Category Archives: Censorship

Assuming three things: that ethnic tensions between Indians and Africans are worsening; that a significant contributor (some would say the main contributor) is politics; and that mainstream mass media remain a legitimising conduit for racial rhetoric, is it time for media leaders to agree on self-censorship in their coverage of racially provocative statements/events?

We have come through a divisive and desperate Tobago House of Assembly (THA) election which will be remembered for Hilton Sandys Calcutta ship announcement, the failure of his PNM party to censure him in an unprecedented way, and the Governmentunder the banner of the Tobago Organisation of the People (TOP)milking it for all its political poison. And thats only one very recent event. We wait in trepidation for local government and general elections.

The country is at a crossroads, saturated with discontent and resentment. Trauma at the loss of political reins is raw among some Africans and translatesin uniquely Trinidadian termsas Indians taking over, which in turn draws from the equally unique Trinidadian proverb Indians have land and money; Africans have political power.

The present Government, meanwhile, promised a coalition that represents and treats equally with all peoples but quickly turned into a UNC Government consumed with old racial prejudices and a rabid desire to equalise government patronage by unethical means. That the UNC found a new face and voice to spew old prejudices born of self-hate has been a handful of salt in racial wounds.

All this is happening in a climate of exceptional violence, short tempers, unending cries for justice, and plenty, plenty guns. Is it time, then, for mass media to prevent circulation of news that can potentially incite that which I will not name but which most of us fear?

Visit link:
Media self- censorship

Home national New rules needed for self-censorship: Supinya

Broadcasting

Opas Boonlom The Nation March 17, 2013 11:01 pm

She will float the proposal with the broadcasting committee on Monday, when they are scheduled to consider Channel 3s action for "Nuamek" series, she said.

The airing of Nuamek was abruptly suspended.

Supinya said the new rules are necessary given a similar action by Thai PBS, in abruptly ending the airing of the Fridays episode of the "Tob Jote Prathet Thai" (Answering Thailand's Questions).

"I believe that Thai PBS had knowledge of the programme detail. As such, it should not have made the decisionto prematurely stop the programme. Some contents are related to the lese majeste or national security laws, but these are screened by the editor. The decision could have been socially or politically motivated. Without the decision, the station may upset the public. But the decision clouds the media environment. Viewers benefits should also be taken into account," she said.

She also mentioned that the programme host, Pinyo Traisuriyathamma, could file a complaint to the National Human Rights Commission. Under the Constitutions Article 46, freedom of TV stations employees is to be protected against the station owners influence.

Read more:
New rules needed for self- censorship : Supinya

EDITORIAL

The broadcaster Thai PBS has taken a nasty fall, and is suffering deep injuries that may linger for a long time. Last Friday, even as technicians prepared to air the fifth part of a discussion on the monarchy on Tob Jote Thailand, station executives decided that self-censorship was a better part of valour than discretion. They moved the "Thai Monarchy Under the Constitution" topic to the rubbish bin and put on safe, unstimulating, uninteresting pap in its place.

The station claimed the discussion by well-known and thoughtful personalities was "sensitive". That may rank forever as the worst reason given for censorship. If topics are not sensitive, why discuss them? If not now, when? If not by respected and knowledgeable people, then by whom? And finally: If not on Thai PBS, where?

Censoring discussion of the great issues of the day will not make them disappear. Ignoring these issues will not solve them. Leaving them for later means more chance for error and a faulty solution at the last minute.

This is not what the public envisioned when Thai PBS went on the air in January 2008. In fact, expectations were just the opposite. Thai PBS began broadcasting in the wake of a disastrous military coup. The station was seen as a way to stimulate rational discussion of hugely controversial subjects. Its founders claimed Thai PBS would venture deeply into popular and intellectual issues where the other stations, heavy on soap operas and game shows, would never dare go.

The Thai PBS website, as of yesterday, was proudly proclaiming that as its greatest achievement, the station had co-organised Thailand's most celebrated traditional boat races. No doubt rowing is culturally important and physically invigorating. If that is true, the station needs different symbols.

The founding principle of Thai PBS was, and remains impressive. "Editorial independence and accountability are crucial to the role of Thai PBS as a public broadcaster," says its website. Independence was to be assured by the Board of Governors and the Audience Council. Neither of these worthy bodies was mentioned in the station's weak explanation of why Tob Jote Thailand was cancelled.

On the contrary, the station said that "executives" met and decided to cancel the broadcast. Programme host Pinyo Trisuriyadhamma was clearly upset. He and his team decided to stop producing the show. The public, he said, might not be confident about its integrity.

That comment is spot-on. For now, it appears that Thai PBS executives were stampeded into cancelling a perfectly rational, interesting debate because about 20 people held a protest rally outside the station's doors. The opinions of all viewers matter, but to turn weak-kneed at the sight of a tiny group of self-described patriots doesn't just challenge the integrity of Tob Jote Thailand, it risks the entire reputation and credibility of Thai PBS.

Thai PBS is "publicly funded", meaning taxes help pay for its operation. There was always fear that an over-reaching government would intimidate the station by threatening its funding. It is disappointing to learn that Thai PBS executives are even faster to censor the station than the government.

Here is the original post:
Lamentable censorship

China #39;s Censorship Costs Western Businesses
China #39;s intense online surveillance doesn #39;t just affect Chinese Internet users and their ability to access information freely. As more and more western entit...

By: NTDonChina

See original here:
China's Censorship Costs Western Businesses - Video

Reporting from Moscow under strict censorship
Former CBS Radio Correspondent Marvin Kalb marks the 75th anniversary of the CBS World News Roundup, describing his experience reporting from Moscow under st...

By: CBSNewsOnline

Original post:
Reporting from Moscow under strict censorship - Video

Googles brand name made Reader work in Iranians favor.

Journalists and other professional nerds are angry thatGoogle is snuffing out its moribund RSS software, Reader. But as Quartzs Zach Seward points out, plain old normal folks in Iran used Reader quite a bit to get around internet censorship. And those users wont be helped by the Reader clones popping up in its wake, because Google Readers unintended power as an anti-censorship interface flows from its Google pedigree, not its Reader functionality.

Google Readers use of HTTPS makes it more difficult for censors to block than normal web traffic, which helps (sort of). But the bigger foot that Reader keeps shoved in the censors door is the google.com domain itself. To cut off Reader, as Seward writes, Iran would probably have to block all of Google and its many popular services in order to keep its citizens from using Reader. [See update below.] Even the censors dont want to do that, at least not now. So Reader persisted, an obsolete product providing unintentionally vital value to Iranians by riding like a remora on the rest of the google.com shark. Until July 1 2013, when Google does what the censors couldnt, and scrapes the remora off.

Google is a business, not a public utility, and its decision to kill Reader makes business sense. But was maintaining Reader really so much of a drain on Googles vast resources that it couldnt have let the little remora keep hanging on as long as possible, as a kind of pro-bono, dont be evil brand-burnishing project? Google didnt design Reader to be used this way, and couldnt have predicted that it would be, but there it is. Why extinguish the benefit?

Reader came out of Google Labs, which spun out interesting (or random) applications and inventions at a semi-alarming clip until Larry Page took over as CEO and shut it down. Labs didnt make much sense as a revenue-generating division. But what it was good at, with its throw spaghetti at the wall non-strategy, was creating opportunities for unintentional interfaces to emerge and catch on ones that, like Reader in Iran, could potentially fulfill Googles dont be evil moral imperative more clearly and cleanly than their on-purpose products do. (Of course, Google has been badly burned by unintentional UIs as well.)

But Labs is gone, and so is Reader. That google.com domain, though, is still as huge a boot in the door of Irans censors as it ever was[not necessarily for technical reasons, see update below]. Politicians often attach controversial riders to popular legislation because they know that their opposition wont throw the baby out with the bathwater. Google has been passively exercising similar power in Iran with Reader for a very good cause, and its a shame that it will come to an end. But maybe its a moment of opportunity for some Googlers to seize with their 20% time: what new thing on the edges of google.com might ride on it to do some unplanned good?

Update: I spoke to The Electronic Frontier Foundations Director for International Freedom of ExpressionJillian C. York, who pointed out that its not technically difficult for Iran to block Reader without taking down other Google services. (They can screw up, of course, she added.) Google Translate offers similar access around censored content by acting as a proxy. Google Reader offered much more convenience, she said, and an alternative US-based RSS reader set up in the same way could offer that same convenience. The problem is, how would Iranians find out about it? Theyre resourceful, but its a huge inconvenience, she said. In other words, the Google brand name is a significant part of that unintentional interface effect that helped Reader be a popular tool for circumventing censorship in that country. Replacing Reader in that regard would take more than just cloning the functionality. Would you have to be Google, and deliver it from a google.com URL, to pull that off? Not necessarily. But if interfaces are culture, then being Google certainly helps. Its just like here: [Google] ispopular, its trusted, York said. Which is why its unfortunate that Google would cut off so many users who use [Reader] this way.

See more here:
Unintentional Interfaces: Google Reader's Censorship -Busting Power Will Be Hard to Replicate

A new study analyzes how controversial posts are deleted in near real time from the Twitter-like Chinese social media service called Weibo, which hosts about 100 million messages per day. Credit: Photos.com/Rice University

(Phys.org) An analysis of censorship patterns on the Twitter-like Chinese social media service called Weibo gives the clearest picture yet of how the site's operator, Sina Weibo, finds and deletes controversial posts in near real time, despite a daily volume of 100 million messages. The study, which was conducted by an independent researcher and collaborators at Rice University and the University of New Mexico (UNM), is available online and undergoing peer review.

"Other people have explored censorship on Weibo, but this work is focused on the speed at which censorship happens," said lead researcher Dan Wallach, professor of computer science at Rice and co-author of a forthcoming study that was recently posted on the pre-print site arxiv.org.

A team led by Wallach and UNM's Jed Crandall worked with the study's lead author, an independent researcher named Tao Zhu. Their analysis indicates that Sina Weibo uses a combination of keyword-matching software and human censors to monitor and delete potentially controversial posts on Weibo. By closely monitoring individuals who frequently post controversial messages, Sina Weibo is able to delete many objectionable posts in less than five minutes, the study found.

Launched three years ago, Weibo, like Twitter, allows users to post 140-character messages with usernames and hashtags. About 300 million people use Weibo, which is China's most popular microblogging service. Users post 100 million messages each day on Weibo.

For the study, researchers began by following 25 "sensitive" users that they had discovered by doing a search for people who had used words previously banned by Weibo. To broaden their search, the researchers added more than 3,000 users who had reposted one of the 25 sensitive users more than five times. They then followed this expanded group for a period of time and measured how often and how quickly their posts were deleted. Any user with more than five deleted posts was added to the pool of sensitive users.

After 15 days, the sensitive group included 3,567 users. The researchers found that on average, about 4,500 posts by the sensitive users were deleted each day, including about 1,500 that were deleted at the network level by Sina Weibo. The team's censorship-tracking software was able to track, within one minute, the amount of time a post remained online before it was deleted.

The researchers found that deletions happened most heavily in the first hour after an original post had been made, and nearly 90 percent of deletions occurred within 24 hours. The analysis also revealed a sophisticated mechanism to remove all reposts of deleted posts, often within five minutes of the original post's deletion. Deletion times were found to be significantly shorter for a subset of users who tended to post deleted content most often, an indication that Sina Weibo actively monitors the activity of some users.

"Roughly 12 percent of the total posts from our sensitive users were eventually deleted," Wallach said. "We have enough of these posts to be able to run topical analysis algorithms that let us extract the main subjects that Weibo's censors seemed concerned with on any given day."

To date, researchers have collected 470 million posts from the Weibo public timeline and 2.38 million posts from a user timeline.

More:
Study shows just how fast censorship can occur in social media

Media Censorship Of Boy Grabbing A Gun And Stopping The Murder Of His Family
HELP SPREAD THIS VIDEO AND MESSAGE!** Links to everything I talked about in this video: http://www.khou.com/news/neighborhood-news/Webster--2-charged-in-ho...

By: matlarson10

Read more here:
Media Censorship Of Boy Grabbing A Gun And Stopping The Murder Of His Family - Video

By Golnaz Esfandiari, RFE/RL

Iran has stepped up its already tough Internet censorship policy by blocking the most popular antifiltering tool used by Iranians to access blocked websites. Beginning last week, Iranian authorities began blocking virtual private networks (VPNs), which an estimated 30 percent of the country's Internet users employ to get around state censorship.

Communications tools that allow free phone calls, like Skype and Viber, and free text messaging, like WhatsApp, have also reportedly been disrupted.

The move, which was first reported by citizen journalists, was confirmed March 10 by Ramezanali Sobhani-Fard, the head of parliament's Information and Communications Technology Committee.

"Within the last few days, illegal VPN ports in the country have been blocked," Sobhani-Fard declared, adding that from now on only legal and registered VPNs may be used.

The ban puts in place an even higher hurdle for Iranians hoping to escape state censorship online.

VPNs allow millions of Iranians to gain access to the Internet via networks based outside the country. They can then visit the thousands of websites that are blocked in Iran for being deemed immoral or against the countrys national security.

These days, when one manages to log on to Facebook, it feels like being [Soviet space pioneer] Yuri Gagarin, reads a joke posted on a popular satirical Facebook page.

Washington-based independent Internet researcher Collin Anderson told RFE/RL that Irans decision to target the most widely used and secure antifiltering tool signals a ratcheting-up by the regime of control over what Iranians can see and say.

See the article here:
Iran Targets Means Of Bypassing Online Censorship

MOSCOW, March 11 (Alexey Eremenko, RIA Novosti) A Russian state watchdog accused of unfairly censoring thousands of websites defended its actions on Monday, claiming that censorship is an efficient way of preventing suicide among minors.

Figures for suicides and suicide attempts among Russian minors have grown 35 percent over the past few years, the Federal Consumer Protection Service said in a press release, without elaborating on the timeframe.

Online promotion of suicide is significantly influencing statistics of childrens suicides, the watchdog said, without providing any figures.

Some websites fail to support the campaign against suicide promotion, the service said. It named no names, but promised to publish, at an unspecified later date, a list of worst offenders.

Internet censorship became a topic of much online controversy in Russia after a new law that came into force last November allowed extrajudicial blacklisting of web content deemed to be promoting suicide, pedophilia or drug use.

About 4,500 websites are currently blacklisted by Russian governmental agencies, even though about 95 percent of them are not guilty of any wrongdoing, according to Rublacklist.net, a project of the unregistered Pirate Party of Russia that tracks online censorship.

Yhe Federal Consumer Protection Service, which runs the blacklist, blocks websites by their numeric IP address, which can be shared by hundreds of websites all of which are banned every time an offender gets targeted by the government.

Ban criteria have also been called into question: Websites blacklisted since November include a photo report about a political activists self-immolation in Tibet; a 15-year-old comic tune parodying Russian goth rock; and a YouTube manual of how to create slashed wrists make-up for Halloween. The make-up video prompted YouTubes owner Google to take the Federal Consumer Protection Service to court in February, the case currently pending review.

Sarcastic-minded bloggers have even produced a universal macros picture for blacklisting websites in Russian Federation, complete with innocent pictures of toddlers titled child porn and instructions on how to commit suicide by ramming a brick wall with ones head. The joke was lost on the authorities, which promptly blacklisted as many copies of the picture as they could.

The Federal Consumer Protection Service denounced online pranksters in a separate press release Monday, claiming that they undermine the governments authority. The agency also pledged to continue the blacklisting campaign in order to save childrens lives.

See the original post:
Web Censorship Prevents Teen Suicide – Russian Watchdog