Category Archives: Censorship

It is time to draw a line. In the fight against Covid-19, people across the world have been required to suspend many hard-won freedoms to give up travel, loved ones, places of worship, the pub. They have gone along with it because they understand that some temporary restrictions on liberty are sometimes needed in times of crisis (even though we must ensure they do not become permanent). But one thing we cannot give an inch on is freedom of speech, our right to speak and our right to hear others, which is under serious threat right now.

An unholy alliance of corporate tech giants, government and international agencies is working to narrow the range of acceptable debate about coronavirus. Since the beginning of this crisis, officialdom has talked up the threat posed to containing Covid by an infodemic the World Health Organisations cute phrase for the spread of misinformation online. Social-media firms have been put under renewed pressure to expand their already extensive policies on what is and isnt acceptable content. And theyve been all too happy to oblige.

Take Facebook, home to around 2.6 billion monthly active users. During this crisis it has moved the goalposts dramatically on what can be posted. At first, it said it would continue to remove misinformation that could contribute to imminent physical harm, while deploying its army of fact-checkers to flag certain posts, depress their distribution, and direct sharers of such material to reliable information. Just a few weeks on and it is removing event posts for anti-lockdown protests in various US states, in tandem with state officials.

Last month it was revealed that Facebook had removed event pages for anti-lockdown protests in California, New Jersey and Nebraska. A spokesperson told Politico that Facebook reached out to state officials to understand the scope of their orders and resolved to remove the posts when gatherings do not follow the health parameters established by the government and are therefore unlawful, such as when protests intend to flout social-distancing rules.

Facebook has stressed that state governments did not ask them to remove specific posts. But what seems to have happened is almost worse. Facebook moderators appear to be banning events posts on the basis of what they reckon the laws of a particular state constitute. As David Kaye, UN special rapporteur on free expression, told the Guardian: If people show up to protest and I think the vast majority of public-health officials think thats really dangerous its up to the government to clamp down on them. For Facebook to do it just seems suspect.

Whats more, Kaye continued, this informal arrangement reached between Facebook and state governments will make it harder for citizens to challenge instances of censorship. If a state government were to issue a formal takedown notice to Facebook, asking it to remove a post for an illegal protest, then that government action would at least be subject to a challenge in court. But Facebook, a private company, is allowed to take down whatever it wants and is protected from legal liability.

This is, in effect, government outsourcing censorship to the private sector. Even if straightforward takedown requests arent being made, the increasingly cosy relationship between Big Tech, governments and intergovernmental organisations is leading to elite consensus effectively being enforced on social media. In a recent interview with CNN, YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki said her platform will remove anything that is medically unsubstantiated, as well as anything that goes against WHO [World Health Organisation] recommendations, essentially asserting this one UN agency as infallible and its critics as heretics.

As many have pointed out, this standard is almost impossible to enforce consistently not least because the WHO has got a fair bit wrong over the course of this pandemic, and in previous crises. But it seems YouTubes guidelines are now sufficiently broad that it can take down any dissident post that sparks outrage. It recently banned a viral video of two doctors, Dan Erickson and Artin Massihi, who run a group of urgent care centres in Bakersfield, California, discussing the data they have drawn from Covid testing, and arguing that California should lift its lockdown.

Experts and commentators have questioned the doctors claims and conclusions, and even their motivations (apparently one of them is a Trump supporter). But these two are not snarling conspiracy theorists. They are experienced medics giving their opinions on the data as they see it. But this apparently cannot be hosted on YouTube because, in the words of a spokesperson, it disputes the efficacy of local health authority recommended guidance on social distancing. It seems you cannot question the wisdom of the authorities at all.

As for the real snarling conspiracy theorists, theyve also been getting booted off platforms during this crisis. David Icke has been kicked off Facebook and YouTube, where hitherto he was allowed to promote his cobblers about lizard people, vaccines and Bill Gates relatively unmolested. But for spreading the conspiracy theory that 5G causes coronavirus, among other madcap corona ideas, he has been damned by the tech giants for spreading harmful disinformation. Inevitably, Icke and his supporters have taken this as vindication that, in his words, the elite are TERRIFIED.

Mad as these people are, the censorship of conspiracy theorists is a worrying development. For years, while Big Tech firms have expanded censorship in other areas, they have resisted clamping down on Icke and his ilk. As recently as March, Facebook said that claims that dont directly result in physical harm, like conspiracy theories about the origin of the virus would be fact-checked rather than censored. When Facebook banned Infowars Alex Jones in 2018 it was at pains to say that this was for glorifying violence and hate speech, not for spreading 9/11 or Sandy Hook conspiracy theories.

Social-media companies hesitancy in censoring conspiracy theories up to now was not out of any grand principle their policing of hateful speech is just as censorious. But notwithstanding the egotism and self-righteousness of Silicon Valley, you can understand why companies primarily interested in making money would be wary of moving more definitively into the role of pronouncing on what is and isnt true. Until now, it seems. That they hide behind the experts and reliable sources makes this no less problematic for free debate.

Facebook and YouTube now monopolise huge arenas of public discussion. Writers and thinkers unable to promote their work on Facebook, or videomakers unable to upload their work to YouTube, are effectively denied access to a significant portion of what now constitutes the public square. At a time when billions of people are under house arrest, and the literal public square is largely off-limits, this is an even more sinister development. As is the fact that governments and powerful organisations seem to be working hand in glove with tech firms to enforce conformity.

Covid-19 and the policies being pursued to tame it affect everyone. We must be free to question and debate all the issues this crisis raises, insisting that no one person or organisation has a monopoly on truth and that dangerous nonsense can be defeated in free debate. And we need to make sure we have a (relatively) free internet at the end of all this. That some firms are now helping to police offline protests, organised to oppose government policy, is a particularly alarming indication of how far Big Tech censorship has spread during this pandemic. We need to flatten the curve.

Tom Slater is deputy editor at spiked. Follow him on Twitter: @Tom_Slater_

To enquire about republishing spikeds content, a right to reply or to request a correction, please contact the managing editor, Viv Regan.

See the article here:
We need to stop the spread of Big Tech censorship - Spiked

Put hate aside, work for all

I am not an easy going person all the time, but there is something in the water that has caused all this hate during this time of lockdown. The name calling and threats, carrying weapons into the Capitol building and the partisan politics are getting more radical as each side becomes entrenched in who is right and wrong. There are thousands of people who have died during this pandemic, for no choice of their own. We all want to get back to work, school, church and the normal life that we had until February.

There may be constitutional rights, but they all have to take a back seat to the COVID-19 virus, not that we don't have those rights, but not the right to cause harm or spread infections. Ask those who have lost family, friends and co-workers and they would likely set aside their rights to have them back.

Put the hate and politics aside and work together for the good of all.

Tom Gilbert

Warren

Governor Whitmer has a task force to study why a higher percentage of blacks have died from the coronavirus. This task force should search for facts and not excuses.

George Hardy

Warren

As a long time subscriber to The Macomb Daily, I read the two gentlemen's letters from the May 10 edition. Although I did not agree with them, the part that was of concern to me was that the one urged you not to publish the offending column (authored by Brian Pannebecker). We live in the United States of America. We have freedom of speech. Not everyone is in step with the mainstream media as he states. No one is forcing them to read these columns. There are certain writers that I do not read because I know I do not agree with them but that doesnt mean I think they shouldnt be published. I also try and read some that I dont agree with to try and understand where they are coming from. I spend time fact-checking from different sources and then make up my mind. We have these freedoms because we live in America.

Janet Vereecken

Macomb Twp.

Original post:
Letters to the Editor 5-15-2020: Set aside hate, get facts and no censorship - The Macomb Daily

Youve probably heard of at least several authors of this new Politico piece, which I suspect but dont know for sure was submitted to (and rejected by) the New York Times after the paper retroactively redacted a column by Bret Stephens on the overrepresentation of Ashkenazi Jews in intellectual and creative fields. The article by Paresky et al. is a severe indictment of the Timess policies, which now include giving in to an outrage mob and changing a column (as well as removing genuine facts), without leaving a record of the changes. Truly, the New York Times under its relatively new management (wokemeister A. G. Sulzberger) is going down the tubesfast.

You probably know of Jon Haidt and Steve Pinker, whom Ive written about often, and have likely heard of Nadine Strossen (former head of the ACLU and now a Professor of Law Emerita at New York Law school) and of the first author, Pamela Paresky, who writes for Psychology Today and lectures at my own university. These are not slouches, and theyre rightfully pissed off. The only one I know here is Pinker, but it takes a lot to make him append his name to a piece like this. He musters and dispenses his anger carefully and infrequently.

Click on the screenshot below to read, and to weep at how far the New York Times has fallen. Truly, even the dubious 1619 Project pales before how they treated this column by Bret Stephens.

Heres the column, which has been changed with the redacted passages completely gone. Instead, theres a note at the top that says this:

Editors Note:

An earlier version of this Bret Stephens column quoted statistics from a 2005 paper that advanced a genetic hypothesis for the basis of intelligence among Ashkenazi Jews. After publication Mr. Stephens and his editors learned that one of the papers authors, who died in 2016, promoted racist views. Mr. Stephens was not endorsing the study or its authors views, but it was a mistake to cite it uncritically. The effect was to leave an impression with many readers that Mr. Stephens was arguing that Jews are genetically superior. That was not his intent. He went on instead to argue that culture and history are crucial factors in Jewish achievements and that, as he put it, At its best, the West can honor the principle of racial, religious and ethnic pluralism not as a grudging accommodation to strangers but as an affirmation of its own diverse identity. In that sense, what makes Jews special is that they arent. They are representational. We have removed reference to the study from the column.

Note that the sin of Stephenss column was not being racist or giving erroneous facts. Rather, he cited a paper uncritically when one of its authors had make racist statements. And Stephenss intentthe cultural hypothesiswas apparently already clear in the original paper. The apology here is not from Stephens, but from the paper to those readers outraged that Stephenss column would cite a paper partly written by an author who said racist things and dared imply that creative and intelligence of Ashkenazi Jews might have a genetic basis. (Saying something like that is, of course, verboten.) And you cant even check for yourself, for the paper has removed any reference to the study. (The link isnt in the Paresky et al. article either, but you can find the paper, published in the Journal of Biosocial Science, for free here.)

The original Stephens column cited a peer-reviewed study that advanced the hypothesis that Ashkenazi Jews had a complement of genes that led in part to their high achievement and intelligence. Stephens didnt accept the genetic explanation, and, in his column, apparently advanced an alternative cultural hypothesis. (I have no dog in this fight and have followed neither the data nor the controversy).

What happened is that social media discovered that one of the authors of the paper had expressed racist views. Stephens neither parroted them nor mentioned that, nor did he even allude to eugenics. But of course thats not good enough for social media: the fact that one author did express racist views discredits, in the mind of Outrage Culture, not just the original paper, but Stephenss column as well. Business Insider writes that Stephenss original column led to canceled subscriptions.

Paresky et al note that the appropriate response of the NYT would have been this:

. . . . to acknowledge the controversy, to publish one or more replies, and to allow Stephens and his critics to clarify the issues. Instead, the editors deleted parts of the columnnot because anything in it had been shown to be factually incorrect but because it had become controversial.

But the Times didnt follow that pathnot at all. Instead, they took it upon themselves to change what Stephens wrote. Thats censorship. (Note: the alterations are attributed to the papers editors wenot to Stephens.) To continue with Paresky et al.:

Instead, the editors deleted parts of the columnnot because anything in it had been shown to be factually incorrect but because it had become controversial.

Worse, the explanation for the deletions in theEditors Notewas not accurate about the edits the paper made after publication. The editors did not just remove reference to the study. They expurgated the articles original subtitle (which explicitly stated Its not about having higher IQs), two mentions of Jewish IQs, and a list of statistics about Jewish accomplishment: During the 20th century, [Ashkenazi Jews] made up about 3 percent of the U.S. population but won 27 percent of the U.S. Nobel science prizes and 25 percent of the ACM Turing awards. They account for more than half of world chess champions. These statistics about Jewish accomplishments were quoted directly from the study, but they originated in other studies. So, even if theTimeseditors wanted to disavow the paper Stephens referenced, the newspaper could have replaced the passage with quotes from the original sources.

The authors wind up listing three pernicious precedents for American journalism caused by the Timess handling of this piece. Rather than paraphrase them, Ill just quote from them:

First, while we cannot know what drove the editors decision, the outward appearance is that they surrendered to an outrage mob, in the process giving an imprimatur of legitimacy to the false and ad hominem attacks against Stephens. The Editors Note explains that Stephens was not endorsing the study or its authors views, and that it was not his intent to leave an impression with many readers that [he] was arguing that Jews are genetically superior. The combination of the explanation and the post-publication revision implied that such an impression was reasonable. It was not.

Unless theTimesreverses course, we can expect to see more such mobs, more retractions, and also preemptive rejections from editors fearful of having to make such retractions.

. . . Second, theTimesredacted a published essay based on concerns about retroactive moral pollution, not about accuracy. While it is true that an author of the paper Stephens mentioned, the late anthropologist Henry Harpending, made some deplorable racist remarks, that does not mean that every point in every paper he ever coauthored must be deemed radioactive. Facts and arguments must be evaluated on their content. Will theTimesand other newspapers now monitor the speech of scientists and scholars and censor articles that cite any of them who, years later, say something offensive? Will it crowdsource that job to Twitter and then redact its online editions whenever anyone quoted in theTimesis later canceled?

And finally:

Third, for theTimesto disappear passages of a published article into an inaccessible memory hole is an Orwellian act that, thanks to the newspapers actions, might now be seen as acceptable journalistic practice. It is all the worse when the editors published account of what they deleted is itself inaccurate. This does a disservice to readers, historians and journalists, who are left unable to determine for themselves what the controversy was about, and to Stephens, who is left unable to defend himself against readers worst suspicions.

In other words, what the paper did makes it look like Stephens somehow transgressed, and thus was given a spanking in words by the editor.

This is all part and parcel not only of the Timess increasing wokeness, evidenced in its 1619 Project, in its fairly blatant favoring of pro-Palestinian over pro-Jewish news (remember the long article about the stray bullet, implying that Israeli soldiers murdered a Palestinian medical aid worker?), and now in an unbelievable act of post facto censorship without letting us see what was censored.

The erasing or demonization of a person, or in this case a paper, because some of the views expressed by an author were racist, is classical behavior of the Control Left. First its Gandhi, then Galton, then Thomas Jefferson, and who will be next? And apparently we also need to remove facts that are indisputable because someone who had racist views expressed them! Should we redact the Declaration of Independence because Jefferson owned slaves?

Well, the Times is already trying to rewrite American history with the 1619 Project, which, unbelievably, got a Pulitzer Prize. Even those who like the Projectand its aims are admirableshould deplore its misrepresentation of fact and of history to accomplish an ideological end. (Sadly, some people, even here, will swallow the means of distortion if the ends are antiracist). But such misrepresentation could also be considered moral pollution, for its bending the truthand a paper like the New York Times cannot afford to bend the truth, or, in this case, expunge the truth. Thats truly Orwellian; remember what Winston Smith did for a living?

Its a pity that four distinguished authors had to correct the papers missteps in an article in Politico, rather than in the paper itself.

h/t: Muffy

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Four heavy hitters criticize the New York Times for Orwellian retroactive censorship - stopthefud

Its not easy to convince me that a class action by Facebook moderators (censors) isnt just a case of some pure BS meant to extract money from a company that just happens to have lots of cash to spare.

But according to Facebook moderators (human censors, to be clear) theyre basically on a par with war veterans/survivors.

This is not to say that interacting with billions of other people (such is Facebooks audience) might not legitimately give anybody disturbing nightmares, anxiety attacks, and grace their minds with intrusive imagery some of the prime ways your old, actual PTSD will manifest.)

But there seem to be other ways, too like this one:

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People really started to believe these posts they were supposed to be moderating, said Chloe a made-up name The Verge has used for its stories.

Facebook seems to have done well, though: it will only have to pay out $52 million in settlements to thousands of moderators who claim having developed PTSD from reviewing Facebook content.

And if there is something a trillion-dollar tech company like Facebook can do about any of this now like, say, pay out an average content moderator turned conspiracy theorist $1,000 or more just to keep these former third-party employees out of its hair of course it will.

After all, these moderators are actual people, with lives, feelings, and depending on where you stand, even souls, who were initially hired to complement Facebooks inadequate smart algorithmic solutions that are meant to automatically weed out anything unwanted by the platform, as it tried to make its primary ad business as appealing as ever and then, a while later, navigate the political minefield that is the US politics.

Turns out, though algorithms are still as smart, or as stupid, as the people who write them. So we still need real people.

Im fucked up, man, Facebook moderator Randy (fake name/NDA reasons) told The Verge.

See more here:
Facebook censors awarded $1000 for being subjected to conspiracy theories - Reclaim The Net

Forced apology shows the colleges foremost interest is its public perception

As far as meaningful apologies go, this is one of the best ones Ive seen from a college.

Arizonas Maricopa County Community College District not only apologized for trampling on the academic freedom of a Scottsdale Community College professor, but promised an immediate independent investigation into its handling of the situation.

Its also creating a Committee on Academic Freedom to ensure that the districts longstanding commitment to the value of inclusion does not come at the expense of academic freedom.

The Monday announcement from interim Chancellor Steven Gonzales came four days after the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education warned SCC that its actions were flatly inconsistent with its First Amendment obligations and would chill faculty expression.

Nicholas Damask, chair of the political science department, teaches a world politics class that includes a module called Islamic Terrorism. Three quiz questions in the module asked whom terrorists strive to emulate, which Islamic verses encourage terrorism, and when terrorism is justified in Islam, according to FIREs letter.

A student complained to Damask that the questions were in distaste of Islam and didnt accept his explanation of the legitimacy of the quiz questions. Soon the same complaint had been shared online and SCCs Instagram account started getting bombarded with complaints about the quiz.

In an Instagram post that has since been removed but remains archived, interim SCC President Chris Haines not only agreed that the quiz questions were inaccurate, inappropriate, and not reflective of the inclusive nature of our college, but said Damask will be apologizing to the offended student.

The college was also permanently banning those questions from future quizzes. Haines implied they violated the colleges nondiscrimination policy.

We applaud the student for bringing this to our attention and encourage any student or employee to speak out when offended by quiz questions, Haines said. (Side note: Please use Archive.Today to document online posts you think may be removed. Haines post does not display on the most popular archive service despite being saved more than 200 times in a single day.)

MORE: UCLA censors book on Islamic Totalitarianism at free speech event

Not only did Damasks dean tell him the districts governing board was reviewing the matter, and that a leader in the Islamic faith would now be screening his course content, but the college refused to tell a local newspaper if the professor was facing discipline. (Investigating protected speech by itself can violate the First Amendment, nevermind issuing sanctions at the end of the investigation.)

Damask left these calls [with Dean of Instruction Kathleen Iudicello] feeling that his job security was in jeopardy, FIRE program officer Katlyn Patton wrote to President Haines.

As for that apology that the president promised? Marketing and Public Relations Manager Eric Sells wrote it, sent it to multiple administrators and warned that senior leadership would probably want to review it. The draft apology pledged, in Damasks name, to ensure theres no additional insensitivities in course material. (Sells grammar is incorrect here.)

The college committed the trifecta of censorship with this course of action, violating not only the First Amendment and core tenets of academic freedom but also state law protecting faculty against compelled expression of a particular view,Patton wrote. She reminded Haines that the district already paid a six-figure settlement in the past year to resolve a First Amendment lawsuit brought by faculty.

(The settlements mandated training on freedom of expression and academic freedom apparently didnt work, which is too bad, because those are explicit conditions of its accreditation.)

Patton warned the president that she doesnt want to litigate this, because the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals (whose rulings are binding on SCC) has already exempted academic freedom from a precedent that lets employers regulate employee speech pursuant to their official duties. That 2014 ruling went even further than Damasks quiz, protecting speech related to scholarship orteaching.

SCCs ludicrous overreaction to the quiz questions sets a dangerous precedent for Damasks entire department, Patton wrote:

Further, the study of political scienceand particularly world politics and terrorismwill almost inevitably venture into sometimes-uncomfortable territory and include topics on which many students will have both varying and deeply-held beliefs. That students may experience discomfort, and even anger, in the course of their studies should have no bearing on a professors right to select relevant materials and test students on their knowledge of those materials as they see fit. The students in Damasks class are adults in a college-level course and should be treated as such.

MORE: Six-figure settlement with student punished for Islamic terrorist spoof

The forced apology is a stark admission that the colleges foremost interest is its public perception, which it has shamefully elevated above the well-established expressive and academic freedom rights of its students and faculty, Patton concluded. (FIREs blog post Monday gives no suggestion the college responded by its May 8 deadline.)

Mondays announcement from Chancellor Gonzales left out names and other details of the dispute, but made clear that the quiz questions were taken out of context and their subject was within the scope of the course. Some people even made threats against the unnamed professor.

Gonzales said he was troubled by what appears to be a rush to judgement in how the college responded to the controversy, including by violating its own policy and procedure:

I apologize, personally, and on behalf of the Maricopa Community Colleges, for the uneven manner in which this was handled and for our lack of full consideration for our professors right of academic freedom.

Perhaps alluding to FIREs warning that an investigation itself can trigger legal liability, the chancellor cleared up misinformation that the districts governing board was investigating the professor or might be planning to. Damask is not in jeopardy of losing his position.

As for the academic freedom committee, its members will be identified by the end of the week, he said. Their task is to champion academic freedom education and training and to resolve academic freedom disputes in the hope of ensuring this fundamental academic value is better understood and realized alongside our longstanding commitment to the value of inclusion.

If theres one thing folks like FIRE can tell you, however, its that promises made in the midst of a PR disaster can go unfulfilled if the public loses interest. The first test of the districts commitment will be whom it appoints to the new committee, and the second will be its transparency with the results of the independent investigation.

MORE: American university punishes prof for refusing to proselytize Islam

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The British magazine was extremely popular with readers but not with the Irish censor. Its portraits of ireland are timeless, however

In his memoir thelong-time editor of the Irish Press Tim Pat Coogan recalls a story that the firms controlling director, Vivion de Valera, once told him.

It concerned Vivions schooldays at Blackrock College and how he had once been summoned to the college presidents office. There, the future Catholic archbishop of Dublin John Charles McQuaid instructed Vivion to review a pile of newspaper cuttings of full-page adverts for Clearys department store. The adverts, Coogan recounts, included small line drawings of women modelling underwear of a design which reflected the modest standards of the Ireland of that era. To the somewhat baffled Vivion, McQuaid pointed out the insidious immorality of the drawings. Some of them, if one used a magnifying glass, indicated the outline of a mons veneris.

The hint was duly delivered by Vivion to his father, amon de Valera, then taoiseach and controlling director of the Irish Press. But ecclesiastical policing of the press extended beyond Irish newspapers: the presence of undesirable British newspapers, particularly the hugely popular Picture Post, represented a contagion of immorality, indecency and obscenity.

Published in London as a photojournalismmagazine between 1938 and 1957, it sold more than 1.5 million copies a week, and quickly attracted the ire of Irish clerics because of what the magazines historian David J Marcou has called the vitality, humour, and pathos of its reflections and dreams, as well as the intelligence of its layouts and interests.

The human interest aspect of its photoessays covered everything from swimwear contests to urban life, crime and art and would lead the Picture Post to be the most frequently banned British publication in Ireland. Less than three months after its launch came the first complaint to the censorship of publications board. In February 1939 the Rev JA Twomey protested against the indecent and suggestive pictorial matter contained in several editions of the Picture Post, which has a wide sale in each week in Cork.

The following month brought a letter from the Rev MJ Hennelly of Tuam, who lodged an official complaint with the censorship board on the grounds that the magazine was indecent and obscene. It seems that photographs of art were the source of this objection, with Hennelly declaring that such images may be alright for the art-lover, but for the ordinary boy and girl they are abominably suggestive.

But for a publication to be banned it had to be found to have been indecent or obscene over several sequential issues;isolated instances could not be punished. In an attempt to demonstrate the sequential indecency of the magazine, John Charles McQuaid, while still president of Blackrock College, lodged a lengthy and detailed official complaint with the censorship board. He alleged that obscenity and indecency had occurred 12 times in the issue of January 21st, 1939; eight times in the edition of January 28th; six times in the February 4th edition; 12 times in the February 11th edition; and eight times in the February 25th edition.

Among the items that McQuaid objected to in the latter two editions were a photograph of a woman model in a swimsuit; a photograph showing the lower legs of women roller-skaters; photographs of statues of the female form at Crystal Palace in London; photographs of women mud wrestlers; and a photograph of a painting of a nude woman sleeping on a couch.

Despite McQuaids complaint the magazine was not banned, though Picture Post was obviously informed of Irish sensitivities as it voluntarily removed two pages Painters of Paris from an April 1939 edition. Despite this attempt at sanitising the magazine for Irish readers, complaints continued.

In October 1939, Ellie Kelly, a Dublin newsagent, complained that the magazine had a huge circulation in the city and noted that its terrible to think this awful filth is in a Christian country. She also recorded how she had refused to stock the magazine and had refereed it to the priests of the parish.

Those priests would no doubt have been aghast at the description of Ireland in the November 4th edition. Drawing on his time in Dublin earlier in the decade, Orson Welles declared that censorship of books and controlled education have produced a crop of young men as blankly ignorant of the modern world as if they lived in the thirteenth century, mentally concentrated upon the idea of bringing the Protestant North under Catholic control in the sacred name of national unity.

Referring to the IRAs bombing of Coventry the previous August, Welles asserted that the attack had been carried out by young priest-taught men who purify their souls at mass and confession before they leave a bomb in a London underground station.

Describing the Catholic Church as that clumsy system of frustration, that strange compendium of ancient traditions and habit systems, he declared it as the most formidable single antagonist in the way of human adjustment.

Unsurprisingly, complaints flooded into the censorship board: one letter described it as nothing short of a national scandal that such journals should be allowed to enter Irish homes; another described Welless article as highly blasphemous; yet another described Picture Post as not fit reading for the family in our Catholic state.

The Rev Thomas Burke from Connemara asked: in the name of God and Ireland, why has this indecent, blasphemous production even been allowed to enter this country? He hastened to add that the edition that he had read was given to me recently by a friend.

Official complaints also flowed in, with Francis OReilly, secretary of the Catholic Truth Society of Ireland, itemising content from four sequential editions as being indecent or obscene. Similarly, McQuaid lodged an official complaint itemising content from three sequential editions as indecent or obscene. On this occasion, Picture Post was, on the advice of the censorship board, banned by the minister for justice, Gerry Boland, for three months.

The date of the ban was December 16th, 1939, but, at the request of the magazines distributor, Eason and Sons, the justice department held back publishing the official notice in the government gazette, Iris Oifigiuil. This allowed Easons to distribute the edition of December 20th, 1939, which had already arrived in Ireland. However, a request that the December 27th edition 26,000 copies of which were in Liverpool awaiting dispatch to Dublin be allowed to circulate in the State, subject to the justice department clearing its content, was denied.

The ban prompted a rare protest from members of the public. In January 1940 a petition signed by 35 people from Waterford, Kilkenny, Louth and Dublin was sent to the censorship board. Describing Picture Post as one of the most human, impartial, and democratic papers recently circulating in Eire, the petition argued that an occasional representation of nudity or semi-nudity, in a periodical which aims at giving a comprehensive view of modern life, does not constitute a general tendency to indecency. It concluded by noting that any action whose chief effect is to hinder the free circulation of varying opinions is detrimental to the moral and intellectual interests of the country.

The three-month ban expired at the end of March 1940 and in an attempt to mend fences Picture Post decided to do a special issue The Story of Ireland in July 1940. Writing to taoiseach amon de Valera, editor Tom Hopkinson noted that the special issue tried to treat the whole subject in a way that would be at once friendly and impartial.

However, as if to prove the maxim no good deed goes unpunished, the issue was immediately banned under wartime censorship regulations. It had unfortunately referred to a news item that the censorship authorities had prohibited Irish newspapers from revealing:the capture of a boat off the Irish coast containing two Germans and a cargo of explosives.

Subsequent complaints by members of the public to the censorship board centred on adverts that one reader viewed as selling filthy contraceptives. Despite this, Picture Post continued to circulate in Ireland. Writing a profile of the state for New Statesman in 1941, Elizabeth Bowen noted that English newspapers and periodicals can be obtained on order. Picture Post is in constant demand.

In its final years it was banned numerous times: between July 1948 and June 1956 it was banned no fewer than 10 times, with each ban being lifted on appeal or following assurances given the censorship board. But perhaps Picture Post had the last laugh. Its January 1957 edition carried a feature, This is Ireland, in which it noted that the most delightful thing about Ireland is that in many ways it is foreign, but it is still British in quite a few others... You can understand the language unless the peasants talk Gaelic at you; the pubs are open all hours and the churches are crammed full on Sundays.

The visitor also took delight in the native sport of hurley, a dashing form of hockey, and the fact that nobody is really expected to be strictly on time for an appointment.

Five months later Picture Post ceased publication. A row in 1950 between publisher Edward Hulton and long-time editor Tom Hopkinson over Hultons spiking of an article on atrocities committed by the South Korean army had led to Hopkinsons departure. The magazine never recovered.

On its demise one reviewer from this newspaper noted that while Picture Post had begun as a vigorous weekly picture paper with a serious interest in social and economic problems, by the late 1950s it was aiming at a fairly low common denominator which presumably prefers its pictures to be thrown on the television screen.

The loss of advertisers to television and a drop in circulation to below 600,000 saw the Picture Post publish its last edition in June 1957, a move no doubt welcomed by the ever-alert guardians of Irelands morality.

Mark OBrien is an associate professor at Dublin City University and the author of The Fourth Estate: Journalism in Twentieth-Century Ireland (2017)

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Immoral, indecent and obscene, or timeless portraits of Ireland? - The Irish Times

State control on information and media and aggressive pressure on journalists seeking to maintain their independence are critical elementsof the modern Russian state. Although the Russian constitution has an article expressly prohibiting censorship, in reality censorship is a constant factor in the life of the Russian media. Censorship is carried out both directly and indirectly by state pressure and through self-censorship by journalists. The Kennan Institute hosted three well-known Russian publicists, analysts, and commentators, Konstantin Sonin, Konstantin Eggert, and Gleb Cherkasov, to discuss censorship and self-censorship in Russia and its role in Russian society.

Konstantin Sonin, John Dewey Distinguished Service Professor, University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy

"I think the second main reason leaders want censorship is because they just do not want bad things said about them. So I think a lot of frustration is not that they really fear a revolution or they really feel that theyre going to be punished for their corruption, but they just find that its extremely unpleasant to read about their corruption. So they dislike it."

"Now that 20 years have passed of Mr. Putins rule, a lot of people dont need to be told what to say, and how to present certain topics. They already know. Its not self-censorship; its just living in censorship."

"Media does not exist in a vacuum. And, essentially, if Russian society figures out that its right to know is an important right for it, then a lot of things will fall into place."

Gleb Cherkasov, Journalist; Former Deputy Editor-in-Chief, Kommersant (Live translation from Russian)

"We are living at a time of technological revolution in the media, and it is much easier now to create your own media than it was five to ten years ago. And so, its really incomparable: [the] technological advances we have now [and] those we had in the 90s. If you want to create some kind of product, all of us can have the tools. It may not necessarily be professional, but we have the technological basis to just pull out a phone and be newsmakers."

"Over the past year and a half, like mushrooms after a rain, we see small media projects that are being done by young people, very different young people. These media projects are about various news [items], various themes, and cover different subjects. The process is evolving, and I personally call this Media 3.0. Its usually a small partnership of people who are not connected with an official media market who produce a product, satisfying their own professional ambitions."

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Censorship and Self-Censorship in Russia | Wilson Center

Theres no way to know precisely where the line is, much less when you might go over it, except by means of delicately tuned antennae, said Orville Schell, who has written many books on China and is the director of Asia Societys Center on U.S.-China Relations (where I was formerly a fellow). But onceyouve crossed over into the observation zone of the Party, you know it, and the question of denied access cannot help but come into your calculations about what you say and what you write.

Paul Mooney, the journalist who recently was denied a visa for Reuters, doesnt know when he crossed the line. It could have been his reporting on AIDS or Tibet, or the fact that he worked on the dissident Chen Guangchengs English-language memoir. He told me that he didnt pull his punches in China, simply because he didnt see the point of being there if he couldnt write what he wanted. Other Americans advised him to be more pragmatic. Even over the past year, waiting for my visa to come through, journalist friends, academics and China watchers said to me, stop posting critical things on Facebook, he said. Many foreign journalists do their Chinese visa applications in December, to get them in before the end of the year. Mooney told me that a European journalist approached him for an interview recently but did not plan to write a story until after his own visa had been renewed. How many foreign journalists are doing the same thing every year at this time, or are now doing this throughout the year? Mooney wondered.

Countless Chinese journalists do this all the time. Of course, for them the stakes are much higher: They could end up behind bars. Self-censorship is in my blood, an outspoken Chinese Internet dissident once proudly told me. His years of carefully dancing around political land mines kept him out of exile or jail. Murong Xuecun, a writer and an increasingly bold critic, recently admitted: I often remind myself: Don't engage in self-censorship, and I was confident I had succeeded in this, but so far I have not yet written a single article about Tibet issues, even though I lived in Llasa for three years; nor have I openly discussed Xinjiang issues, even though they are of great concern to me.

This is not to say that all Western reporters censor themselves in China. Over the past year or so, there has been startlingly bold reporting. Oft-cited examples include David Barbozas Pulitzer Prize winning reporting on the riches acquired by the family of Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, and somewhat ironically, Bloombergs own investigation into the wealth of the relatives of President Xi Jinping. Those news organizations paid a price for their reporting, but others write on sensitive topics and emerge unscathed. In 2010, Evan Osnos, former Beijing correspondent for The New Yorker, did a profile of the Dalai Lama, and he didnt get the boot.Some writers are less fearful of expulsion because they are not career China hands, or perhaps because theyareChina hands who have just had enough.Jeremy Goldkorn, a Beijing-based blogger and the director of the research firm Danwei, told me, Every time I apply for a visa or leave the country and come back in, the thought always passes through my mind that maybe this time its not going to work. But I've been in China for so long, that Im thinking it would be a good thing if they kicked me out.

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Censorship in China: How Western Journalists Censor ...

YouTube has been removing videos of a press briefing in which two doctors criticize the sweeping shelter-at-home edicts that governments have imposed throughout the world in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. One of the videos had over 5 million views before it was taken down.

The original videos were posted by an ABC news affiliate in Bakersfield, California. When the affiliate reached out to YouTube about the removal, a company spokesperson issued a statement that offered the following justification:

We quickly remove flagged content that violate [sic] our Community Guidelines, including content that explicitly disputes the efficacy of local health authority recommended guidance on social distancing that may lead others to act against that guidance. (...) From the very beginning of the pandemic, weve had clear policies against COVID-19 misinformation and are committed to continue providing timely and helpful information at this critical time.

The claims of the physicians (Dr. Daniel W. Erickson and Dr. Artin Massihi, owners of Accelerated Urgent Care in Bakersfield) have been the subject of furious debate. Many health experts and organizations have denounced their remarks as unscientific and reckless. Even fellow critics of shelter-in-place who agree with much of the rest of their analysis have questioned some of their statistical inferences.

Whatever the veracity of the doctors claims, YouTubes censorship of unorthodox ideas in the name of protecting the public from misinformation is misguided and counter-productive. Sheltering the public from ideas, even bad ones, only makes society more susceptible to dangerous error.

One of the censored doctors critiques of shelter-at-home provides an apt metaphor for the folly of censorship. Dr. Erickson said:

Id like to go over some basic things about how the immune system functions so people have a good understanding. The immune system is built by exposure to antigens: viruses, bacteria. When youre a little child crawling on the ground, putting stuff in your mouth, viruses and bacteria come in. You form an antigen antibody complex. You form IgG IgM. This is how your immune system is built. You dont take a small child, put them in bubble wrap in a room, and say, go have a healthy immune system.

This is immunology, microbiology 101. This is the basis of what weve known for years. When you take human beings and you say, go into your house, clean all your countersLysol them down youre gonna kill 99% of viruses and bacteria; wear a mask; dont go outside, what does it do to our immune system? Our immune system is used to touching. We share bacteria. Staphylococcus, streptococcal, bacteria, viruses.

Sheltering in place decreases your immune system. And then as we all come out of shelter in place with a lower immune system and start trading viruses, bacteriawhat do you think is going to happen? Disease is going to spike. And then youve got diseases spikeamongst a hospital system with furloughed doctors and nurses. This is not the combination we want to set up for a healthy society. It doesnt make any sense.

Just as local health authorities are ostensibly trying to protect the public from COVID-19 through shelter-at-home policies, YouTube is seeking to shelter the public from misinformation. The following characterizes the perspective of YouTube and the health authorities that YouTube is serving in a metaphorical nutshell:

This is in keeping with the policy that YouTube CEO Susan Wojcicki announced days ago, that YouTube would remove any content that contradicts the World Health Organization on COVID-19.

Even assuming all the doctors ideas are indeed bad, such a policy doesnt work, and only makes things worse.

Just as human immune systems are built up through exposure to viruses and other pathogens (as Dr. Erickson explained above), our intellectual defenses against error are strengthened through exposure to bad ideas.

When you encounter a bad idea, what can conceivably happen? You can:

In the case of #1, there is no problem. Next, lets consider #4, since that is the outcome that censors are most trying to avoid.

What happens when you adopt and implement a bad idea in your life? In the worst-case scenario, it could destroy you. But that is far less common in life than scaremongers would have us believe. More often, we suffer but do not die. And that is a very memorable way to learn that the idea implemented was indeed bad. We learn from experience, from failure, from the school of hard knocks. That is one of the reasons why what does not kill you makes you stronger, as the saying goes.

But not everybody needs to suffer to benefit from the lessons of suffering. That brings us to #2: we can investigate the idea. Through investigation, we can discover the accounts (whether first- or second-hand) of experiments with the bad idea and their bad results. Ideally, these would be rigorously scientific experiments whenever possible.

Finally, we have #3, which is adopting the bad idea without implementing it. What would be the point of doing that? Well, it could mean adopting it just enough to advocate it. And arguing for an idea is one of the most efficient ways to investigate it (making #3 really a subset of #2). That is because argument elicits counter-argument. And true, effective counter-arguments are, by definition, antithetical to bad ideas. Even if the apologist of the bad idea holds fast to his belief, the counter-arguments that emerge can arm debate spectators against error.

In all of the above cases, exposure to bad ideas strengthens our defenses against bad ideas. We come away equipped with truthsfacts, information, and counter-argumentsdrawn ultimately from experience, whether our own or that of others. These good counter-ideas are like antibodies that we develop through exposure to bad ideas. Bad ideas are not just pathogens, but antigens. We thus develop immunity, not only to those specific bad ideas, but to similar ones, because we learn to recognize the basic logical fallacies that they share.

The mind, like our immune system and our muscles, is antifragile to use the term coined by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. It grows stronger through exposure to adversity.

The flipside of that is also true. Just as sheltering from antigens can lead to immunodeficiency, sheltering from bad ideas ultimately makes us more susceptible to them.

When paternalistic censors seal us up in a sterile bubble of ideas for our own protection, they deprive us of the chance to develop through experience our own ability to identify and grapple with bad ideas. As soon as a bad idea penetrates our bubble, we have no defences against it. Our lack of experience with the responsibilities of intellectual independence has left us naive, credulous, and gullible.

The more that self-appointed gatekeepers like YouTube and its allied health authorities protect us from ideas they disapprove of, the more susceptible we will be to falsehood and error (including falsehoods foisted on us by our protectors themselves). This vulnerability will in turn be used to justify still more such protection. Such is the vicious cycle of sheltering.

Ironically, many secular leftists who support public-health influence sheltering probably fully understand the dangers of that practice in another instance.

The classic critique of a sheltered upbringing is that it deprives the child of experience grappling with potentially bad influences and so ultimately leaves her more vulnerable to them. The stereotypical example of this is a child raised in an exclusively religious and traditional environment, without exposure to non-traditionalist peers, popular movies and music, and tempting situations. Once this naif inevitably leaves home, perhaps to go off to college or the big city, she has no defenses against the wave of bad influences that she must then face all at once with little support, and so the wave engulfs her.

The same principle applies generally: sheltering backfires, whether the bad influences are cultural or medical.

This is one reason why open discourse is so important and censorship is so debilitating and disrespectful. We need to be allowed the responsibility and practice of identifying and guarding against falsehood to be any good at it.

Now, all of the above takes for granted, for the sake of argument, that the purported bad ideas are in fact bad, and that the censors are in possession of good ideas. However, that is often not the case. Heresies often turn out to be right, and orthodoxies often turn out to be wrong: and this includes scientific paradigms that wound up in the ash heap of history. Our protectors may be sheltering us from the truth and forcing falsehood upon us. Wrong orthodoxies are far more dangerous than wrong heresies, simply as a matter of the scale of the errors impact.

That is yet another reason why open discourse is so vital. For the sake of human welfare, orthodox falsehoods need to be overthrown, and heretical truths need to spread.

The remarks of the Bakersfield doctors are probably a mix of good ideas and bad, truths and falsehoods. Taking down the video does us a disservice regarding both sides of the coin.

To the extent that they are wrong, their errors should be aired out and refuted. Any mistake the doctors made will probably be made again, since the human mind tends to fall prey to the same basic fallacies. By developing and disseminating counter-arguments (mental antibodies) to them, we develop our immunity to these and similar errors.

By taking down the videos, YouTube has limited the extent to which that social learning can happen and insulated the error from debunking. If anything, YouTubes censorship has lent additional credence to whatever mistakes they made by feeding into the narrative that the powers-that-be fear its truth. The debunking is being drowned out by outrage over the censorship. And the Streisand Effect (how censorship can boost somethings publicity) is causing it to spread even more.

Moreover, even if the physicians are wrong in some ways (like in their statistical claims), they may be right in other important ways.

Whether or not sheltering bodies is a wise policy for the spread of COVID-19, sheltering minds is surely a bad policy for the spread of ideas.

See the article here:
YouTube's Censorship of Dissenting Doctors Will Backfire - Foundation for Economic Education

I never thought I'd see the day that journalism professors would petition for censorship or that a liberal magazine would advocate we become more like China.

But I guess 2016 really broke their brains.

Writing in the Atlantic on Saturday, two law professors declared that online speech can "never go back to normal" after the COVID-19 pandemic. Instead, the United States must follow China's lead and police the internet with an iron fist, they said.

Significant monitoring and speech control are inevitable components of a mature and flourishing internet, and governments must play a large role in these practices to ensure that the internet is compatible with a societys norms and values, argued Harvards Jack Goldsmith and University of Arizonas Andrew Keane Woods.

Meanwhile, journalism professors blasted out a petition urging TV networks to police President Trumps COVID-19 press conferences. (I was asked Sunday to sign it but declined.)

The petition stated: We ask that all cable channels, broadcast stations, and networks (with the exception of C-SPAN) stop airing these briefings live. Instead, they should first review the briefings and, after editing, present only that information that provides updates from health officials about the progress and ongoing mitigation of the disease. Many journalists agreed.

In other words, the chattering class must control discourse because people are too stupid to think for themselves.

Goldsmith and Woods explain in the Atlantic: Ten years ago, speech on the American Internet was a free-for-all various forms of weaponized speech and misinformation had not yet emerged," but a wake-up call was Russias interference in the 2016 election. Though "not particularly sophisticated," it exposed the "legal limitations grounded in the First Amendment."

Mind you, Goldsmith is the same "expert" who was a legal adviser to President George W. Bush and the Department of Defense during the disastrous Iraq War, which was premised on Iraq having weapons of mass destruction. The damage done by that disinformation at a time when the internet had already displaced the traditional media as a news source incomparably outweighed the pittance Russia spent on farcical Facebook ads during the 2016 presidential campaign. Even famed election forecaster Nate Silver and Trump critic the Nation agree Russia was a nonfactor.

Yet, Goldsmith somehow believes this nothingburger warrants Americans abdicating their two-centuries-old free speech rights to the government. Moreover, he believes the U.S. should model its cyber crackdown after China, which detained doctors and censored social media users who dared warn the public about COVID-19. "In the great debate of the past two decades about freedom versus control of the network, China was largely right and the United States was largely wrong," he and Woods wrote.

By contrast, the authors of the petition to censor Trumps press conferences said they believe that our government cant be trusted as a steward of information. While they may be right, their solution to misinformation is as questionable as the Atlantic's.

The petition demands Trumps briefings be blacked out: Because Donald Trump uses them as a platform for misinformation and disinformation about COVID-19, they have become a serious public health hazard a matter of life and death for viewers who cannot easily identify his falsehoods, lies and exaggerations.

News flash: The public knows Trump lies. But they dont need to be told that by the media, which ranks 16 points lower than the president in handling the crisis. Many of the same journalists who would filter Trumps words have exacerbated the infodemic by spreading their share of misinformation about COVID-19. A CNN anchor was caught staging fake news about his quarantine. On multiple occasions, journalists have misrepresented Trump's statements related to the virus. No, he didn't call it a hoax or prescribe fish tank cleaner.

That's why TV networks should show exactly what the president says, unedited, and let the public evaluate for themselves. In fact, networks have a duty to do so. For nearly a century, radio and TV have been governed by a public interest standard. In exchange for the privilege of an FCC license to broadcast, stations have an obligation to cultivate a more informed citizenry through democratic dialogue and diversity of expression.

While this public interest standard is ill-defined, airing a presidents press conferences during an unprecedented crisis would seem to fit the bill. If Trump is lying, as many journalists and journalism professors contend, thats all the more reason to air his press conferences and expose his lies so voters can be aware, especially as an election looms.

Sunlight may not help fight COVID-19, as Trump claims. But, as Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis famously remarked, it is the best of disinfectants when it comes to public policy. At a time when many don't trust the government or the press, it's imperative to demand transparency from both.

Mark Grabowski is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He teaches communications law at Adelphi University in Garden City, N.Y.

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Journalists have learned nothing and call for Chinese-style censorship - Washington Examiner