Category Archives: Censorship

Ever since the OTT platforms came under the ambit of censorship imposed by the government, there has been a lot of noise about the unfairness of it all and many have been vehemently opposing the move. But, with the recent controversy over Mira Nairs A Suitable Boy, some have welcomed the move.

Speaking of the recent imposition of censorship on OTT platforms, Sumeet says, This is a very undemocratic move indeed. Imposing a censorship on the OTT platforms, is pretty much like robbing viewers off the information that they could bag off the internet. If you think about it, does it mean that in the future the government would levy a ban on the internet itself? After all we are a democracy, and we do have a right to information and the freedom to speech.

The actor, who became a household name with series like Permanent Roommates and Tripling, goes on to add, OTT platforms are fast emerging as a cesspool for content. It is being explored and exploited all the same. However, it is one of the mediums that delivers content thats compelling. Content that is being portrayed on OTT platforms becomes exceedingly challenging to showcase on the mediums such as cinema and television. I am very much against censorship, but I absolutely support that rating process. Series and films appearing on the OTT should be rated according to age.

Having co-written the screenplay of Permanent Roommates, would the levying of censorship affect the way he writes? Not really. As a writer, Ive usually written slice of life pieces, and nothing that Ive written is hurtful in any manner. However, I wont shy from lobbying against censorship as I would love to support fellow-writers, who create thought-provoking content that could be positively impact society. On enquiring about the upcoming trends on OTT, he says, People are steering towards content that is realistic. Docu-dramas are on the rise. People are very interested in learning about about facts and figures and taking from biopics.

Sumeet has successfully experimented by playing the part of Ram Jethmalani in the series State versus Nanavati. The story behind Harsha Mehta in Scam 1992. The Tashkent Files have done exceedingly well. With the media opening avenues, viewers are now thirsty for truth. The truth could be about a number of things ranging from whats happening in the lives of culprits like Vijay Mallya and Mehul Chokshi, to what goes on in the mind of a match-maker, before getting two fitting individuals hitched.

Sumeet Vyas will next been seen the Zee5 web series Dark7White. In the series, he plays a spoilt royal who takes to politics. Speaking about his character, Sumeet says, Yudhveer is a very impulsive character. He is very determined about taking to politics, and gets it done hook, line and sinker. He takes decisions at a drop off a hat!

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Sumeet Vyas says he is against censorship, but supports the rating process - Free Press Journal

The following interview was conducted by journalist Matt Taibbi and originallyposted on TK News. Taibbi is a contributing editor for Rolling Stone and the recipient of the National Magazine Award. He is the author of The Great Derangement (2009); Griftopia (2010); The Divide (2014); Insane Clown President (2017); I Cant Breathe (2017); and Hate Inc. (2019).

On November 15th, weeks after news that a New York Post article about Hunter Biden had been blocked by prominent social media platforms, Pink Floyd lead singer Roger Waters ripped Twitter for a less-publicized incident:

The IYSSE, a student movement affiliated with international Socialist parties, was suspended over an obscure technical violation (see explanation below). It was reinstated after nine days, which in a period of increasingly draconian tech penalties might have been a small surprise.

Less surprising was that yet another organization associated with the World Socialist Web Site had been hit with a punitive content moderation decision. For much of the last four years, the WSWS has been a bit of a canary in the coal mine, when it comes to new forms of censorship and speech restrictions.

Many Americans didnt pay attention to new forms of content moderation until May, 2019, when a group of prominent tech platforms banned figures like Alex Jones and Milo Yiannopolis. A legend quickly spread that such campaigns exclusively target the right. Long before then, however, the WSWS had been trying to sound the alarm about the impact of corporate speech moderation on dissenting voices on the progressive left. As far back as August of 2017, the WSWS sent an open letter to Google, demanding that it stop the political blacklisting of their site, as well as others.

Like many alternative news sites, WSWS noticed a steep decline in traffic in 2016-2017, after Donald Trump was elected and we began to hear calls for more regulation of fake news. Determined to search out the reason, the site conducted a series of analyses that proved crucial in helping convince outlets like the New York Times to cover the issue. In its open letter to Google, the WSWS described inexplicable changes to search results in their political bailiwick:

Google searches for Leon Trotsky yielded 5,893 impressions (appearances of the WSWS in search results) in May of this year. In July, the same search yielded exactly zero impressions for the WSWS, which is the Internet publication of the international movement founded by Leon Trotsky in 1938.

The WSWS connected the change to Project Owl, a plan announced by Google in April of 2017 designed to surface more authoritative content. When I called Google about a year later for a story on a related subject, they explained the concept of authority as an exercise in weighting some credentials over others. So, I was told, an old search for baseball might first return a page for your local little league, while a new one would send you to the site for Major League Baseball.

The rub was that Google was now pushing viewers away from alternative sources, such that an article in the New York Times about Trotskyism might be ranked ahead of the worlds leading Trotskyite media organ. Queries had to be right on the nose to call up a whole host of alternative sites, all of which had seen sharp drops in their Google search results.

The WSWS listed many of them: Alternet down 63 percent, Common Dreams down 37 percent, Democracy Now! down 36 percent, down 25 percent, etc. Even WikiLeaks, in the middle of an international furor over Russiagate, was down 30 percent.

In the years since, the WSWS has been one of the only major media outlets in the U.S. to regularly focus on tech censorship issues, frequently showing an interest in constitutional principles curiously absent in traditionally liberal publications. This has won the site an unpleasant brand of notoriety with tech platforms. In a recent Senate hearing, Google CEO Sundar Pichai referenced the WSWS when challenged by Utah Republican Mike Lee to name one left-wing high profile person or entity it had censored.

TK reached out to Andre Damon, writer and editor for the WSWS, to ask about the sites experiences:

TK: There was recently an incident involving the Twitter presence of International Youth and Students for Social Equality. Can you explain what happened? Has the WSWS had any other issues with Twitter over the years?

Damon: On November 11, Twitter suspended the account of the International Youth and Students for Social Equality (US) without explanation. The IYSSE is the student movement of the Socialist Equality Parties around the world, which are affiliated with the World Socialist Web Site.

When we wrote to Twitter to demand the reinstatement of the account, Twitter replied vaguely, hinting that the IYSSE was operating multiple accounts. We responded that the IYSSE has chapters all over the world, which are officially recognized on dozens of campuses, including New York University, the University of Michigan, and Berlins Humboldt University, where the IYSSE holds multiple seats in the student parliament. Each of these chapters, legitimately, has its own social media presence.

Twitters stated justification for suspending the IYSSEs account was a ridiculous pretext, and this act of censorship triggered statements of opposition. Pink Floyd co-founder Roger Waters and model Andrea Peji made statements opposing it, as did dozens of other people. Nine days after the account was suspended, Twitter reinstated it, again without any serious explanation.

TK: When did the WSWS first become interested in the issue of platform censorship, content moderation, or whatever you want to call it? Actually, what do you call it? Is whats going on with increased content moderation a first amendment/free speech issue?

Damon: Its censorship, and it absolutely is a First Amendment issue.

In July 2017, we noticed that traffic to our site from Google fell by more than 75 percent. After reaching out to other sites and SEO experts we realized that the WSWS was one of over a dozen left-wing websites whose search traffic had also plunged.

As we sought an explanation, we discovered a blog post by Ben Gomes, at the time Googles VP of engineering, announcing that Google was making changes in its algorithm to demote what it called fake news. It explained that Google would be hiring a small army of people to review search results and score them. The reviewers were told that if a search returned alternative viewpoints, that search should be scored poorly. This system was internally called Project Owl, and later came to be known as such publicly.

It was obvious that the drop in search traffic to the WSWS and other left-wing sites was caused by this change in Googles algorithm.

The actions by Google were the outcome of a campaign, largely bipartisan but led by the Democrats and their affiliated news outlets, to claim that domestic social opposition was the product of interference by foreign countries, particularly Russia. To stop this alleged interference, it was necessary to censor domestic political opposition, which the Russians allegedly sought to amplify.

At repeated hearings in Washington, figures like Mark Warner and Adam Schiff would demand over and over again that Google, Facebook and Twitter censor left-wing content. It was all a clear and flagrant violation of the First Amendment, which says that Congress does not have the power to limit the freedom of expression. But here was Congress instigating private companies to do exactly that, and threatening to regulate or fine them if they did not comply.

In August 2017, the WSWS sent Google executives an open letter demanding that the anti-democratic changes to the Google search result rankings and its search algorithm since April be reversed. In January 2018, we called for the formation of an international coalition to fight Internet censorship.

In response to our letters, Google flatly denied it was carrying out political censorship. But this makes its admission this month that it is censoring the WSWS so significant.

When Senator Mike Lee asked Google CEO Sundar Pichai, Can you name for me one high profile person or entity from a liberal ideology who you have censored, Pichai replied that We have had compliance issues with the World Socialist Review [sic], which is a left-leaning publication.

This was a confirmation of every claim made by the WSWS in its campaign against internet censorship.

TK: What other private platforms have tried to regulate your content?

Damon: The World Socialist Web Site is banned, without any justification, from R/Politics on Reddit, as well as R/Coronavirus. The latter is particularly egregious, since we have been the most consistent proponent of the position of the WHOthat COVID-19 can be containedof any news outlet. The New York Times has published over a dozen articles by Thomas Friedman arguing for herd immunitythat is, for letting COVID-19 spread throughout the populationbased on irresponsible quack pseudo-science.

Facebook has repeatedly prevented us from holding events. In the latest incident, it prevented the IYSSE from holding an event entitled Trumps Electoral Coup and the Threat of Dictatorship. But when we changed the name of the event to a generic placeholder, we were allowed to set it up.

TK: Why did the WSWS decide to focus on the New York Times Magazines 1619 Project, and what was the response of the platforms to this work?

Damon: The WSWS took a stand against the 1619 Project for two main reasons: Because it was a work of historical falsification, which denigrated the two great democratic revolutionsthe struggle for independence between 1775 and 1783 and the Civil War of 1861 to 1865which rank among the most progressive events in world history; and because its political purpose was to promote the politics of racial communalism.

The 1619 Project falsely claimed that the revolution that established the United States aimed at preserving and extending slavery. This is a blatant falsification of the historical record.

Moreover, the 1619 Projects political purpose, in falsely claiming that blacks in America fought alone for their liberation, was to weaken the bonds of class solidarity between black and white workers. It is a fundamental and undeniable fact that hundreds of thousands of Northern whites, many of them artisans, farmers and craftsmen, sacrificed their lives in the Civil War under the banner of the Battle Hymn of the Republic: Let us die to make men free.

This fact shows that it is possible to create a multi-racial, multi-religious and multinational movement of the working class. The slogan of Marxists, going back to the Communist Manifesto, is workers of the world, unite! not, races of the world, divide.

Working in collaboration with the worlds leading historians of the American Revolution and Civil War, the WSWS exposed the central premise of the 1619 Project to be utterly false.

In November and October of last year, the World Socialist Web Site published interviews with Gordon Wood, James McPherson, James Oakes, Victoria Bynumand Clayborne Carson. These historians demolished the series central premise that the American Revolution was an insurrection to defend slavery. Moreover, they made clear that neither they nor any of their leading colleagues were ever consulted in the production of the 1619 Project.

Our coverage of the 1619 Project exposes the true role of internet censorship. Google claims that its censorship regime is aimed at promoting authoritative and original content, while demoting what it calls alternative viewpoints.

There exist no more authoritative documents on the 1619 Project than the interviews published by the WSWS with these historians. Wood and McPherson are universally regarded as the best authorities on American history, and their interviews on the WSWS are what led to thousands of other articles being written on the 1619 Projectfor and against.

By contrast, the 1619 Project was based on a rejection of these authoritative sources, who were never consulted in its writing or publication.

So the obvious question is, why do you have to scroll to the third page of Google results in a search for 1619 Project to see a single article from the WSWS on the 1619 Project? Why dont the interviews with Wood and McPherson show up?

The answer is that Googles censorship has nothing to do with helping users find authoritative content. Its sole aim is to demote content to which the US political establishment objects, and promote content that it wants to promote.

TK: A lot of the more high-profile targets of deletions and suspensions have been conservatives like Alex Jones, or the followers of the Q movement. Youve said that you believe the real goal of content moderation is to suppress left critiques of capitalism. Is it possible going after high profile conservatives is a way of selling the concept to liberals? Or is there another motive that you see?

Damon: The World Socialist Web Site does not believe that censoring fascists is an effective way to fight fascism. It lends credence to their false claims to oppose the political establishment. The fascists receive high-level support from the financial oligarchy, from within the state, the police and the military. Censorship only strengthens them.

At Berlins Humboldt University, the IYSSE has been leading a campaign by students to oppose the far-right professors that play a leading role at the university, such as Jrg Baberowski, who told Der Spiegel that Hitler was not vicious. The right-wing press in Germany has attacked us for trying to censor Baberowski and others. No, we have been waging this fight by telling students and the broader population what these figures actually do, say and advocate! We fight fascism by telling the truth about the fascists and exposing their high-level connections to the state.

The real target of censorship is always the left.

TK: Do you see a connection in all of this to the long tradition of suppression of leftist speech in America (dating back to the red flag laws, the criminal syndicalism standard, etc.), or is this something different, inspired by different motives?

Damon: There is a long tradition of anticommunism in America. Most of the arguments for internet censorship are lifted straight from the arguments of the McCarthyites and Birchites, as well as the Southern segregationists, who claimed that blacks in America would be happy with Jim Crow if only outside agitators would stop stirring up trouble.

TK: What do you say to people whose response to this issue is that private companies have the right to do what they want on their own platforms?

Damon: Well, legally speaking, private companies do not have the right to do what they want. A restaurant owner cant throw a patron out of his restaurant because of the color of his skin. UPS cant say they wont deliver your packages because they dont agree with your political views. Technology companies provide a vital social service, just like private municipal waste collection companies and private package handling companies. They do not have the right to discriminate against people based on their political views.

TK: Have you observed changes in American attitudes toward speech recently? How about changes within the political left on this issue?

Damon: In my experience, the American working class is fiercely committed to the principles of freedom of expression.

With the affluent upper-middle class, it is a different story. For years, the parties and organizations of what we call the pseudo-left have been promoting sexual witch hunts against cultural and intellectual figures, equating an accusation with a conviction, and calling for the destruction of their careers. You can see the right-wing character of such campaigns in the witch hunt of Roman Polanski, whose brilliant film on the Dreyfus Affair has been condemned equally by bourgeois feminists and by anti-Semites.

Your readers who are unfamiliar with the record of the WSWS will be relieved to learn that we opposed the #MeToo campaign from the start and have defended figures such as Polanski, Louis CK and Kevin Spacey.

TK: Does the content moderation era already have a political legacy?

Damon: The COVID-19 pandemic has shown that the suppression of information is a matter of life and death. Bob Woodwards interview with Donald Trump, in which the president said he sought to play down the threat of the virus, even as his cabinet and members of Congress were getting dire briefings about the looming disaster, points to a far-reaching conspiracy to suppress information about the pandemic.

Every workplace is a microcosm of this nationwide conspiracy. In the auto plants, workers are not being told when their coworkers fall ill, making contact tracing impossible.

We have tried to make the WSWS the antipode to this conspiracy of silence. The WSWS is a hub for workers to learn about the threat posed by the disease, to track outbreaks at their factories and coordinate their response. There exists no comparable resource for manufacturing workers, particularly in the American Midwest.

The decision of what is true and false, what can and cannot be said, is not for self-interested corporations to decide. Working people need to know the truth. And the only way to get there is for them to be able to read whatever they please and to make up their own minds.

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Meet the Censored: Andre Damon - WSWS

The insane brouhaha over the kissing scene in A Suitable Boy is, of course, one more example of Indias ever irate offence brigade doing what it does best take offence. But it is especially noteworthy now as it comes amidst the recent rumblings from the government and its minions on the need to regulate content on streaming platforms such as Netflix, Amazon Prime, Hotstar, SonyLIV, Zee5, Jio, and many others.

Earlier this month, the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting (MIB) brought video streaming platforms, also known as online curated content providers (OCCPs), under its ambit. (Digital news media have also been brought under the MIB, but thats a discussion for another day.) Prior to that, the platforms were under the jurisdiction of the Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (Meity), which is logical, as they are governed by the Information Technology Act, 2000.

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Censoring Netflix & Other OTT Platforms: Who Stands To Gain? - The Quint

Its easy to forget what a recent phenomenon freedom of expression is, even in this country. Until 1959, British publishers could be sent to jail for producing books deemed to have a tendency to deprave and corrupt those whose minds are open to such immoral influences.

Back then, the things that couldnt be said were largely sexual. James Joyces masterpiece, Ulysses, was banned indeed burned on the grounds of obscenity. A single line in Radclyffe Halls The Well of Loneliness (And that night they were not divided) convinced a magistrate that all copies must be destroyed, because it could induce thoughts of a most impure character and would glorify the horrible tendency of lesbianism.

The bravery of successive generations of publishers, their mischievous insistence on thumbing their nose at the censors, helped bring about the sexual revolution, enabling us all to live and love and read more freely. The obscenity trial, 60 years ago, of Lady Chatterleys Lover (or more accurately, of its publisher, Penguin Books), is widely recognised as the moment when the gates of artistic and sexual freedom were finally blown open.

Now, though, there are those who wish to drag them shut again. This time it isnt the grey elderly ones, as Lawrence described his censors, having apoplexies over the written word. Today, the blue pencil hovers in the hand of young progressives some of them, astonishingly, publishers themselves.

Staff at Penguin Random House tried this week to block the publication of a new book by Jordan Peterson, the Canadian academic whose contempt for identity politics has earned him a huge following on the Right. At a town hall meeting at Penguins Canada office, employees argued that the publisher should not give a platform to an icon of hate speech. According to one of those present, people were crying in the meeting about how Mr Peterson has affected their lives, with one employee fretting that the publication of the book would negatively affect their non-binary friend.

To Penguins great credit, it is pressing ahead with publication. But as the social justice generation moves up the media hierarchy, this bizarre sight publishers protesting against their own publishing house for publishing a book will only become more common.

Earlier this year, the US firm Hachette dropped its plans to publish Woody Allens memoirs after staff staged a walkout. The American journalist Abigail Shrier has described how her latest book, an investigation into the rise in transgender identification among adolescent girls, was dropped by her first publishers following protests by staff. When another publisher picked it up, newspapers refused to review it. When the podcaster Joe Rogan interviewed Shrier about her book, staff at Spotify, the podcast platform, threatened to walk out. Censorship is once more in the ascendant.

They are so easily rattled, these new inspectors of literary hygiene. No sensible critic of Peterson would claim that his books constitute hate speech. (Unlike Mein Kampf, which Penguin, quite rightly, continues to publish on the grounds of public interest.) The argument against Peterson seems to be that, even if he isnt a neo-Nazi, some of his fans are. But since when did we judge a book by its readers?

If reading has any moral purpose, it is that it broadens our understanding of the world by exposing us to different ideas. This is what makes publishing an exalted profession: its whole purpose is to find ideas and set them free. A publisher should be a liberator, not a jailer.

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The attempt to censor Jordan Peterson shows the intolerance of the social justice generation - Telegraph.co.uk

PlayStation is reportedly censoring PS5 users on Twitter. Over the course of the PS4 generation, Sony came under fire from some PlayStation gamers for censoring sexual content in a few different games. Continuing this streak of censorship, it's now censoring PS5 users on Twitter, or at least that's what new reports claim. More specifically, users are reporting that the PS5's share functionality comes equipped with a built-in profanity filter that prohibits users from using certain words when tweeting from their PS5 by blocking the publication of the tweet until the word is removed. Adding to this, apparently, the filter is broken, with one user providing a concrete example of a tweet being flagged for containing problematic language, except it doesn't contain any profanity whatsoever.

Reports of the filter can be found from Twitter to Reddit, but the best example comes way of Patrick Beja. Taking to the former social media platform, Beja revealed that when trying to share a post about Astro's Playroom, full of PG praise for the game and Sony, the PS5 blocked its publication, citing issues with the text.

As you can see below, the tweet has zero profanity, though it's possible "torrent" is triggering the filter, though, for now, this is just a theory.

Oddly enough, there's no mention of this feature within the parental controls, which suggests it can not be removed.

At the moment of publishing, Sony has not commented on this feature or the backlash and speculation it has created. If this changes -- or if more information on the filter itself is provided -- we will be sure to update the story. Until then, for more coverage on the PS5 -- including all of the latest news, rumors, leaks, guides, and deals -- click here or check out the links below:

H/T, The Gamer.

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PlayStation Reportedly Censoring PS5 Users on Twitter - ComicBook.com

Written by Ruchika Goswamy | Pune | November 28, 2020 10:59:50 pm

A constant element of human life is thoughts. Construction of thoughts, ideas, concepts and convictions has been a never-ending process and humans have often expressed their thoughts in a wide variety of ways. In simple words, just like the need for food, clothes and water, expressing ones thoughts and feelings becomes a primal need.

We often talk about freedom of expression, ways of expression but what crossed my mind is what if thoughts dont get expressed? What happens when one cant express? What happens when one is not allowed to fully express themselves the challenges that one might face. And lastly, with no visible consequence, how does one comprehend this basic human need, said performer and collaborator Ashish Vaze.

Avyakta (Unexpressed), is a performance and a work in progress by Vaze and Stephanie Castrejon from the US, which makes an attempt to take stock of what could happen if one stops expressing their thoughts. The project is one of the creative crossovers of the fifth edition of the IAPAR International Theatre Festival (IITF), which will be held from December 4 to December 10.

Unlike the previous years, however, the official event of the Indian Centre of International Theatre Institute has adopted a hybrid format to face the uncertainty head on and keep theatres alive. The pandemic is surely something that one can imagine being screened on a film but now, it is something that we are all facing together. Although all sectors are still dwindling, given the circumstances, the worst hit is the sector of arts. We began by carefully assessing how to host the festival completely online but now, with spaces slowly opening up, we are hopeful for theatre to gain momentum in the new normal as well, said Vidyanidhee Varanase, director of the festival and alumnus of the National School of Drama.

While the hybrid format will mean the annual plethora of workshops and masterclasses will be conducted online, the on-ground performances will be held at The Box, Pune, on the first three days of the festival, amid all precautionary measures and safety guidelines.

Another performance project at IITF, Constant Acts of Disobeying, has been designed and directed by Aditi Venkateshwaran. It is an attempt to reflect on the censorship of a womans body, her thoughts and her voice. With the help of a collaboration between Margot Bareyt from France and Sayli Kulkarni and Tanvi Hegde from India, the performance tries to comprehend the mandate of masculinity as defined by famous Argentinian anthropologist Rita Segato, and how it can be taken down.

A unique segment of IITF 2020 will be the Emerging Artist Laboratory, an online interaction between young theatre-makers and mentors in the field of theatre, which will help mentors and youngsters to create work together.

Initiated in October, 20 students were selected for it, and the work thus created will premiere between December 6 and December 10 on the festivals social media channels. John Britton, Aniruddha Khutwad, Yuki Ellias, Dr Jimmy Noreiga and Abhiram Bhadkamkar each exploring a different tangent within theatre right from realistic acting, playwriting, physical theatre, inter-disciplinary practises and theatre for social change were a part of the Lab.

This year, in order to acknowledge artists driving change within and outside communities through artistic practises that benefit the art form or the society, IITF has announced singer and composer Shruthi Veena Vishwanath as their change maker, for her path-breaking work in the Indian artistic scene.

The Indian Express is now on Telegram. Click here to join our channel (@indianexpress) and stay updated with the latest headlines

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In hybrid online-offline format, theatre fest explores the Unexpressed, censorship of womens bodies and artistic collaborations - The Indian Express

President Trump took aim at Twitter late Thursday, saying it was putting out false trends, censoring Republican lawmakers and creating a matter of national security.

He called for Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, which provides a legal shield for publishers on third-party content, to be terminated.

Twitter is sending out totally false Trends that have absolutely nothing to do with what is really trending in the world. They make it up, and only negative stuff. Same thing will happen to Twitter as is happening to @FoxNews daytime. Also, big Conservative discrimination! the president tweeted.

For purposes of National Security, Section 230 must be immediately terminated!!! he added.

Mr. Trump also defended Pennsylvania state Sen. Doug Mastriano, who pushed for an informal hearing earlier this week by GOP lawmakers in the keystone state over potential election fraud.

The Republicans had Mr. Trumps legal team present evidence of election irregularities that they say led to presumptive President-elect Joseph R. Biden being named the winner of Pennsylvanias 20 electoral votes.

Wow! Twitter bans highly respected Pennsylvania State Senator Doug Mastriano after he did a great job of leading a hearing on the 2020 Election fraud. They and the Fake News, working together, want to SILENCE THE TRUTH. Cant let that happen. This is what Communist countries do! the president tweeted on Friday morning.

Twitter later issued a statement saying Mr. Mastrianos account was suspended by mistake.

This account was mistakenly suspended for perceived violations of our impersonation policy. This was an error. We have immediately reversed the decision and the account has been reinstated, a spokesperson for the company said.

Andrew Blake contributed to this report.

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Donald Trump says Twitter censorship is a national security issue - Washington Times

A discussion between Noam Chomsky, a political activist and celebrated linguist, and Vijay Prashad, writer and Frontline columnist, organised by the Tata Literature Festival, was abruptly cancelled a few hours before the event. Chomsky and Prashad were scheduled to speak on November 20 on an online platform about Chomskys latest book Internationalism or Extinction. The organisers said they cancelled the event to protect the integrity of the festival.

Both Chomsky and Prashad accused the organisers of censorship and said they will find another platform to have the discussion, which they said was important and relevant.

Over 50 well-known activists had urged Chomsky and Prashad to bow out of the event, organised by the Tatas, who, they alleged, were involved in widespread human rights violations. It is believed that Chomsky and Prashad were planning to read out a statement during the discussion against corporations such as the Tatas, and the Tatas in particular. The organisers reportedly learned of the plan to open the discussion with the statement and cancelled the event.

In a statement published on Peoples Dispatch (an international media organisation highlighting voices from peoples movements) and released to the media,Vijay Prashad says: Both of us agreed to hold this dialogue because we believe that the themes in the bookthe dangers of nuclear war, climate catastrophe, erosion of democracyrequire the widest circulation and debate. We were pleased to join even though we had reservations about the sponsor of the event.

Vijay Prashads statement says: Noams book is based on a lecture that he delivered in Boston in 2016, in which he warns that human beings must act to end various calamities. Of nuclearism, Noam writes specifically, Either we will bring it to an end, or its likely to bring us to an end. The urgency of these matters cannot be dismissed. In conversation with the actor Wallace Shawn, which followed the lecture, Noam speaks about the perils of public discourse. Objectivity has a meaning, he notes. It means reporting accurately and fairly whats going on inside the Beltway, White House, and Congress. In other words, what is being said by the elites is notable and must be given judicious care by the media owned by large corporations, but what is said outside those circles must be ignored or disparaged. Since we do not know why Tata and Mr. Dharker decided to cancel our session, we can only speculate and ask simply: was this a question of censorship?

Regarding India, the issue of the erosion of democracy is a serious matter, with the passage of bills such as the Citizenship (Amendment) Act (CAA) and the vast sums of money that have now suffocated the voices of the hundreds of millions of impoverished Indian voters as examples of the problem; the issue of warfare is significant, with the Indian government participating in the highly destabilising Quadrilateral Security Dialogue with Australia, Japan, and the United States. We wanted to talk about how governments such as those led by the Bharatiya Janata Party and corporations such as the Tatas are hastening humanity towards a deeper and deeper crisis.

Anil Dharkar, Tata Mumbai Literature Festival director, issued a statement saying: The festival which I founded and run with a dedicated team, owes its success to a free expression of ideas, not a free expression of someones specific agenda. The expression of such an agendawhether against a specific organisation, a corporation or an individualis therefore misplaced in the discussions at our festival.

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Tata Lit Fest cancels a discussion between Noam Chomsky and Vijay Prashad, raising concerns of censorship - Frontline

Since late May, fact checks, censors, warnings and even removals have appeared on President Trumps social media posts. Throughout the pandemic, social media companies have been exposed for censoring all kinds of voices, like medical professionals, politicians, event organizers and even the president.

The problem many have with this censorship is that the majority of these voices appear to be conservative-leaning. Is it true that companies like Facebook, Twitter and YouTube are silencing those with opinions they dont agree with? Is big tech truly infringing upon the First Amendment and taking away individuals and the presidents right to free speech?

While this narrative has been effective in stirring the emotions of those who agree with the voices being censored, its most likely not the case.

The censorship, which began as far back as March, was introduced by most big social media companies as a method to combat dangerous misinformation regarding the pandemic.

Misinformation is one of the biggest problems related to the pandemic and has made an incredibly complicated issue even more so. Removing harmful, incorrect information from social media sounds like a great step to prevent dangerous underreaction or overaction on a large scale.

However, this was much easier said than done.

Almost immediately, people started to take issue with new censorship policies when posts on Facebook were mistakenly blocked by a bug in their anti-spam system. The blocked posts included sources many thought to be legitimate and well recognized like Buzzfeed and USA Today. The bug was soon corrected, but the conspiracy theories had just begun.

Fox News Tucker Carlson spoke about a viral video on TouTube by doctors who were suggesting that the COVID-19 death count was heavily inflated and that serious policy changes were necessary. The video was taken down by YouTube, and Carlsons main argument was that media giants were silencing any form of dissent from the opinions of those in power. This may sound like something to be seriously worried about, but its actually the exact kind of misinformation that threatens our safety.

The doctors statements, thought by many to be a credible source of information, have since been completely debunked and proved to be filled with a variety of statistical errors. YouTube was right to censor this information as it was false and had it been spread any further, it couldve persuaded the millions who saw it to take the pandemic much less seriously and act accordingly.

On May 26, 2020, Twitter placed the first fact check warning on one of Trumps tweets. The president and many of his supporters were outraged, as it seemed as though Twitter was participating in partisan bias and trying to silence Trump for a difference in political views.

However, when the information contained in the tweet and the surrounding situation is examined closely, it becomes clear why this censorship was justified and necessary for American safety. The tweet was an argument for the theory that mail-in ballots are completely untrustworthy and shouldnt be used in the upcoming election. The reason Trump made this argument wasnt that it was true, but because he knows his supporters are more likely than the opposition to disobey quarantine standards and come out in larger numbers for an in-person event, as they have been for months, to protest the quarantine laws.

The tweet was a political move filled with misinformation that could still put people in danger. This is exactly the kind of censorship that isnt done because of partisan bias, but because false information could put our national health in danger.

Shortly after Trumps tweet was censored, a federal appeals court rejected a lawsuit claiming that these social media agencies were suppressing conservative views.

Evan Holden is a sophomore political science major. Contact Evan at holdened@dukes.jmu.edu.

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Opinion | Is big social media censoring those they disagree with? - The Breeze

The New York Times Guild, the union of employees of the Paper of Record, tweeted a condemnation on Sundayof one of their own colleagues, op-ed columnist Bret Stephens.Their denunciationwas marred by humiliating typos and even more so by creepy and authoritarian censorship demands and petulant appeals to management for enforcement of company rules against other journalists. To say that this is bizarre behavior from a union of journalists, of all people,is towoefullyunderstate the case.

What angered the union today was an op-ed by Stephens on Friday which voiced numerous criticisms of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning 1619 Project, published last year by the New York Times Magazine and spearheaded by reporter Nikole Hannah-Jones. One of the Projects principal arguments was expressed by a now-silently-deleted sentence that introduced it: that the countrys true birth date is not 1776, as has long been widely believed, but rather late 1619, when, the article claims, the first African slaves arrived on U.S. soil.

Despite its Pulitzer, the 1619 Project has become a hotly contested political and academic controversy, with the Trump administration seeking to block attempts to integrate its assertions into school curriculums,while numerousscholars of history accuse it of radically distorting historical fact, with some, such as Brown Universitys Glenn Loury, calling on the Pulitzer Board to revoke its award. Scholars have also vocally criticized the Times for stealth edits of the articleskey claims long afterpublication, without even noting to readers that it made these substantive changes let aloneexplaining why it made them.

In sum, the still-raging political, historical, and journalistic debate over the 1619 Project has become a majorcontroversy. In his Friday column, Stephens addressed the controversy by first noting the Projects positive contributions and accomplishments,then reviewed in detail the critiques of historians and other scholars of its central claims, and then sided with its critics by arguing that for all of its virtues, buzz, spinoffs and a Pulitzer Prize the 1619 Project has failed.

Without weighing in on the merits of Stephens critiques, some of which I agree with and some of which I do not, it is hardly debatable that his discussing thisvibrant multi-pronged debate issquarely within his functionas a political op-ed writer at a national newspaper. Stephens himself explained that he took the unusual step of critiquing his ownemployerswork because the 1619 Projecthas become, partly by its design and partly because of avoidable mistakes, a focal point of the kind of intense national debate that columnists are supposed to cover, contending that avoiding writing about it out of collegial deference is to be derelict in our responsibility to participate insocietys significant disputes.

But his colleagues in the New York Times Guildevidentlydo not believe that he had any right to express his views on these debates. Indeed, they are indignant that he did so. In a barely-literate tweet that not once buttwice misspelled the word its as its not a trivial level of ignorance for writers with the worlds most influential newspaper the union denounced Stephensand the paper itself on these grounds:

It is a short tweet, as tweets go, buttheyimpressively managed to pack it with multiple ironies, fallacies, and decreestypical of the petty tyrant. Above all else, thisstatement, and the mentality it reflects, is profoundly unjournalistic.

To start with, this is a case of journalists using their union not to demand greater editorial freedom or journalistic independence something one would reasonably expect from a journalists union but demanding its opposite: that writers at the New York Times be prohibited by management from expressing their views and perspectives about the controversies surrounding the 1619 Project.In other words: they are demanding that their own journalistic colleagues be silenced and censored. What kind of journalists plead with management for greater restrictions on journalistic expression rather than fewer?

Apparently, the answer is New York Times journalists. Indeed, this is not the first time they have publicly implored corporate management to restrict the freedom of expression and editorial freedom of their journalistic colleagues. At the end of July, the Guild issued a series of demands, one of which was that sensitivity reads should happen at the beginning of the publication process, with compensation for those who do them.

For those not familiar with sensitivity reads: consider yourself fortunate. As the New York Times itself reported in 2017, sensitivity readershave been used by book publishers to gut books that have been criticized, in order tovet the narrative for harmful stereotypes and suggested changes. The Guardian explained in 2018that sensitivity readers are a rapidly growing industry in the book publishing world to weed out any implicit bias or potentially objectionable material not just in storylines but even in characters. It quoted the author Lionel Shriver about the obvious dangers: there is, she said, a thin line between combing through manuscripts for anything potentially objectionable to particular subgroups and overt political censorship.

As creepy as sensitivity readers are for fiction writing and other publishing fields, it is indescribably toxic for journalism,which necessarily questions or pokes at rather than bows to the most cherished, sacred pieties. For it to be worthwhile, it must publish material reporting and opinion pieces thatmight be potentially objectionable to all sorts of powerful factions, including culturally hegemonic liberals.

But thisis a function which the New York Times Union wants not merely to avoid fulfilling themselves but, far worse, to deny their fellow journalists. They crave a whole new layer of editorial hoop-jumping in order to get published, a cumbersome, repressive new protocol for drawing even moreconstraining lines around what can and cannot be said beyond the restrictions already imposed by the standard orthodoxies of the Times and their tone-flattening editorial restrictions.

When journalists exploit their unions not to demand better pay, improved benefits, enhanced job security or greater journalistic independence but instead as an instrument for censoring their own journalistic colleagues, then the concept of unions and journalism is wildly perverted.

Then there is the tattletale petulance embedded in the Unions complaint. In demanding enforcement of workplace rules by management against a fellow journalist they do not specify which sacred rule Stephens allegedly violated these union members sound more like Human Resources Assistant Managers or workplace informants than they do intrepid journalists. Since when do unions of any kind, but especially unions of journalists, unite to complain that corporate managers and their editorial bosses have been too lax in the enforcement of rulesgoverning what their underlings can and cannot say?

The hypocrisy of the Unions grievance is almost too glaring to even bother highlighting, and is the least ofits sins. The union members denounce Stephens and the paper forgoing after one of its [sic] own and then, in the next breath, publicly vilify their colleagues column because, in their erudite view, it reeks. This is the same union whose members, just a few months ago, quite flamboyantly staged a multi-day social media protest a quite public one ina fit of rage becausethe papers Opinion Editor, James Bennet, published an op-ed by U.S. Senator Tom Cotton advocating the deployment of the U.S. military to repress protests and riots in U.S. cities; Bennet lost his job in the fallout. And many of these same union members now posturing as solemn, righteous opponents of publicly going after ones colleagues notoriously mocked, scorned, ridiculed, and condemned, first privately and then publicly, another colleague, Bari Weiss, until she left the paper, citing these incessant attacks.

Clearly this is not a union that dislikes public condemnations of colleagues. Whatever principle is motivating them, that is plainly not it.

Ive long been a harsh criticof Stephens (and Weiss) journalism and opinion writing. But it would never occur to me to take steps to try to silence them. If they were my colleagues and published an article I disliked or expressed views I found pernicious, I certainly would not whine to management that they broke the rules and insist that they should not have been allowed to have expressed what they believe.

Thats because Im a journalist, and I know that journalism can have value only if it fosters divergent views and seeks to expand rather thanreduce the freedom of discourse and expression permitted by society and by employers. And whatever one wants to say about Stephens career and record of writing and Ive had a lot of negative things to say about it harshly critiquingyour own employers Pulitzer-winning series, one beloved by powerful media, political and cultural figures, is thetypeof challenge to power that many journalists who do nothing but spout pleasing, popular pieties love to preen as embodying.

Therehas never been a media outlet where I have worked or where I have been published that did not frequently also publish opinions with which I disagree and articles I dislike, including the one in which I am currently writing. I would readily use my platforms to critique what was published, but it would never even occur to me take steps to try to prevent publication or, worse, issue pitiful public entreaties to management that Something Be Done. If youare eager to constrict the boundaries of expression, why would you choosejournalism of all lines of work? Itd be like someone whobelieves space travel to be an immoral wasteof resources opting to becomean astronaut for NASA.

Perhaps these tawdry episodes should be unsurprising. After all, one major reason that social media companies which never wanted the obligation tocensorbut instead sought to be content-neutral platforms for the transmission of communications in the mold of AT&T turned into active speech regulators was because the public, often led by journalists, began demanding that they censor more. Some journalists even devotesignificant chunks of their careerto publicly complaining thatFacebook and Twitterare failing to enforce their rules by not censoring robustly enough.

A belief in the virtues of free expression was once a cornerstone of the journalistic spirit. Guilds and unions fought against editorial control, notdemandedgreater amountsbe imposed by management. They defended colleagues when they were accused by editorial or corporatebosses of rules violations, not publicly tattled and invited, even advocated for, workplace disciplinary measures.

But a belief in free expression is being rapidly eclipsed in many societal sectors by a belief in the virtues of top-down managerial censorship, silencing and enhanced workplace punishment for thought and speech transgressions. As this imperious but whiny New York Times Guildcondemnationreflects, this trend can be seen most vividly, and most destructively, in mainstream American journalism. Nothing guts the core function of journalism more than this mindset.

Update: Oct. 11, 2020, 8:40p.m. ETThe New York Times Guild moments ago deleted its tweet denouncing Stephens and the paper, and thenposted this:

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The New York Times Guild Once Again Demands Censorship Of Colleagues - The Intercept