 2013, (PTI):

"Rang De Basanti" helmer Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra feels that filmmakers should exercise self-censorship while making a film in the nation of culturally diverse population.

The 40-year-old filmmaker's last release "Delhi-6" faced criticism for the treatment given to Divya Dutta's character of a female cleaner in the 2009 film.

"Sometimes we filmmaker cross the line in the guise of freedom and creativity. I believe we have to take a call of self-censorship and if there is a law that doesn't mean we have to break it in the name of freedom of expression.

"Rather, we should be responsible to our craft in the nation of diverse cultures and traditions," Mehra said while speaking on the topic of "We: The Offended" at the Centenary Film Festival here.

His Aamir Khan starrer film "Rang De Basanti" had also faced stiff resistance from the Indian Defence Ministry due to parts that depicted the use of MiG-21 fighter aircraft.

"I made a film whose turning point was the MIGs crash issue. I was sensitive to that issue because I am from Air Force School and expressing my views on it was inevitable. I knew we were entering in their domain but I didn't make any changes suggested by the ministry," he added.

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Filmmakers should do self-censorship: Rakeysh Omprakash Mehra

What gets removed from Chinas social networks shows how censorship strategies are advancing, and can even hint at the governments plans.

In February last year, political scandal rocked China when the fast-rising politician Bo Xilai suddenly demoted his top lieutenant, who then accused his boss of murder, triggering Bos political downfall.

Gary King, a researcher at Harvard University, believes software he developed to monitor government censorship on multiple Chinese social media sites picked up hints days earlier that a major political event was about to occur.

Five days before Bo demoted his advisor, the Harvard software registered the start of a steady climb in the proportion of posts blocked by censors, a trend that lasted for several days. King says he has noticed similar patterns several times in advance of major political news events in the country. We have examples where its perfectly clear what the Chinese government is about to do, he says. It conveys way more about the Chinese governments intents and actions than anything before.

King has seen dissidents names suddenly begin to be censored, days before they are arrested. A jump in the overall censorship rate, like the one that foreshadowed Bos fall, also presaged the arrest of artist Ai Weiwei in 2011. The rate declined in the days before the Chinese government announced a surprise peace agreement with Vietnam in June 2011, defusing a dispute over oil rights in the South China Sea. King suspects those patterns show that censors are being used as a tool to dampen and shape the public response to forthcoming news. That tallies with his other findings that censors focus on messages encouraging collective action rather than just blocking all negative comments.

Chinas social media censorship is less well known, and less understood, than the system known as the Great Firewall, which blocks access to foreign sites, including Facebook and Wikipedia, from inside the country. But social media censoring is arguably as important to the countrys efforts to control online speech. Social media is attractive in a country where conventional media is tightly controlled, and the Great Firewall directs that interest toward sites under government direction.

Studies like Kings tracking which posts disappear from social media services in China have now begun to reveal how the countrys censorship works. They paint a picture of a sophisticated, efficient operation that can be carefully deployed to steer the nations online conversation.

The most popular social media services in China are microblog networks, or weibos, roughly equivalent to Twitter and used by an estimated 270 million people, according to government figures. In China, all microblog service providers must establish an internal censorship team, which takes directions from the government on filtering sensitive posts. Sina Weibo and Tencent Weibo between them claim the majority of active users, and are said to have censorship teams as large as 1,000 people.

Those teams can act fast, as a study of 2.38 million posts on Sina Weibo (12 percent were censored) showed last year. Its minutes or hours, not days, says Jed Crandall, an assistant professor at University of New Mexico, who took part in research with colleagues from Rice University and Bowdoin College. Previous studies had only checked for deleted posts at intervals of a day or more, says Crandall, who concludes that assumptions that social network censorship was largely manual were incorrect. There must be some automation tools that would help them, or they wouldnt be able to do the rate that we observed.

Crandall has also uncovered evidence of how Chinese censorship is used to steer the direction of public conversation rather than just being used to block out sensitive topics for good. His software saw censors successfully dampen the online outcry after a major train crash in July 2011 before carefully relenting once politicians had managed to shift public chatter onto more favorable terms. It demonstrates the kind of PR that the censors are trying to pull off, says Crandall. They delay the discussion until the news cycle changeswhen the conversation changes to a favorable one, people can talk all they want.

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Social Media Censorship Offers Clues to China’s Plans

Just My Opinion: Prostitute mentality of Hollywood censorship
The movie World War Z starring Brad Pitt has been recut because the Chinese might be offended. And not by chance. China is becoming the largest foreign marke...

By: RussiaToday

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Just My Opinion: Prostitute mentality of Hollywood censorship - Video

Googles latest data shows the number of requests from governments to remove content from its services is higher than ever before.

The Transparency Report was started three years ago, and since then Google has been making public the scale and scope of government requests for censorship around the world.

The latest figures show that between July and December 2012 it received 2,285 government requests for the removal of 24,179 pieces of content. It was a drastic increase from the first half the year when 1,811 requests for the removal of 18,070 pieces of content were received.

The subject of the content requested for removal varies widely but the most cited reason is defamation. On Googles public policy blog it says In more places than ever, weve been asked by governments to remove political content that people post on our services. In this particular time period, we received court orders in several countries to remove blog posts criticizing government officials or their associates. Other grounds include privacy and security breaches, copyright violation, hate speech, violence and other adult content.

Google by no means agrees to all the submissions, if the request is written informally from a government agency they usually refuse it and let a court decide. From time to time they have even received fake court orders that threaten the company with legal action if certain blog posts are not removed.

The data highlights the significant rise in requests from Brazil and Russia. In Brazil 697 requests were put forward in the 6 month period. The reason for the rise was largely due to the municipal elections that took place last year, with half of the total relating to the removal of alleged violations of the Brazilian Electoral Code which forbids the defamation of candidates.

In Russia, a new law that allows the government to blacklist sites and take them offline without a trial came into effect; the law aims to protect children from harmful content. The Transparency Report shows that requests from Russia grew from a peak of 6 in the first half of the year to 114 in the most recent period, with all but 7 citing the new law. The majority of the requests were related to suicide promotion and drug abuse.

The online video known as The Innocence of Muslims also kicked up a storm of requests. Google reported receiving inquiries from 20 different countries regarding the clip. Google concluded that the video was within the community guidelines but chose to restrict it from view in several countries in accordance with local laws.

The Top 5 countries, ordered by volume of requests are Brazil, The United States, Germany, India, and Turkey. To find out how an individudal country fares in the censorship chart read more of the report that breaks down individual countries submissions.

Copyright 2013 euronews

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Google report highest ever government censorship requests

Google has published its latest Transparency Report and the results are not encouraging for free speech advocates: governments around the world are asking it to remove more content than ever before.

In the second half of 2012, the number of government requests to remove content from services like YouTube and Blogger increased from 1,811 to 2,285, and the number of items targeted for censorship increased from 18,070 to 24,179. As this screenshot shows, government requests have been rising steadily for years:

Many of these requests appear to have come from politicians who invoke defamation laws to remove content that was damaging or embarrassing. In a section of the report that breaks down requests by country, Google notes it received a request to remove a YouTube video that allegedly showed the President of Argentina in a compromising position. (Google did not comply with the request but did impose age restrictions on the video.)

Google also noted a spike in requests from Brazil where electoral law permits candidates to ban offensive material, and from Russia where a controversial law allows the government to remove content it seems harmful to young people. The company also received requests from multiple countries to censor the Innocence of Muslims video.

The content censorship report is part of Googles ongoing effort to shed light on how governments seek to access its data and suppress content. In the last year, the company has begin issuing the report in two parts one devoted to content takedown and another dedicated to requests to identify users.Under the content section, Google also shows copyright takedown requests from private companies.

Twitter has recently followed Googles example by creating transparency reports of its own. Other prominent social media and content providers, including Facebook, have remained largely silent on the issue.

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Google: government censorship requests jumped 20% in last six months

As part of its Keep Toronto Reading festival, featuring Ray Bradburys 1953 classic Fahrenheit 451, the Toronto Reference Library invited John Ralston Saul, president of PEN International, and Charles Foran, president of PEN Canada, to go to the library on Thursday to talk about censorship in the digital age. Here, they give an idea of the issues they will discuss:

Charles Foran: In Fahrenheit 451, a woman self-immolates with her forbidden home library rather than watch the books be burned. The novel suggests that books are where ideas, history, even human consciousness get stored. Is their status different in the digital age?

John Ralston Saul: You look around the world in 2013 and you say: How many prime ministers or presidents are in prison? One or two. How many generals or bankers? Two or three. But how many writers? 850 or so. Plus, the new fashion is, Dont torture or imprison the writers, just kill them. PEN tracks dozens killed every year. Books, words, are more powerful than ever, and more frightening to those in power.

Foran: And yet the perception is that other forms of expression, in particular those associated with digital technologies, now dominate. Are you sure books are still worth dying for?

Saul: We shouldnt obsess about the book in its traditional form. People are always saying its the end of the Gutenberg era. More to the point, its a return to an oral era. The Gutenberg galaxy was about the written word. At its best, the digital era is part of the rediscovery of the oral. At its worst, its a Kafkaesque victory of the bureaucratic over the imagination.

Foran: A blogger or tweeter is at greater risk than a novelist or poet.

Saul: Certain governments are suggesting that bloggers and tweeters arent real writers, and so dont merit protection. A writer is anyone from a Nobel laureate to a debut blogger. They all get PENs attention.

Foran: I wonder about the attention span of digital culture itself, whether it is even built to house those ideas, preserve that history, contain that consciousness. Its too scattered and unfocused.

Saul: The danger is that the sophisticated managers of power can employ these uncertain new mechanisms to shut down freedom of expression. What were witnessing is a war between those who want to use the Internet for freedom and those who want to use it for financial gain, and/or to control.

Foran: Ron Deibert, head of Citizen Lab at the University of Toronto, talks about the exploding new cyber-industrial complex. Corporations, including Canadian ones, are selling governments cyberspace software that allows them to hack, spy and survey their citizens, sometimes by methods that are illegal within national jurisdictions. Theres big money in aiding and abetting oppression on the Net.

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Censorship in the digital age: ‘Words are more powerful than ever’

A New Era of Journalism (and Censorship) in China
Many people in the West take for granted the ability to go online and browse freely. But in China, with the Great Firewall and a vast censorship apparatus, i...

By: NTDchinafocus

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A New Era of Journalism (and Censorship) in China - Video