Category Archives: Censorship

Its an opportunity to maybe shine a light on the issues and use our platforms to make change for the better.

These were the words of England midfielder Jordan Henderson during a press conference in the months preceding the 2022 World Cup in Qatar. His comments were in response to questions about the host nations appalling human rights record, particularly in regard to LGBTQ+ people, women and labour migrants, and whether teams should be boycotting the competition in protest.

England manager Gareth Southgate echoed Hendersons suggestion. There would be more change if we go and these things are highlighted, he argued. Theres an opportunity to use our voices and our platform in a positive way.

This sentiment was commonly expressed in the build-up to the tournament, as teams justified their participation in what was widely regarded to be an ill-disguised sportswashing attempt. However, a year has gone by and such changes have yet to materialise, with those inside the state continuing to be denied basic rights and freedoms.

Qatari physician and activist Dr Nasser Mohamed tells Index on Censorship that for LGBTQ+ people inside the state the situation has not improved.

As we were approaching the lead up to the Qatar World Cup, I noticed that the coverage and the public message was so disconnected from the lived reality that I had, he revealed.

Mohamed publicly came out as gay in 2022, after his anonymous attempts to publicise the struggles of LGBTQ+ people in his home country received little traction, seeking asylum in the United States as a result. He described his initial reaction to Qatar being awarded the World Cup as one of anger and defeat. He accused the state of using the tournament to try and launder their international reputation, and attempting to gaslight the world into believing they arent abusers, despite taking everything from him.

As for the suggestions that the pressure of a global audience would force the state to improve their stance on LGBTQ+ rights, Nasser assured us that this has not been the case. In terms of things on the ground, I think they have not changed, if anything they are worse, he said. Arrests, torture, everything, its still happening.

The activist also condemned his home states use of celebrity endorsements to launder their image. You get people like David Beckham coming in and selling their influence to the authoritative regime, saying things like football has the power to change the world. Amazing! Do you think it will happen by your magical presence? he laughed. You cant just show up and magically infuse goodness into the world, there needs to be action.

Mohamed also criticised the role of the media when it came to reporting on such human rights violations, arguing that much of the coverage afforded to LGBTQ+ rights in the region framed the issue as a cultural argument between the Middle East and the West, which he said came at the detriment of actual LGBTQ+ people in the country.

You get all the thousands of spins on the same factual story. Muslim Dad beats his son or Homophobic Qatari is violently attacking his LGBT child. Then on the Arabic side, white Europeans and Americans are intruding to come and tell Middle Eastern parents how to raise their children, he explained.

Then people get really afraid because now they are worried about Islamophobia, racism, discrimination. In comparison, sometimes it feels like being in the closet and occasionally facing homophobia is a lesser evil.

The absence of change in Qatar is not down to a lack of effort on the part of persecuted groups. In the autumn 2022 issue of Index, when we looked at the free speech implications of hosting the tournament in Qatar, Qatari activist Abdullah Al-Malikioutlinedthe many ways the regime punishes and thereby silences human rights defenders. He wrote:

Tamim [bin Hamad Khalifa al-Thani]has planted fear and terror in the hearts and minds of the Qatari people. No one in our country can criticise the actions and words of the corrupt dictator, or those of his terrorist gang.

Mohamed spoke about his own recent experience. He suggested that external pressure has been placed on platforms and organisations to stifle any allegations of human rights violations in the state, a situation he is no stranger to. He described being ghosted by Meta, shadowbanned by X (formerly Twitter) and speaking to high-profile politicians at length only for those conversations to go nowhere.

Theres censorship definitely, he said. Its really hard because Qatars money is everywhere. Whenever my voice reached a certain level, I was dropped by the people I was talking to.

It seems that simply spreading the word is not helping to bring about changes in the region. I naively thought nothing was happening through lack of knowledge, Mohamed said, before pausing. Its not a lack of knowledge.

There are similar concerns over the continuing exploitation of migrant workers in Qatar. Despite promises from the state that conditions would improve following global outrage in the build-up to the World Cup,a report published last week by Amnesty Internationalstated that progress towards improving these rights has largely stalled since the tournament ended, while hundreds of thousands of workers who suffered abuses linked to the tournament have still not received justice.

Prior to the tournament, there was hope that the global pressure had successfully pushed Qatar into improving conditions for migrant labourers. Reforms were passed in 2021 in an attempt to reduce the power of sponsors over workers mobility and to raise the minimum wage, motions which were largely influenced by the criticisms levelled at the country following their successful World Cup bid. However, Amnesty Internationals Head of Economic Social Justice, Steve Cockburn, said on publication of the new report that Qatar had shown a continued failure to properly enforce or strengthen these pre-World Cup labour reforms, putting the legacy of the tournament in serious peril.

He said in a statement: From illegal recruitment fees to unpaid wages, hundreds of thousands of migrant workers lost their money, health and even their lives while FIFA and Qatar tried to deflect and deny responsibility. Today, a year on from the tournament too little has been done to right all these wrongs, but the workers who made the 2022 World Cup possible must not be forgotten.

Human Rights Watch stated earlier this year that the 2021 legislation was not in itself adequate to solve the issues faced by migrant workers, calling claims by Qatari authorities and FIFA that their labour protection systems were adequate to prevent abuse grossly inaccurate and misleading. An investigation by the organisation found that some issues being faced by migrant workers in the country in the aftermath of the World Cup include wage theft, being prohibited from transferring jobs, not receiving their entitled compensations and being unable to join a union.

Mohamed believes that the fight for human rights in Qatar should encompass all such groups who find themselves exploited, abused or persecuted, but that more targeted action is required: Workers rights, womens rights, you can support all of these causes and I think it can be powerful, and it can be a very helpful thing to do, but it needs intention.

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Qatar fails to deliver on World Cup promises - Index on Censorship

Narges Mohammadi is locked in a vicious circle. The 2023 Nobel Peace Prize winner has been held in Tehrans notorious Evin prison since September 2022 and the Iranian authorities seem determined to keep the prominent human rights activist there.

Mohammadibecame active in fightingagainst the oppression of women in Iran as a student physicist in the 1990s and has promoted human rights ever since, including campaigning for an end to the death penalty in a country where 582 were executed last year alone.

In her nomination for the Peace Prize, Berit Reiss-Andersen, the head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee, said: Her brave struggle has come with tremendous personal costs. Altogether, the regime has arrested her 13 times, convicted her five times, and sentenced her to a total of 31 years in prison and 154 lashes.

During her current detention, Mohammadi has been summoned to the courts on numerous occasions to face new charges. Yet Mohammadi argues thatthe revolutionary courts are not independent judicial bodies and she has also stopped lawyers attending on her behalf for that same reason.

Some of these charges relate to her ongoing human rights work from inside prison, including smuggling out an article which was published in the New York Timeson the anniversary of Mahsa (Jina) Aminis death in custody, the event that sparkedthe Woman, Life, Freedom protests that erupted inIranin 2022. Mohammadis message from prison was: The more of us they lock up, the stronger we become.

At the beginning of last week, the woman human rights defender started ahungerstrikein protest against delayed and neglectful medical care for sick prisoners, as well as the rule which makes wearing the mandatory hijab a condition for the transfer of the women prisoners to medical facilities.Then, earlier this week Mohammadi heard that she was to face a series of new charges, but after refusing towear hijab the prosecutor prohibited her from attending court. As a result neither Mohammadi nor her lawyer know the nature of the new charges levelled against her. She has now ended her hunger strike.

The regime will be infuriated with her refusal to engage with the justice system, while Mohammadi knows that each time she doesnt attend it draws yet more attention to her plight.

Mohammadi knows only too well the methods the authorities use to break prisoners. Index has recently been given a video made by Mohammadi just before she returned to jail, shot by the Iranian film-maker Vahid Zarezadeh. In it she says that people should not be surprised if, in the event that she dies in jail, the authorities blame an undiagnosed health problem, perhaps a dodgy heart.

This system sets up the conditions for the prisoners death, she says.

In sharing the video, she has put the regime on notice that they are being watched. You canwatch the video here.

Zarezadeh tells me, It was filmed at the time when she was rushed from the prison to the hospital due to the blockage of her heart veins, which were opened through angioplasty. She was on medical leave and not in good health. Shortly after this video, she was returned to Qarchak womens prison.

He says, Qarchak Womens Prison is a notorious facility designed for women, where many human rights activists and opponents of compulsory hijab are held. The prisons lack of adequate drinking water, as well as poor hygiene and medical care, leads to the spread of various diseases among inmates. Originally used as a livestock centre, Qarchak has been expanded over time. Numerous reports highlight human rights violations in this prison, yet Iranian judicial authorities show no inclination to change the conditions of detainment.

Irans appalling human rights record has also come under scrutiny at this weeks Alternative Human Rights Expo, whichhighlighted human rights issues related to the suppression of freedom of expression and assembly in the Middle East and North Africa.The virtual event, hosted by the Gulf Center for Human Rights and its partners, washeld to focus attention on the 28th session of the Conference of Parties (COP28) to be held from 30 November to 12 December 2023 in the United Arab Emirates. It featured artists, poets, writers and singers from the region including Iranian poet Fatemeh Ekhtesari.

Ekhtesari performed her poem She is Not Woman as part of the event (which is available to view here) which includes the following lines:

Were sick of queuing for the gallows Clotted grief in our blood Trouble is all thats left Rage is all we own

Narges Mohammadis rage is clear for everyone to see. It is high time that she and other human rights defenders in Irans jails are unconditionally released.

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Life and death in Iran's prisons - Index on Censorship

In the late 1950s, the Rhode Island legislature created a commission to encourage morality in youth. One of its practices was to send notices to out-of-state distributors and retailers of publications it deemed obscene, asking for cooperation in suppressing them. The notices warned that the commission had circulated lists of objectionable materials to local police departments, and that it would recommend prosecution against those found to be purveying obscenity.

Four publishers sued. The case went to the Supreme Court. With one dissent, the justices in Bantam Books Inc. v. Sullivan (1963) held that the informal censorship violated the 14th Amendment. They also noted that it didnt matter that the Rhode Island commission had no real power beyond informal sanctions.

People do not lightly disregard public officers thinly veiled threats to institute criminal proceedings against them if they do not come around, noted Justice William Brennan, a fierce liberal, in his opinion. It would be nave to credit the states assertion that these blacklists are in the nature of mere legal advice, when they plainly serve as instruments of regulation independent of the laws against obscenity.

Brennans warning is worth keeping in mind when considering last weeks ruling in Missouri v. Biden, in which a federal district judge in Louisiana, Terry Doughty, ordered the Biden administration to desist from communicating with social media platforms for purposes of removal, deletion, suppression or reduction of content containing protected free speech.

Judge Doughtys order has flaws, including, it seems, some dubious assertions of fact that need to be closely investigated. And the broadness of the preliminary injunction is also a practical issue.

Still, the order is a triumph for civil liberties. It also ought to be considered a victory for liberals, insofar as liberals have historically been suspicious of Big Tech and the big national-security state cooperating, as alleged in this case to suppress the speech of people whose views they deem dangerous.

But in one of the stranger inversions of recent politics, its mostly conservatives who are cheering and liberals who are decrying the ruling. A government official appearing on a television show and stating that certain speech is disinformation does not come even remotely close to the government coercing social media companies into removing that speech, scoff the law professors Laurence Tribe and Leah Litman in an essay on the Just Security website.

Fair enough. And its certainly true that senior government officials, no less than private individuals, also have free speech rights, which include urging companies to do what they think is the right thing. The legal line between a government official encouraging or discouraging private conduct versus engaging in behavior that amounts to coercion is a blurry one.

But its also a line that, in this case, the administration seems to have repeatedly crossed. Two examples:

In a July 20, 2021, interview on MSNBC, the anchor Mika Brzezinski asked Kate Bedingfield, who was then the White House communications director, whether the White House would amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act so that social media companies would be open to lawsuits for hosting Covid misinformation. Bedingfield replied, Were reviewing that, and certainly they should be held accountable. Social media companies soon began to remove the pages and accounts of the so-called Disinformation Dozen, referring to notorious vaccine skeptics.

On Oct. 29, 2021, Surgeon General Vivek Murthy tweeted that we must demand Facebook and the rest of the social media ecosystem take responsibility for stopping health misinformation on their platforms. That day, according to Doughtys ruling, Facebook requested that the government provide a federal health contract to determine what content would be censored on Facebooks platforms.

Neither of these cases is an example of the administration merely encouraging Big Tech to remove ostensibly harmful content. On the contrary, it is multiple federal agencies yelling jump and threatening dire legal consequences and Big Tech replying, in effect, How high?

The constitutional principle should be obvious. Government should not be able to do an end-run around its constitutional obligation to protect freedom of speech by delegating censorship to private-sector actors, Nadine Strossen, a former president of the American Civil Liberties Union, told me on Tuesday. If private-sector action becomes so closely interwoven with the government that it becomes functionally indistinguishable from state action, it sensibly becomes subject to First Amendment constraints.

Thats true irrespective of whose speech is being curtailed.

Critics of last weeks ruling may claim that, at the height of the pandemic, with thousands of Americans dying of Covid every day, the government had an urgent interest in curtailing what it saw as misinformation. Similar claims were made about communists at the height of the Cold War and antiwar activists during World War I. Yet the actions of government and powerful media companies against them shock us to this day.

It shouldnt be hard to agree that the highest purpose of the First Amendment is to protect speech we like the least speech we are sure is pernicious, bigoted, obscene or potentially harmful to health. Liberals especially should take care that the arguments they now make for privatized censorship will not eventually be turned on them.

Link:
Opinion | Speech We Loathe Is Speech We Must Defend - The New York Times

For comic professionals at San Diego Comic-Con, there is no better party than the annual Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) welcome party. This years event will be Thursday, July 20 at the Westgate Hotel, from 8pm-12pm on the Terrace Under the Stars, and it will be sponsored by Oni Press.

At the event, theyll be debuting a new initiative in support of the CBLDF, called FIGHT CENSORSHIP, READ COMICS! where theyll be unveiling new artwork for the initiative from artists including Maia Kobabe (Gender Queer), Matt Kindt (Mind MGMT, BRZRKR), Gabriel B and Fbio Moon.

The party is free for CBLDF members and the general public with a suggested voluntary donation to support CBLDFs ongoing work supporting free speech and creative expression. The first 50 attendees will also receive a free Secret Edition variant cover of the latest issue of the publishers sci-fi anthology,Xino #2, featuring artwork by Nick Cagnetti (Pink Lemonade), while the first 200 will receive a free FIGHT CENSORSHIP, READ COMICS! button set.

The evening will also feature the annual CBLDF annual Silent Art Auction, featuring comic art and collectibles donated from Abrams Comicarts, Becky Cloonan, Dark Horse Comics, DSTLTRY, Dynamite Entertainment, Oni Press, IDW, and more.

During the evenings events, Oni Press will also be offering 50 signed copies of theGender Queer: Deluxe Edition hardcover with a bookplate signature by creator Maia Kobabe with all funds benefiting the CBLDF. High-quality, 1117 prints of Kobabes FIGHT CENSORSHIP, READ COMICS! illustration will also be available at the Oni Booth #1829 throughout the week, with a portion of all proceeds benefiting the CBLDF.

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Fight Censorship with the CBLDF San Diego Comic-Con 2023 Welcome Party - San Diego Comic-Con Unofficial Blog

U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty | YouTube

Some critics of last week's preliminary injunction inMissouri v. Biden, which bars federal officials from encouraging social media platforms to suppress constitutionally protected speech, reject the premise that such contacts amount to government-directed censorship. Other critics, especially researchers who focus on "disinformation" and hate speech, pretty much concede that point but see nothing troubling about it. From their perspective, the problem is that complying with the First Amendment means tolerating inaccurate, misleading, and hateful speech that endangers public health, democracy, and social harmony.

The day after Terry Doughty, a judge on the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Louisiana, issued the injunction,The New York Times gave voice to those concerns in a piece headlined "Disinformation Researchers Fret About Fallout From Judge's Order." According to the subhead, those researchers "said a restriction on government interaction with social media companies could impede efforts to curb false claims about vaccines and voter fraud."

That much is true by definition. Doughty's injunction generally prohibits various agencies and officials from "meeting with social-media companies," "specifically flagging content or posts," or otherwise "urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing" the "removal, deletion, suppression, or reduction of content containing protected free speech." The injunction also bars the defendants from "threatening, pressuring, or coercing social-media companies" toward that end and from "urging, encouraging, pressuring, or inducing" them to "change their guidelines for removing, deleting, suppressing, or reducing content containing protected free speech."

The injunction includes some potentially sweeping exceptions. Among other things, it does not apply to "postings involving criminal activity or criminal conspiracies"; "national security threats, extortion, or other threats"; posts that "threaten the public safety or security of the United States"; "foreign attempts to influence elections"; posts "intending to mislead voters about voting requirements and procedures"; or "criminal efforts to suppress voting," "provide illegal campaign contributions," or launch "cyber-attacks against election infrastructure."

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Some of these categories are commodious enough to encompass constitutionally protected speech by American citizens. In particular, "national security" is a broad, ill-defined excuse that might apply, for example, to information derived from classified sources or even to criticism of U.S. surveillance practices. The goal of resisting "foreign attempts to influence elections" can easily result in misidentification of Americans as Russian agents or mischaracterization of accurate reporting as foreign "disinformation."

But insofar as Doughty's order has bite, which it presumably does as it relates to COVID-19 "misinformation" and speech embracing Donald Trump's stolen-election fantasy, those anxious researchers surely are right that it "could impede efforts to curb false claims about vaccines and voter fraud." Notably, these critics take it for granted that preventing the government from demanding removal of disfavored content will have a substantial impact on the speech that platforms allow.

"Most misinformation or disinformation that violates social platforms' policies is flagged by researchers, nonprofits, or people and software at the platforms themselves," theTimes notes. But "academics and anti-disinformation organizations often complained that platforms were unresponsive to their concerns." The paper reinforces that point with a quote from Viktorya Vilk, director for digital safety and free expression (!) at PEN America: "Platforms are very good at ignoring civil society organizations and our requests for help or requests for information or escalation of individual cases. They are less comfortable ignoring the government."

The reason social media companies are "less comfortable ignoring the government," of course, is that it exercises coercive power over them and could use that power to punish them for failing to censor speech it considers dangerous. In the 155-page opinion laying out the reasoning behind his injunction, Doughty notes implicit threats against recalcitrant platforms, including anti-trust actions, new regulations, and increased civil liability for content posted by users.

Doughty cites myriad communications that show administration officials expected platforms to promptly comply with the government's censorship "requests," which they typically did, and repeatedly complained when companies were less than fully cooperative. He emphasizes how keen Facebook et al. were to assuage President Joe Biden's anger at moderation practices that he said were "killing people."

The major platforms eagerly joined what Surgeon General Vivek Murthy described as a "whole-of-society" effort to combat the "urgent threat to public health" posed by "health misinformation," which he said might include "legal and regulatory measures." It beggars belief to suppose that the threat of such measures played no role in the platforms' responses to the administration's demands.

As the fretful researchers quoted by the Times see it, that is all as it should be. "Several disinformation researchers worried that the ruling could give cover for social media platforms, some of which have alreadyscaled back their efforts to curb misinformation, to be even less vigilant before the 2024 election," the paper reports. Again, that concern assumes that the interactions covered by Doughty's injunction resulted in stricter rules and more aggressive enforcement, meaning less speech than otherwise would have been allowed.

The Times paraphrases Bond Benton, an associate communication professor at Montclair State University, who worries that Doughty's ruling "carried a message that misinformation qualifies as speech and its removal as the suppression of speech." As usual, the Times glides over disputes about what qualifies as "misinformation," which according to the Biden administration includes truthful content that it considers misleading or unhelpful. But since even a demonstrably false assertion "qualifies as speech" under the First Amendment, the "message" that troubles Benton is an accurate statement of constitutional law. That does not mean platforms cannot decide for themselves what content they are willing to host, but it does mean the government should not try to dictate such decisions.

The concerns expressed by Doughty's critics go beyond health-related and election-related "misinformation," and they go beyond the soundness of this particular ruling. In an interview with the Times, Imran Ahmed, chief executive of the Center for Countering Digital Hate, complained that the U.S. takes "a 'particularly fangless' approach to dangerous content compared with places like Australia and the European Union." Those comparisons are telling.

Australia's Online Safety Actempowers regulators to order removal of "illegal and restricted content," including images and speech classified as "cyberbullying" and "content that is inappropriate for children, such as high impact violence and nudity." Internet service providers that do not comply with complaint-triggered takedown orders within 24 hours are subject to civil penalties. The government also can order ISPs to block access to "material depicting, promoting, inciting or instructing in abhorrent violent conduct" for up to three months, after which the order can be renewed indefinitely.

Freedom House notes that Australia's law includes "no requirement for the eSafety Commissioner to give reasons for removal notices and provides no opportunity for users to respond to complaints." The organization adds that "civil society groups, tech companies, and other commentators have raised concerns about the law, including its speedy takedown requirements and its potential disproportionate effect on marginalized groups, such as sex workers, sex educators, LGBT+ people, and artists."

Australia's scheme plainly restricts or prohibits speech that would be constitutionally protected in the United States. Likewise the European Union's Digital Services Act, which covers "illegal content," a category that is defined broadly to include anything that runs afoul of a member nation's speech restrictions. E.U. countries such as France and Germany prohibit several types of speech that are covered by the First Amendment, including Holocaust denial, disparagement of minority groups, and promotion of racist ideologies.

These are the models that Ahmed thinks the U.S. should be following. "It's bananas that you can't show a nipple on the Super Bowl but Facebook can still broadcast Nazi propaganda, empower stalkers and harassers, undermine public health and facilitate extremism in the United States," he told the Times. "This court decision further exacerbates that feeling of impunity social media companies operate under, despite the fact that they are the primary vector for hate and disinformation in society."

Critics like Ahmed, in short, do not merely object to Doughty's legal analysis; they have a beef with the First Amendment itself, which allows Americans to express all sorts of potentially objectionable opinions. If you value that freedom, you probably consider it a virtue of the American legal system. But if your priority is eliminating "hate and disinformation," the First Amendment is, at best, an inconvenient obstacle.

The post Some Critics of the Ruling Against Biden's Censorship by Proxy Have a Beef With the 1st Amendment Itself appeared first on Reason.com.

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Some Critics of the Ruling Against Biden's Censorship by Proxy Have a Beef With the 1st Amendment Itself - Yahoo News

A series of tweets by a Japanese manga author on the topic of words they are not allowed to use in their works has triggered discussion among users regarding the censorship of words referring to insanity in fiction, with many expressing the opinion that the attempts to avoid ableism may be straying into the area of excessive censorship.

Japanese manga author Hekiru Hikawa made a post on their Twitter account listing up words that they are not allowed to use within their current publication. Words including the Japanese kanji which represents insanity, such as (go crazy/insane) or (madness/insanity), seem to be particularly unwelcome by the publishers. Other words subject to censorship are saikopasu, which is a transcription of the English psychopath and the derogatory internet slang menhera that is derived from the English words mental health but refers to a person (especially woman) suffering from mental illness.

The censorship doesnt seem to be limited to just words either, as the author mentions that scenes that associate mental illness with criminal behavior such as a depiction of a criminal talking to themselves are also not allowed. The author goes on to mention some words that they believe are not rightfully subject to censorship.

The Japanese word (battle-crazed) refers to a common character trope in anime and manga and describes a character that loves battle and pursues strong opponents in order to hone their fighting skills. The meaning itself does not have connections to mental illness, but the word contains the previously mentioned kanji that refers to insanity, likely making it a grey area for the publishers.

Reactions to the publishers restrictions were mixed, as users did note the importance of maintaining the boundary between terms referring to disabilities and slang, but many found the censorship excessive and indiscriminate, erasing too many words without taking wider contexts into account.

Growing sensitivity to those suffering from mental illness and efforts to do away with ableist language and negative stereotypes are a worldwide tendency in recent years, and Japan following suit is undoubtedly a natural and positive development. However, where censorship of media, especially art and fiction is concerned, a nuanced approach seems to be necessary. The ability to not look at just individual words but entire contexts and the intentions behind them is undoubtedly what can prevent situations in which common terms and obvious slurs end up being treated as equally offensive.

The previously quoted author makes a good point in mentioning the responsibility of creators to be in touch with language, as exploring new expressions is equally important as doing away with outdated expressions.

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Japanese publishers ban insanity and similar sensitive words, but ... - AUTOMATON WEST

The B.C. government has reversed direction and will now stop most advertising on Facebook and Instagram.

With layers of urban history, the Powell Street Festival celebrates local Japanese identity in dialogue with the city.

The move follows actions last week by the federal and Quebec governments to suspend advertising with Meta the Silicon Valley technology conglomerate that also owns Facebook, Instagram, Threads and WhatsApp after the company followed through on a threat to block Canadian news from its services.

To send a strong message to Meta that journalism is a vital public service and access to news should never be blocked, our government has decided to stop all advertising on Facebook and Instagram with a limited exception for critical health and safety information, Premier David Eby said Wednesday in an emailed statement.

Local media creates much of the content that tech giants have relied on to build their business models, and many British Columbians now rely on social media to get their news, he said. Metas decision to cut off that access is totally unacceptable.

Meta has begun blocking access to Canadian news, including The Tyee, as the dispute over Bill C-18, the Online News Act, escalates. The federal act, which passed June 22, requires companies like Meta and Google to enter deals with Canadian news organizations to pay them for the news content appearing on their platforms.

For now, governments are continuing to advertise with Google, which is in talks with the federal government on implementing the law and says it wont start blocking news until the law comes into effect in six months.

Last week a spokesperson for B.C.s Finance Ministry said that while the province was keenly watching developments, it planned to continue advertising with Meta and Google as part of a strategy to reach diverse audiences. Active paid campaigns included ones on wildfire information, the BC Demographic Survey and BC Parks programs.

Ebys statement yesterday said that as the province experiences one of its worst wildfire seasons on record, the government will now only advertise on Meta to provide the public with critical information related to public health and safety emergencies.

During emergencies, we need to use all effective communications tools at our disposal, he said.

The B.C. government spent $1.4 million on ads from Meta last year and $1.7 million the year before that.

A Finance Ministry spokesperson said that as the situation evolves the province will review and update its interim advertising policy as needed.

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BC Cuts Ads on Meta over Canadian Media Censorship - TheTyee.ca

American public figures and corporations are increasingly self-censoring to please the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). One conservative advocate wants Congress to fight back by dragging business leaders and others to Washington, D.C., for public hearings.

But China's government bullying can't be fixed by U.S. government bullying.

Fearing loss of access to the Chinese market, companies routinely avoid speech that may anger the CCP. For example, an investigative report from the free speech group PEN America revealed that Hollywood studios write and produce with CCP guidelines in mind in hopes of retaining access to its $2.46 billion box-office market.

From 2016 to 2021, the Swedish National China Centre compiled data on foreign businesses in China from English and Chinese language news sites, company statements, and social media posts and found that Chinese consumers routinely boycott companies that contradict CCP doctrine. More than 80 percent of the companies that consumers boycotted for violating Chinese territorial claims, such as sovereignty over Taiwan, Tibet, and Hong Kong, issued apologies in response.

Actors, sports officials, and other public figures also regularly apologize to China and self-censor when they offend the CCP. In 2019, Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey tweeted his support for Hong Kong protesters, costing the NBA hundreds of millions of dollars in deals and leading Chinese broadcasters to cancel broadcasts. The league described the comment as "regrettable" and LeBron James said Morey "wasn't educated on the situation," while Morey apologized for "offending or misunderstanding" Chinese fans. In 2021, actor John Cena apologized for calling Taiwan a country on social media while filming Fast & Furious 9. That same year, JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon apologized after joking that his company would outlast the CCP, stating that "it's never right to joke" about another country.

The consistent self-censorship U.S. companies and public figures engage in to appease an authoritarian regime led Oren Cass, founder and executive director of the conservative think tank American Compass, to argue that Congress should intervene. Cass sees China's economic influence as undermining the American tradition of free speech.

"The pursuit of profit often calls for kowtowing to the CCP. As a result, American movie studios and sports leagues self-censor in keeping with the CCP's preferencesand American business leaders fall over themselves apologizing for any possible slight," Cass writes in a recent policy paper, A Hard Break from China. "Americans are mostly oblivious to the reality that they are seeing only what the CCP will allow, except when the occasional misstep by a star or executive leads to groveling."

One solution to "re-normalize free speech," Cass argues, is to "raise the reputational stakes by creating a high-profile forum that embarrasses people who toe the CCP line." Enter the House Select Committee on the Chinese Communist Party.

Cass' proposal seeks to transform the committee into a platform where those who are honest "earn widespread praise" and those who stay silent or lie would face "higher reputational costs." Business leaders would be asked or subpoenaed to testify under oath about their experiences with the CCP and what they really think about China.

"We're going to have a Hollywood hearing. We're going to have a sports hearing. We're going to have a finance hearing. And we're going to kind of move our way consistently through different sectors," Cass tells Reason,arguing that the prospect of public humiliation would encourage executives to stop self-censoring.

"The only peril you're in is if you have really dumb and indefensible ideas, which is exactly how a democracy is supposed to work," Cass says. "It's not like some kind of witch hunt project to try to embarrass people. It's, in a sense, quite the opposite. All you have to do to have a triumphant appearance is show up and say what you think."

Other critics of China's influence strongly disagree. Having a House committee question business leaders "is not a good step," Angeli Datt, PEN America's China research and advocacy lead, tells Reason. "We can't counter Chinese government censorship or restrictions on free expression by restricting free expression. We have to show that within a democracy and within the confines and principles that we believe indemocratic norms and free expressionthat there's ways to put pressure and expose and ultimately shame companies into not making censorship decisions."

Cass, who sees his proposal as a counterbalance to the CCP's censorship pressures, denies that the committee would have its own chilling effect on international business relations. "What's coercive about the subpoena?" Cass says. "The only thing you're being asked to do is, again, say what you actually think."

The House Select Committee on the CCP, formed in January and chaired by Rep. Mike Gallagher (RWis.), has not summoned any business leaders or celebrities to speak about Chinese censorship. However, when asked at a U.S. Chamber of Commerce conference in May if the committee would seek testimony from business executives, Gallagher said "Companies should be prepared to defend their investment strategy in China, their manufacturing presence in China," according to The Wall Street Journal. "My goal is not to have some sort of bomb-throwing viral moment," he added.

The committee follows several legislative efforts to curb CCP-induced censorship. In 2019 and again in 2021, a bipartisan group of senators introduced a bill that would have set up the China Censorship Monitor and Action Group, an interagency task force dedicated to reporting on CCP-related free expression concerns. In May 2020, Sen. Ted Cruz (RTexas) introduced the SCRIPT Act which would block federal agencies from assisting productions that alter content for CCP censors. In February 2022, Rep. Mark Green (RTenn.) introduced the SCREEN Act, which would have a similar effect.

Their proposals touch on an underlying irony of American concerns about Chinese soft power. As PEN America noted in its report, "The Hollywood-Pentagon relationship" affords Hollywood studios "conditional access to military facilities and experts" for films that the government "believes will reflect well on the country's armed forces." The report rightly notes, however, that "this governmental influence does not bring to bear a heavy-handed system of institutionalized censorship, as Beijing's does."

Cass and Gallagher aren't alone in wanting business leaders to testify about Chinese influence. In May, Yaqiu Wang, senior China researcher at Human Rights Watch, testified to the House Rules Committee, calling on behalf of her organization for Congress to "hold hearings requesting executives of companiesto testify in relation to their China operations, including whether they have conducted human rights due diligence and their responses to requests from Chinese authorities that would be contrary to their human rights responsibilities."

On the other hand, to combat censorship in Hollywood, PEN America endorses in its report Gallagher's proposal requiring studios to disclose whether their films were altered "to fit the demands of the Chinese Communist Party," similar to the "no animals were harmed in the making of this film" notice that many films contain. It also recommends studios commit to only altering their films for the version shown in China.

Datt maintains that congressional hearings would constitute government overreach. "I have no problem with blasting that person or having media scrutiny on a business decision because that should be subjected to scrutiny. Studios should not be making these decisions in their films based on the dictates of a single government," she says. But "government hearings, I think, cross a line into another governmentcoercively forcing studios into a very specific effort."

Datt points out correctly that the American tradition of free expression is built on the idea that the people, not the federal government, will hold institutions accountable for their speech. Allowing Congress to intimidate public figures over their speech, whether censored by China or not, risks unintentionally chilling China-related speech and business relations.

The press, everyday citizens, and other concerned stakeholders have always held companies and public figures accountable for their speech. The solution to China's infringement on free speech is not government bullyingit's more speech.

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Dragging Business Leaders to Congress Is Not a Solution to ... - Reason

By Thomas Hinnant

Lord, I cant make any changes. All I can do is write em in a song. I can feel the concrete slowly creepin. Lord, take me and mine before that comes

Lynyrd Skynyrd, All I can do is write about it

Warren County has a rural character and beauty that is reflected in the folks who live here, the history of the area, and the touristic nature of the local economy.

Anyone who has spent any time here knows that Rockland is one of the most beautiful areas in Warren County. Consistent with its character, beauty, and history. Rockland happens to be designated a rural historic district by the Virginia Department of Historic Places.

Thats why as a community, we must stand together in order to Keep Rockland Rural.

Stand together to keep National Developers off of our agricultural land.

Stand together and say NO to this rezone.

In order to hold on to the beauty and authenticity of our county. Folks must speak out against the attempt at suburbanization that threatens to strip away the historic nature and rural character of this community.

There are those who will tell you that in order to raise revenue for the county and to keep up with the times, we must develop our farmland into high-density housing. They will likely speak of how great it is to have National builders interested in developing our area.

Dont fall for these predatory talking points. Dont buy the lie.

Firstly, these housing developments rarely, if ever, contribute as much tax revenue as they end up costing the county in infrastructure development. Large high-density housing developments overburden our infrastructure and drive taxes up for longtime county residents. On top of that, they rarely use local labor when building their developments. The cost-value analysis simply doesnt add up. The local economy is burdened, not boosted. This is something every resident of Warren County should be concerned about.

Secondly, this proposed development in Rockland violates the vision for this charming area. The very vision found in our own comprehensive plan.

The comprehensive plan seeks to direct future development into an efficient and serviceable form that will preserve the Countys predominately rural character.

This proposed development is a clear and direct violation of the ethos espoused within the comprehensive plan and its vision for Rockland.

Lastly, if we start rezoning land, especially land that is zoned agricultural. A domino effect of development will undoubtedly begin. That domino of development will turn this county into just another rootless suburban outpost of metropolitan Northern Virginia.

The distinct culture, history, and character of the community will be overshadowed by cookie-cutter high-density housing.

I was at the community meeting on May 4th. It was a beautiful demonstration of democracy. The Alliance for the Shenandoah Valley should be commended for the facilitation of such a successful event. Over 100 residents attended of all stripes, backgrounds, and worldviews.

Partisan political proclivities were put aside, and a community came together with one voice in defense of their areas history, character, and beauty.

I hope the planning Commissioners and Supervisors take heed of the clear and undeniable will of the people.

I recommend everyone check out the documents and information that the Alliance for the Shenandoah Valley has made publicly available regarding Rockland.

In conclusion, I implore you. Dont be fooled by the shallow promises of suburbanization, it will destroy the soul of this county that we all cherish. Our aquifer, our river, our agricultural land, and our way of life are under threat.

As a community, we should be focused on preserving our agricultural land.

We should be focused on cleaning up and rehabilitating our rivers. And we should be focused on holding on to a rural way of life that builds true character. We should not allow Warren County to be steamrolled by National Developers who have no ties to this community.

If this land is rezoned, thats exactly what will happen.

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It's Censorship and It's Expensive - Royal Examiner

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Censorship is never the answer | Columns | themountaineer.com - The Mountaineer