Category Archives: Censorship

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Posted: Aug 04, 2017 12:01 AM

Social media has become the boon and the bane of our political culture. Conservatives have a new, profound voice to go around and take down the media like never before. Overcoming the liberal chokehold of the liberal mainstream media, we the conservatives, the constitutionalists, the consistent libertarians are punching away at the stale, imposing media narrative. We got tired of hearing how great Barack Obama was, especially when Breitbart, Townhall.com, and the rest reported how untrue the narrative turned out to be.

Besides, when illegal aliens have taken your job or killed your kid, there is no amount of media-driven propaganda that can regain your trust or assure your confidence in the liberal talking points.

Social medias bane has become more prominent, too, and in ways that I had never expected. First, let me address the rising Anti-Semitism. I frequently post pro-Israel statements on my media profiles. I do not apologize for being a Zionist, and a vocal supporter of the only stable democracy in the Middle East. Enduring the Obama Administration, I wished that Benjamin Netanyahu were my president. Fortunately, President Trump has forged a renewed, stronger relationship with Israel.

Today, social media explodes with anti-Semitic, anti-Zionist hate more frequently than I care to admit. One of my tweets about Israel induced a unique firestorm of anti-Zionist hate. The hate I have witnessed on social media against Jews is pretty appalling. At Politicon 2017, Ben Shapiro had to address this disconcerting trend. At least we could talk about it, but the hatred of Jews and the attacks on Israel are getting heated and more prevalent. Why? Anonymity and efficiency to spread ones message could not be easier because of social media. Should we block it? In my opinion, no. The best defense to false or inflammatory speech is more speech.

Which brings me to the other threat looming over media: censorship. Twice in one week I have been blocked from posting on my Facebook profile. What?! Whats worse, Latinos for Trump like Harim Uzziel and Robert Latino Heat Herrera have been routinely blocked from posting their Facebook Live videos, articles, and other daily observations. Why? Illegals and their law-abiding amnesty-pandering supporters were reporting their posts, then getting them blocked. Latinos who support Trump detonate the left-wing narrative that opposition to illegal immigration is racist. Uzziel, an outspoken and outstanding Latino for Trump in LA, California, and perhaps even the country--is also Jewish, and proudly so. Are these attacks anti-Semitic, too?

The same censorship applies to Islam. Pamela Gellers Facebook page was shut down, then brought back following a large outcry. On the other hand, a close friend of mineanother Latina for Trump in Los Angeles--reported a Facebook page whose title read as follows: Mexican Pride Group: Kill All White People. The response she received from Facebook? The Community Standards review determined that there was nothing wrong. Really. If you dont believe me, read the attached photo (see above).

This ongoing censorship and repression of different points of view is not new, but only now is the growing, effective conservative movement taking note and fighting back. First Twitter came for Charles Johnson of GotNews.com. Then they took down Milos verified blue checkmark. Then Milos Twitter feed was suspended for good over a media battle discussing the crappy feminist version of The Ghostbusters. A meandering movie that got poor ticket sales and no reviews led to Free Speech provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos Twitter-demise.

And it has gotten worse. Hunter Avallone of Maryland, a post-Millennial taking on the liberal-progressive Pharisees of our day, lost his Twitter handle, too. Paul Joseph Watson, Dennis Prager, and others have reported the subtle censorship of their YouTube videos. Watsons latest report outlines YouTubes officious oversight with the left-wing Anti-Defamation League, which has deemed Pepe the Frog an anti-Semitic symbol.

Have we forgotten the leading conservative media lights who met with Facebook leaders to confront their media bias? The conservatives approached the meeting with intentions of negotiating some standard of fairness. So much for that approach. Now social media censorship has gotten dangerously close to home. For the past month and a half, Ive worked freelance as a guerrilla journalist with Joshua Caplan through Vessel News. Ive gone places with Facebook Live, exposing illegal alien town halls hosted by our own federal officials, including Congressman Lou Correa of Santa Ana, CA, as well as raucous events in city council meetings and during Trump supporter celebrations.

Now Caplan reports that his viewership reach has been cut down because other Facebook pages are losing their own reach and influence. Caplan had agreements with other Facebook page news sites, but they have recently cut the contracts since Facebook is coming down hard on them. Add to The Gateway Pundits lament about Facebook throttling Jim Hofts potential reading traffic, you can tell that Facebook has become Fascist-Book.

Within the last 24 hours, I learned that Dinesh DSouzas own Facebook was compromised, scuttling his outreach as well as the sales of his new book The Big Lie, exposing the totalitarian tendencies of the American Progressive Movement, which infiltrated the Democratic Party leading up to President Franklin Delano Roosevelts administration. They also inspired the Nazis under Adolf Hitler. Of course, this very serious message accompanied that latest update from DSouza: Ive been hearing of this happening to a lot of people, though most often its Facebook itself taking their pages down.

Pretty heavy stuff. For decades, the Saul Alinsky approach of shaming conservatives had successfully silenced the Right. Now that we are bolder than ever to speak, the Regressive Left is working overtime to suppress freedom of speech. If not through violence or the passage of draconian anti-free speech ordinances, they can pressure or assume the leadership over these multi-media platforms and shut down dissent and discourse. Enough. The next leg of the New Right, New Tea Party fight means targeting and taking on these social media platforms. We cannot afford to lose, since we have gained so much already.

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Anti-Social Media: Anti-Semitism and Censorship on the Rise - Townhall

The shift which could affect a swath of users from researchers to businesses suggests that China is increasingly worried about the power of the internet, experts said.

It does appear the crackdown is becoming more intense, but the internet is also more powerful than it has ever been, said Emily Parker, author of Now I Know Who My Comrades Are, a book about the power of the internet in China, Cuba, and Russia. Beijings crackdown on the internet is commensurate with the power of the internet in China.

China still has not clamped down to its full ability, the experts said, and in many cases the cat-and-mouse game continues. One day after Apples move last week, people on Chinese social media began circulating a way to gain access to those tools that was so easy that even a non-techie could use it. (It involved registering a persons app store to another country where VPN apps were still available.)

Still, Thursdays test demonstrates that China wants the ability to change the game in favor of the cat.

A number of Chinese internet service providers said on their social media accounts, websites, or in emails on Thursday that Chinese security officials would test a new way to find the internet addresses of services hosting or using illegal content. Once found, these companies said, the authorities would ask internet service providers to tell their clients to stop. If the clients persisted, they said, the service providers and Chinese officials would cut their connection in a matter of minutes.

The Ministry of Public Security did not respond to a faxed request for comment.

Studies suggest that anywhere from tens of millions to well over a hundred million Chinese people use VPNs and other types of software to get around the Great Firewall. While the blocks on foreign television shows and pornography ward off many people, they often pose only minor challenges to Chinas huge population of web-savvy internet users.

Chinas president, Xi Jinping, has presided over years of new internet controls, but he has also singled out technology and the internet as critical to Chinas future economic development. As cyberspace has become more central to everything that happens in China, government controls have evolved.

It is difficult to figure out the extent of the new efforts, since many users and businesses will not discuss them publicly for fear of getting on the bad side with the Chinese government. But some frequent users said that getting around the restrictions had become increasingly difficult.

One student, who has been studying in the United States and was back in China for summer vacation, said that her local VPN was blocked. She said she had taken the period as a sort of meditation away from social media and left a note on Facebook to warn her friends why she was a gone girl.

A doctoral student in environmental engineering in at a university in China said it had become harder to do research without Google, though his university had found alternative publications so that students did not always need the internet. He has since found a new way to get around the Great Firewall, the student said, without disclosing what it was.

Close observers of the Chinese internet said some VPNs still work and that China could still do a lot more to intensify its crackdown.

We do think that if the government has decided to do so, it could have shut down much more VPN usage right now, said a spokesman for VPNDada, a website created in 2015 to help Chinese users find VPNs that work.

If the government had sent more cats, the mice would have a tougher time, said the spokesman, who declined to be named because of sensitivities around the groups work in China. I guess they didnt do so because they need to give some air for people or businesses to breathe.

Chinas online crackdowns are often cyclical. The current climate is in part the result of the lead-up to a key Chinese Communist Party meeting, the 19th Party Congress this autumn. Five years ago, ahead of a similar meeting, VPNs were hit by then-unprecedented disruptions.

Much like economic policy or foreign affairs, censorship in China is part of a complicated and often imperfect political process. Government ministries feel pressure ahead of the party congress to show they are effective or can step in if a problem appears, analysts said.

So its definitely not an apocalypse for VPNs, said Paul Triolo, head of global technology at Eurasia Group, a consultancy.

Just a more complex environment for users to navigate, and new capabilities and approaches give China better ability to shut off some delta of VPN use at a time and place of Beijings choosing, he said.

Chinas population is learning to deal with those difficulties at a younger age. Earlier this summer, Chinas internet giant Tencent began limiting the time that people under 18 were allowed to play the popular online game Honor of Kings to an hour a day for those under 12, and two hours for those age 12 to 18.

So Chinese youths have taken to an age-old solution: getting a fake ID.

Your Honor of Kings being limited? Interested in getting an over-18 identification? read a recent advertisement on Chinese social media. No problem. Get in touch for a low-price ID.

Carolyn Zhang contributed research from Shanghai. Adam Wu contributed research from Beijing.

A version of this article appears in print on August 4, 2017, on Page B1 of the New York edition with the headline: Chinas Internet Censors Test a New Way to Shut Down Access.

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China's Internet Censors Play a Tougher Game of Cat and Mouse - New York Times

There's a grassroots movement brewing to kill the new HBO docudrama "Confederate" before it even begins filming, let alone airs. The Guardian has a useful summary of the controversy so far:

Confederate, the new HBO show from the Game of Thrones creators David Benioff and D.B. Weiss, was announced in a press release a few weeks ago and is slated to begin filming sometime after the final season of Thrones, which will probably air in 2018. But already there seems to be little appetite for the series, which plans to take a revisionist approach to American history, imagining a world in which the South successfully seceded from the union and slavery persists "as a modern-day institution" ... Since the project was revealed in early July, it has become a kind of cultural albatross for HBO, and especially Benioff and Weiss, each of whom have fielded criticisms over the years for both the overwhelming whiteness of Game of Thrones ...

Roxanne Gay, an associate professor at Purdue University, chimed in on the opinion pages of the New York Times:

Each time I see a reimagining of the Civil War that largely replicates what actually happened, I wonder why people are expending the energy to imagine that slavery continues to thrive when we are still dealing with the vestiges of slavery in very tangible ways. ... My exhaustion with the idea of "Confederate" is multiplied by the realization that this show is the brainchild of two white men who oversee a show that has few people of color to speak of and where sexual violence is often gratuitous and treated as no big deal. I shudder to imagine the enslaved black body in their creative hands. And when I think about the number of people who gave this project the green light, the number of people who thought this was a great idea, my weariness grows exponentially. ...

Let's put aside complaints about the "whiteness" of "Game of Thrones." It makes sense for a fantasy set in a Medieval European-like fantasyland to use predominantly (but not exclusively) European-looking actors, just as it made sense that the 1980 miniseries "Shogun" used many Japanese actors or, for that matter, for the 1977 miniseries "Roots" to use black actors. If actors should be cast without reference to skin color or identity, than that should go both ways.

Let's also put aside the fact that alternative histories are not uncommon. "The Man in the High Castle" imagines the world if Germany and Japan won World War II. "Confederate States of America" is a deeply satirical look at what would happen if the South had won the Civil War. Philip Roth's The Plot against America imagines what would have happened if nativist Charles Lindbergh had defeated Franklin Roosevelt in 1940 and signed non-interference treaties with both Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan.

What is truly discomforting about the current campaign to shut down "Confederate" is that neither those who are leading it nor those who are piling on in an international Twitter campaign have read a single line of its script. They have no idea how the writers will address issues of race and race relations, nor whether the alternative history will open the door to productive discussion and debate.

If the writers do a bad job, critics pan the show, and people stop watching, that's one thing. But to pre-emptively try to shut down a show sight unseen, that's different.

In a sense, what we are seeing increasingly appears to be the Western version of the Satanic Verses affair.

In that 1989 case, Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini issued a fatwa against Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses for blasphemy, even though neither he nor those around him had ever read the work.

At the time, dozens of writers stood up for Rushdie's right to write and publish. Today, most are silent, and the leading outlets of progressive thought side with the proverbial lynch mob. True, Khomeini's fatwa is an extreme example. No one is suggesting Benioff and Weiss be murdered, but the idea that it is proper to censor works without first reading their content in order to protect popular mores is similar.

Progressives might cry foul at a comparison between what they seek to do and what Khomeini did. After all, haven't conservatives also sought to censor? In the 1980s, many conservatives criticized the funding choices of the National Endowment for the Arts, especially in the wake of a racy Robert Mapplethorpe exhibit and the production of the "Piss Christ" photograph of the late 1980s. Recently, the Washington Post recalled those controversies:

Conservative Sens. Jesse Helms (R-N.C.) and Alphonse D'Amato (R-N.Y.) took to the Senate floor in May 1989 "to question the NEA's funding procedures." Helms called Serrano "not an artist, he is a jerk," and D'Amato theatrically tore a reproduction of the work to shreds, calling it a "deplorable, despicable display of vulgarity." Meanwhile, more than 50 senators and 150 representatives contacted the NEA to complain about the exhibits. [Piss Christ artist Andres] Serrano still remembers being "shocked" by the angry reaction and, he told The Post on Sunday, how suddenly the work became a "political football." ... But the exhibit that pushed Helms over the edge was a retrospective of work by late photographer Robert Mapplethorpe, who Andrew Hartman, author of "A War for the Soul Of America: A History of the Culture Wars," wrote "became the Christian Right's bte noire." ... Like the exhibit containing "Piss Christ," it was partially, indirectly funded by the NEA. The exhibit featured 175 photographs. One hundred sixty-eight were inoffensive, such as images of carefully arranged flowers. The seven from his "X-Portfolio," though, were intensely provocative. One presented a finger inserted into a penis. Another was a self-portrait showing Mapplethorpe graphically inserting a bullwhip into his anus. Two displayed nude children.

What the Washington Post misses, however, is that the controversy was over public funding for such exhibits; it did not demand pre-emptive censorship over writers or artists. Likewise, when 25 years ago Vice President Dan Quayle famously criticized the television character Murphy Brown for having a child out of wedlock, his goal was not to censor the hit CBS sitcom, but rather simply to criticize its judgment. Likewise, criticisms of the Broadway play "Oslo" or the anti-Israel propaganda play "My Name is Rachel Corrie" focus on how they twist the truth or cherry-pick history rather than demand they be shuttered.

Criticism and censorship are not synonymous. The former advances productive debate; the latter seeks to avoid it. With "Confederate," it seems progressives are siding firmly with censorship as they argue against the right to tackle subjects which run afoul of their own narrow orthodoxy.

Michael Rubin (@Mrubin1971) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner's Beltway Confidential blog. He is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute and a former Pentagon official.

If you would like to write an op-ed for the Washington Examiner, please read our guidelines on submissions here.

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On censorship of 'Confederate,' it's 'Satanic Verses' deja vu - Washington Examiner

China held a drill on Thursday with internet service providers to practice taking down websites deemed harmful, as the country's censors tighten control ahead of a sensitive five-yearly political reshuffle set to take place later this year.

Internet data centers (IDC) and cloud companieswhich host website serverswere ordered to participate in a three-hour drill to hone their "emergency response" skills, according to at least four participants that included the operator of Microsoft's cloud service in China.

China's Ministry of Public Security called for the drill "in order to step up online security for the 19th Party Congress and tackle the problem of smaller websites illegally disseminating harmful information," according to a document circulating online attributed to a cyber police unit in Guangzhou.

An officer who answered the phone in the Guangzhou public security bureau confirmed the drill but declined to elaborate.

President Xi Jinping has overseen a tightening of China's cyberspace controls , including tough new data surveillance and censorship rules. This push is now ramping up ahead of an expected consolidation of power at the Communist Party Congress this autumn.

The drill asked internet data centers to practice shutting down target web pages speedily and report relevant details to the police, including the affected websites' contact details, IP address and server location.

China's Ministry of Public Security and China's cyberspace administration did not respond to faxed requests for comment.

Get Data Sheet , Fortunes technology newsletter.

Several service providers, including 21Vianet Group and VeryCloud, issued notices to users, warning of possible temporary service disruptions on Thursday afternoon as a result of the drill, which were confirmed to Reuters by their customer service representatives.

Nasdaq-listed 21 Vianet Group is China's largest carrier-neutral internet data center services provider according to its website, and counts many Western multinationals including Microsoft , IBM , Cisco and HP among its clients. It runs Microsoft's Azure-based services in China.

21 Vianet Group did not immediately respond to an emailed request for comment.

China has been tightening its grip on the internet , including a recent drive to crack down on the usage of VPNs to bypass internet censorship, enlisting the help of state-owned telecommunication service providers to upgrade the so-called Great Firewall.

Apple last week removed VPN apps from its app store, while Amazon's China partner warned users not to use VPNs.

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China Holds Drill to Shut Down 'Harmful' Websites - Fortune

Courts in modern times are generally protective of the First Amendment, specifically our freedoms of speech and press. On the whole, they vigorously oppose any attempt by government to minimize those essential liberties; they recognize that a free press is critical to any society that values expression and intellectual diversity. The Supreme Courts 1983 ruling inMinneapolis Star v. Minnesota Commissioner of Revenue(1983), striking down certain taxes on ink and paper, shows that attempts to regulate the media as a group, even when broadly applied, are considered unacceptable if they crowd out certain viewpoints.

The University of California San Diego (UCSD), a public university, attempted to do something similar when it defunded certain student organizations in a thinly veiled attempt to censor one organizations opinions. The Koala, a satirical newspaper funded by student activity fees, published an article mocking safe places that sparked controversy on campus and debate in the schools student government. In response, the student government enacted a Media Act that defunded all student-printed media organizations, in order to prevent the The Koala from publishing further articles that contradicted the student governments political sensibilities.

The Koalasued in an attempt to restore its funding, but the federal district court remarkably ruled against them. Cato has joined the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education on an amicus brief supporting its claim.

There is a longstanding, constitutionally based tradition of public universities serving as conduits for freedom of expression, a tradition that UCSD has unceremoniously abandoned. By providing funding to certain groups and not others, the university is effectively restricting certain members of the public from a public forum, in blatant violation of the First Amendment.

The lower court misread well-established jurisprudence regarding the scope of such forums, and failed to consider the evidence of viewpoint discrimination prevalent in the schools Media Act. Not only does this rule have a discriminatory effect, but also it constitutes unconstitutional retaliation in direct response to the controversy surrounding The Koalas article.

In addition, the Supreme Court has established that student activity fee programs are required to respect viewpoint-neutrality, in order to ensure that political bias does not stifle speech. UCSD has violated all of these core constitutional principles in pursuit of political correctness and the comfort of ideological homogeneity.

In The Koala v. Khosla, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit should reverse the lower courts decision and stop UCSDs efforts to seek vengeance against student groups for satirical articles.

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Should the Koala Bear the Brunt of Censorship? - Cato Institute (blog)

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If the American people actually believed that censorship was bad, they would throw away their iPhones, stop buying shampoo on Amazon, and quit going to the movies.

Why is it not a cause for concern that the world's wealthiest corporations are cooperating with the Chinese government, employing their considerable technological resources to prevent Chinese citizens from circumventing firewalls or accessing private networks designed to restrict access to information and opinions of which the authorities disapprove? Why do only nerd parodists on YouTube complain about the absurd lengths to which film producers go to appease Chinese censors doing everything from removing same-sex kissing scenes and other sequences considered vulgar or too violent to inserting brand-new characters to appease nationalist sentiment? Why is the pursuit of obscene levels of profit and record-breaking box office numbers a sufficient justification for these pathetic and, in cinematic terms, banal concessions?

The answer is simple: We don't really think censorship is wrong. Or rather, we vaguely think censorship is wrong except when it gets in the way of profits.

Anyone who went to high school in this country is familiar with what I think of as the standard textbook history of the United States. It is an impoverished, mostly uninteresting narrative that begins with some kind of bridge in Alaska and ends with the Cold War, a thing that we won. It has many gaps not much seems to happen between the War of 1812 and the Lincoln-Douglas debates or between the Civil War and the Depression. Huge lumbering abstractions abound: the Gilded Age, Tariff Reform.

One of the most dreadful of these looming specters is censorship, a bad thing that involved a senator named McCarthy who was somehow also a member of a committee in the House of Representatives. At some point or another, between the time when people said "I Like Ike" and Vietnam, censorship mostly went away. But before it did there was something evil called a blacklist that was maintained by Hollywood. People on the blacklist were good because they stood up for free speech in defiance of censorship. Being okay with the blacklist was so bad that if you appeared before the evil House committee that ran it from Washington it was a very good thing decades later for people to protest your receiving an award and for people in the audience to be rude to you and not applaud.

In other words, the fact that a handful of mediocre screenwriters did not get to make lots of money working in the movie business is obviously much more important and interesting than the intricacies of the very real decades-long struggle for world dominance between the United States and her liberal democratic allies and the Soviet Union.

I mention all this because this valorization of a few insignificant characters is one of the only salient facts that millions of Americans know about the conduct of the Cold War at its height. The badness of censorship is an unquestioned article of faith. The idea that obscenity should not be permitted on our screens is as ludicrous as, well, the idea that there is even such a thing as obscenity. Bold pro-freedom of expression warriors renew their commitments every year with annual cost-free exercises in moral preening like Banned Books Week. The notion that somewhere some parent might take issue with one of her children reading a book with sexual themes is a crisis, a kind of secular blasphemy that demands excommunication. There is no room for prudential judgement here: Thinking that some things might be bad is the only thing that it is not okay to think.

Meanwhile, tech CEOs explain away their acquiescence with blanket censorship in countries where they depend upon cheap labor in order to make world-historic profits. Hollywood pretends that absolute creative freedom is a quasi-sacred right except when it isn't and it's totally worth interfering with an artist's vision in order to placate censors with absurd fears like movies with ghosts in them and get more cash at the box office.

And we let them. Why? Because most Americans think censorship is bad as long as we don't need it to make money.

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Why are so many Americans okay with corporations bowing to Chinese censorship? - The Week Magazine

Customers come to the newly opened Apple store in Shanghai, China.

VCG/Getty Images

Apple recently removed some of the virtual private networks from the App Store in China, making it harder for users there to get around internet censorship. Amazon has capitulated to China's censors as well; The New York Times reported this week that the company's China cloud service instructed local customers to stop using software to circumvent that country's censorship apparatus. While caving to China's demands prompts a vocal backlash, for anyone who follows US tech companies in China it was anything but surprising. Apple and Amazon have simply joined the ranks of companies that abandon so-called Western values in order to access the huge Chinese market.

Doing business in China requires playing by Chinese rules, and American tech companies have a long history of complying with Chinese censorship. Every time a new compromise comes to light, indignation briefly flares up in the press and on social media. Then, its back to business as usual. This isnt even the first time Apple has complied with Chinese censors. Earlier this year, the company removed New York Times apps from its Chinese store, following a request from Chinese authorities. "We would obviously rather not remove apps, but like we do in other countries we follow the law wherever do we business," Apple CEO Tim Cook said during Tuesday's earnings call, in response to the vanished VPN apps.

Here is a non-exhaustive list of American companies that have aided Chinese censorship. In 2005, Yahoo provided information that helped Chinese authorities convict a journalist, Shi Tao. Shi had sent an anonymous post to a US-based website. The post contained state secrets, according to authorities, and Shi was sentenced to 10 years in prison. Also in 2005, Microsoft shut down the blog of a Chinese freedom-of-speech advocate. A year later, Google agreed to censor its search results in China. Internal documents show that Cisco apparently saw China's "Great Firewall" as a choice opportunity to sell routers at around the same time. In 2006, Yahoo, Microsoft, Google, and Cisco faced a congressional hearing about their Chinese collaboration. I do not understand how your corporate leadership sleeps at night," representative Tom Lantos said at the time.

It turns out that some corporate leaders will sacrifice a good nights sleep to reach hundreds of millions of internet usersand potential customers. In 2014, LinkedIn launched a Chinese version of its service with the understanding that doing so would curtail freedom of expression. Users who posted politically sensitive content would get a message saying that their content would not be seen by LinkedIn members in China.

In a 2014 interview with The Wall Street Journal , LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner was upfront about the Chinese bargain. Were expecting there will be requests to filter content, Weiner said. We are strongly in support of freedom of expression and we are opposed to censorship, but thats going to be necessary for us to achieve the kind of scale that wed like to be able to deliver to our membership.

Perhaps LinkedIn figured that, as a business networking site, it could dodge political controversy. But when it comes to China, its never that simple. LinkedIns community, after all, includes China-based journalists. It wasnt long before users complained about receiving notices from LinkedIn that their posts were not available in China. Just this month, journalist Ian Johnson posted one of those notices on Twitter. Twitter is blocked in China, but some people there access it with circumvention technology. In the past, China-based activists have used Twitter to get their message to the outside world. Twitter is a rare American platform that offers relative freedom of expression to the Chinese who are willing to use it.

Bending to China's will doesn't guarantee success. China remains a tough market, even for those willing to censor. Derek Shen, formerly president of LinkedIn China, recently stepped down after the company had less-than-impressive results in China. Problems apparently included missed sales targets and failure to attract new users. In 2010 Google declared wholesale defeat in mainland China, citing problems with censorship and cybersecurity.

Censorship isn't the only challenge: US companies now have to contend with fierce Chinese rivals. Apple has struggled against domestic Chinese competition, including smartphone powerhouses Huawei and Oppo. Uber flailed against incumbent ride-hailing service Didi Chuxing before eventually selling its China operations to its local rival. When it comes to the internet, Chinese users arent necessarily longing to jump over the Great Firewall to gain access to overseas sites. Many are content with domestic products, particularly WeChat, a wildly popular messaging app.

Still, US companies will always try to break through in China. Facebook has eyed the mainland for a while. A Facebook entry may appear unlikely, especially as China temporarily blocked its WhatsApp messaging service. But CEO Mark Zuckerberg appears willing to go the distance; Facebook has reportedly worked on a censorship tool for the purposes of getting China's approval. Conventional wisdom once held that Facebook would not risk the public outcry following a decision to self-censor in China. But is that really true? All those other companies got away with it, and Facebook probably would too.

So will Apple. The company might take a beating in China, but it wont be because of its moral choices. That doesnt mean that the Chinese internet outlook is bleak. Despite pervasive censorship, information manages to get through. Some circumvention tools will vanish, and others will appear. For every sensitive term that gets blocked, people will find a different word to replace it.

The spread of the internet will continue to expand the space for expression in Chinajust not necessarily thanks to the American companies willing to do whatever it takes to gain a foothold there.

Emily Parker has covered China for The Wall Street Journal and has been an adviser in the US State Department. She is the author of Now I Know Who My Comrades Are , a book about the power of social media in China, Cuba, and Russia.

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Apple Caved to China, Just Like Almost Every Other Tech Giant - WIRED

Washington Post

Apple playing China's censorship game should make tech companies really nervous Mashable Based on the events of the last few days, we now know that even the biggest tech company on the planet can't put a significant crack in that impenetrable wall of internet censorship that gives the Chinese government ultimate power over all things ... Apple, Amazon help China curb the use of anti-censorship toolsWashington Post Joining Apple, Amazon's China Cloud Service Bows to CensorsNew York Times VPNs are a vital defence against censorship - but they're under attackAmnesty International Slate Magazine (blog) -Engadget -Daily Mail all 253 news articles »

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Apple playing China's censorship game should make tech companies really nervous - Mashable

A still from the band Cairokee's music video "Al-Kayf." Uploaded on July 10, 2017. (photo byYouTube/CairokeeOfficial)

Author:David Awad Posted August 2, 2017

CAIRO Egyptian rock band Cairokee did not give up when the General Authority for Censorship of Works of Art on July 2 banned the sale of their new album A Drop of White. Why would they, when there is an alternative outlet in the form of YouTube? The YouTube launch of their 11-song album on July 11 was a resounding success. One song, Al-Kayf, ("Fix") has been viewed over 6 million times since its internet launch.

TranslatorPaul Raymond

"Al-Kayf" was the most popular song in Egypt in July, even after Egyptian pop superstar Amr Diab released Meaddy El Nas ("Passing People"), which has still failed to match the YouTube hits of "Al-Kayf" since the release of Diabs album July 20.

"Al-Kayf" was not the only successful song on the album. Wrong Way Blues has been watched over 4.5 million times, the title song A Drop of White 2.7 million times, while Cease-Fire and I Thought There Was Still Time each have received well over 1 million hits. So far, songs on the album have been viewed on YouTube over 24 million times.

But why did the censorship authority ban the album?

Cairokee broke news of the ban in a July 2 Facebook post, saying, The General Authority for Censorship of Works of Art rejected some of the songs on Cairokees forthcoming album 'A Drop of White.' The bad news is that for the first time, our album will not go on sale in shops and most likely will not be on radio or TV (not important). But the good news is that we are carrying on and our songs will be freely available on the internet and in digital stores, out on July 11.

The post did not specify why the authority had banned the album, a question that occupied the media even several weeks after the albums release and YouTube success. On July 26, Al-Tahrir newspaper published an interview with Cairokees lead singer, Amir Eid, in which he said, We dont know why the censor banned the album, the reasons are unclear. [But] the censor took issue with 'Cease-Fire,' 'Wrong Way Blues,' 'The Last Song' and 'Dinosaur' all of which had political overtones.

The words of the four songs are filled with passion. Cease-Fire refers to a Blind society that cant see its collapse and adds, Everybody participated in the crime and pressed the trigger, everybody chose silence and buried his head in the sand/ They are imprisoned between herds surrounded by dogs" in reference to the state's pursuit of opposition political activists after June 30, 2013. "Dinosaur," the most controversial song, says, "Moving between TV channels to kill the time and boredom, the same hypocrisy, stupidity and awfulness/ After they had sold our lands, they accused us of being the disloyal youth a reference to the maritime demarcation agreement between Egypt and Saudi Arabia, under which sovereignty over Tiran and Sanafir Islands will be transferred from Egypt to Saudi Arabia.

Al-Monitor sought further clarification from Ahmad Medhat, the bands spokesman, who said, I believe the censor rejected those songs as it thought they were political, although they are not; they had no fundamental political motive.

Medhat said that the songs were not political but social in nature. "They express the feelings of the young people and their disappointment with how the January 25 Revolution and their revolution against the Muslim Brotherhood ended leading to the present situation, in which activists from the January 25 Revolution are being pursued and oppressed. This is what the youth talk about in the streets and cafes. Our songs had no political goal, their only purpose was to express the feelings of the youth, because we are the youth. The censor fears any honest expression, Medhat added.

Khaled Abdulgalil, the head of the General Authority for Censorship of Works of Art, has not responded to Al-Monitors repeated attempts to seek clarification on why the album was banned.

Mehdat said, The political overtones in the songs were not the only reason they were banned; the band has faced restrictions for years. Its songs have been banned by radio and TV, its concerts have been canceled for security reasons. Our friendship with certain activists, media figures and people who oppose the current regime, as well as our support for the January 25 Revolution, may have been reasons for these restrictions.

The band was launched in 2003 with five members: lead vocalist Amir Eid, lead guitarist Sherif Hawary, drummer Tamer Hashem, keyboarder Sherif Mostafa and bass guitarist Adam el-Alfy. But it was not until the January 25 Revolution that it shot to fame. A day before former President Hosni Mubarak resigned, the group played Sout al-Horeya ("Sound of Freedom"). After Mubaraks ouster, they recorded revolutionary songs such as Ya el-Medan ("O Square") with singer Aida el-Ayoubi. In the run-up to the 2012 presidential elections, they released Wanted: A Leader. When their friend, prominent activist Alaa Abdel Fattah, was arrested in November 2013, they released Yama fi Habas Mazalim ("In the Prison of the Oppressors").

The group performs a mixture of its own rock style and more conventional Egyptian pop. They recorded a song with pop groups Sharmoofers and El-Madfaagya, as well as performed A Stranger in a Strange Country with folk singer Abdelbasit Hammoudeh. After that songs success, they featured folk singer Tareq El Sheikh on Al-Kayf.

Banning songs is pointless in the era of YouTube, music critic Mohammad Shamees told Al-Monitor. I dont agree with the censor on these measures, because the controversy created by banning just makes them more popular. Cairokees songs have benefitted from political events in a way I dont agree with, because they have made political criticisms that were unjustifiably harsh, using any means to win an audience with the youth who are disgruntled about certain topics. The mixing of rock and pop means the songs have lost any unique nature, and the group repeats itself a lot. 'Wrong Way Blues' was the name of their 2014 album, which is a sort of artistic bankruptcy. Eids singing with Sheikh and Hammoudeh exposed the weakness of his own voice.

Cairokees experience with their new album confirms that there is no longer any room for banning and blocking songs, except from the ears of the state censors employees. Even the material losses the group may suffer due to the banning of album sales have been offset: Cairokees album was the most-sold record in Egypt on iTunes in mid-July.

Read More: http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2017/08/youth-band-beats-censorship-via-youtube.html

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Egyptian band beats censorship via YouTube - Al-Monitor

Last week, consumer tech giant Apple removed all major VPN apps from the Chinese branch of its Apps Store, seemingly putting yet another barrier in place for millions of Chinese citizens who might desire to defy their governments pervasive internet censorship system. On Tuesday, Apple CEO Tim Cook explained why Apple chose to comply with the wishes of Chinese censors.

Its pretty simple, in Cooks telling. Unlicensed VPNs are against the law in China now, and Apple has to obey the law, period.

The central government in China back in 2015 started tightening the regulations associated with VPN apps, Cook told investors and media during Apples Q3 2017 earnings and conference call, per TechCrunchs Matthew Lynley. We have a number of those on our store. Essentially, as a requirement for someone to operate a VPN they have to have a license from the government there.

Earlier this year, they began a renewed effort to enforce that policy, he continued. We were required by the government to remove some of those VPN apps from the app store that dont meet these new regulations ... Today theres still hundreds of VPN apps on the app store, including hundreds by developers outside China. We would obviously rather not remove the apps, but like we do in other countries we follow the law wherever we do business.

Heres where Cooks reply gets a little more cynical.

We believe in engaging with governments even when we disagree, Cook continued. This particular case, were hopeful that over time the restrictions were seeing are loosened, because innovation really requires freedom to collaborate and communicate.

Cook compared the controversy to Apples 2016 battle with US authorities over iPhone security features, saying the situation last year was very different because US law was on the companys side. But he added if US law changed, Apple would have no choice but to comply.

In the case of China, the law is very clear there, Cook said. Like we would if the US changed the law here, we have to abide by them in both cases. That doesnt mean that we dont state our point of view in the appropriate way, we always do that.

Heres the thing: Apple isnt really engaging Chinese censors so much as complying with their orders, and theres no way removing the VPN apps will somehow result in that censorship being loosened. Its at best a tradeoff between maintaining market access on one hand, and collaborating with the current Chinese censorship system on the other.

Without getting into an argument on the merits of Chinese artist Ai Weiweis work, he hit something on the head in a New York Times editorial earlier this year: Whenever the state controls or blocks information, it not only reasserts its absolute power; it also elicits from the people whom it rules a voluntary submission to the system and an acknowledgment of its dominion. While Apples decision to remove the VPN apps may be mandated by the absolute power of the Chinese state, its also clearly reinforcing part two of the equation, voluntary submission to said power.

Cook, of course, is clearly aware of thiswhich is why he mentioned Apple would have no choice but to comply with a US censorship regime, too. Hes not exactly wrong. But its also a reminder of how any abuse of power requires enablers, and institutions whose bottom line rely on compliance are probably not going to save anyone from autocracy. With a few exceptions, theyll usually comply.

Elsewhere during the call, Cook noted, mainland China sales are doing just fine. The companys poor performance was mostly due to poor sales in the mostly autonomous region of Hong Kong, which has much less restrictive laws on censorship.

[Matthew Lynley]

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Tim Cook Says Apple Had to Comply With Chinese Censors, and They'd Do It in the US Too - Gizmodo