Category Archives: Transhuman News

America was founded on defianceAt least, thats what Patrick Morgan, an English professor at ULM believes. So he, along with Sigma Tau Delta, hosted a banned books reading last week as an act of defiance against censorship.

Students, faculty and staff gathered on a cold, rainy day in October to share their love of literature by reading books that have been banned in multiple countries.

The annual reading was hosted in the Chemistry and Natural Science Building. Together, attendees read excerpts from books that were all banned at one point or another due to controversies. Some of the pieces of literature referenced were Moby Dick, Red Azalea and several poems from Shel Silversteins A Light in the Attic.

Its a chance to celebrate the freedom to read, the freedom to read any text, even the pieces of literature that have been barred throughout history, Morgan said.

Morgan said that he loves to see students share their interest in literature and learn about their relationships through literature. In the past, some of the books included Lord of the Flies, 1984 and Huckleberry Finn.

Kaylee Sadler, a junior and member of Sigma Tau Delta, said, I enjoyed listening to passages from banned books in history, and the discussions centered around the absurdities of censorship.

Sadler also read passages from Red Azalea, a novel that was banned in China due to its themes of homosexuality and anti-communism.

I hope more people will show up at the next reading, Sadler said. I think some people would be surprised with whats been banned.

A similar event that takes place in the spring is the Ides of March, an event where poetry lovers, students, faculty and staff alike, gather around a tree on campus and read their favorite poems.

Sadler encourages more literature lovers to attend the next banned books reading to celebrate their passion for literature together.

Read more:
Students fight censorship with banned books reading - The HawkEye

from the no-signal dept

It's common knowledge now that the Chinese government heavily censors the access its population has to the internet and information writ large. It's been a decade since China first proffered that its Great Firewall of China was not actually censorship, but was merely a method for "safeguarding" its citizens. Safeguarding them, it seems, primarily from any international criticism of the Chinese regime itself, which sure seems like it's more about safeguarding the government, rather than the citizens. In the subsequent decade, whatever skin China had to weather criticism further sloughed away such that the government is now not only actively pressuring groups and companies within Chinese borders, but actively attempting to affect its censorship outside those borders as well.

Whatever else we might want to say about Chinese censorship, it most certainly is not subtle. This was on full display when the government essentially pulled the plug on streams for the American Vice Presidential debate precisely during a segment discussing China's actions on COVID-19.

Chinas censors cut off Vice President Mike Pence mid-sentence during the debate with Sen. Kamala Harris when he called out the Chinese Communist Party for its mishandling of the coronavirus pandemic.

As Pence Wednesday night began to criticize Beijings response, saying China is to blame, CNNs feed in China suddenly cut out and the words no signal please stand by appeared over a test pattern.

Again, not subtle. And that's actually kind of important, because if you put yourself in the shoes of a Chinese citizen, it's difficult to imagine that you wouldn't know precisely what is going on here. The real question is whether the transparent censorship in cases such as this is a feature or a bug. If a bug, it doesn't serve Chinese government purposes. It will be clear that the censorship is to mask criticism of the ruling party. If a feature, well, the idea is that China doesn't mind the transparent nature of this exertion of control. It's a muscle flex, in that case.

The question is how long can this authoritarian approach expand before the rubber-band reaches its limits and snaps back on the regime. In an increasingly connected and global world, and with China very much wanting play a lead role on that stage, it's own thin-skin may be a high barrier.

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Filed Under: censorship, china, free speech, kamala harris, mike pence, us, vp debate

Read more from the original source:
China Micro-Censors The VP Debate In The Most Hamfisted Way - Techdirt

Joe Rogan has weighed in on employees of Spotify allegedly pushing to censor episodes of his podcast,Joe Rogan Experience.

On Wednesday, September 16th, Spotify hosted a town hall meeting at which employees raised concern over content in theJRE archive.

A number of employees took umbrage with an episode that featured an interview with Abigail Shrier author ofIrreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters. During the episode, Shrier associates transness with autism and explores her theory that YouTube and social media are influencing young people to transition.

Many LGBTQAI+/ally Spotifiers feel unwelcome and alienated because of leaderships response in JRE conversations. What is your message to those employees? one employee raised during the meeting.

When The Joe Rogan Experience first landed on Spotify at the beginning of September, a select few notably controversial episodes were omitted. Episodes that saw Rogan interview Gavin McInnes, Chuck Johnson, Milo Yiannopoulos, and Alex Jones the latter whos own podcast was removed from Spotify for hate content.

In a statement, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek expressed that the company had reviewed the episode featuring Abigail Shrier, ultimately deciding against removing it from the platform.

In the case of Joe Rogan, a total of 10 meetings have been held with various groups and individuals to hear their respective concerns, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek said. And some of them want Rogan removed because of things hes said in the past.

Others have concerns specifically over a recent episode, Ek continued. And Joe Rogan and the episode in question have been reviewed extensively. The fact that we arent changing our position doesnt mean we arent listening. It just means we made a different judgment call.

The rest is here:
Joe Rogan has weighed in on Spotify employees looking to censor JRE - The Industry Observer

Facebook and Twitter on Tuesday censored posts by President Donald Trump that the social media platforms said violated their rules against misinformation about the coronavirus pandemic. In his posts, Trump compared COVID-19 to the seasonal flu, downplayed the deadly nature of the pandemic and said, we are learning to live with COVID.

The morning after he returned to the White House from Walter Reed Hospitalstill infectious and heavily medicatedand posed in Hitlerian fashion for a photo op on the Truman Balcony, Trump took to social media to bolster his homicidal herd immunity policy and dangerously demonstrate by example how the great leader is facing down the virus.

Facebook removed his post entirely but not before it was shared approximately 26,000 times, according to data published by the social media metrics company CrowdTangle. A Facebook spokesperson told CNBC, We remove incorrect information about the severity of Covid-19, and have now removed this post.

The action by Facebook is unusual in that the worlds largest social media platform has been reluctant to remove posts by the president in the past. In August, Facebook deleted a video of Donald Trump falsely asserting that children were almost immune from COVID-19 during an interview with Fox News, the first time the platform ever removed one of his social media posts.

In the case of Twitter, the tweet remains up but is covered by a warning that says, This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the publics interest for the Tweet to remain accessible, along with a link to learn more about the companys coronavirus information policy. Trumps post cannot be retweeted or shared.

The full Tweet reads, Flu season is coming up! Many people every year, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine, die from the Flu. Are we going to close down our Country? No, we have learned to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!

That Trumps comparison of the seasonal flu to the coronavirus is completely false is easily confirmed by information readily accessible on the website of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The site contains data for every year of the seasonal flu going back to 2010-2011 and shows that the death rate among those who get sick from the flu ranges between 0.1 percent and 0.3 percent. The death rate, through July, of those who have contracted COVID-19 is 2 percent, showing that coronavirus is between 6.7 and 20 times more deadly than the flu.

Additionally, as pointed out by the Washington Post, many people who have been infected with the virus have lingering symptoms for months, including difficulty breathing, inability to exert themselves physically, recurring pain. The virus can cause long-term damage to organs other than the lungs, damage that is not common to the seasonal flu.

In response to the censorship measures by Facebook and Twitter, the President tweeted REPEAL SECTION 230!!! Section 230 contains the provisions within the Communications Decency Act of 1996 that shield online services such as social media platforms from being legally responsible for the content posted by users of their systems.

When Twitter began labeling the presidents tweets in late May, he issued an executive order making the US government the arbiter of political speech online. The order called upon the Federal Communications Commission to revise the scope of Section 230 and also empowered the Federal Trade Commission to evaluate the content moderation polices of the tech giants and determine whether or not their actions violate free speech rights.

With Attorney General William Barr standing next to him, President Trump said on that day, Were here today to defend free speech from one of the greatest dangers, before he signed the order. By empowering the federal regulatory agencies in his executive order, Trump was sending a message to big tech that attempts to censor his social media postsalong with those of his far-right and fascist allies and supporterswould result in the removal of Section 230 protections and open up the online service providers to fines and lawsuits.

Since then, the Department of Justice (DoJ) and AG Barr late last month drafted proposed legislation modifying the language of Section 230 to address concerns about online censorship by requiring greater transparency and accountability when platforms remove lawful speech. In a letter dated September 23, Barr jumbled together claims that big tech is hiding behind the shield of Section 230 to censor lawful speech with the allegation that online service providers are invoking the laws protections to escape liability even when they knew their services were being used for criminal activity.

Simultaneous with the DoJ-drafted legislation, Republican Senators Roger Wicker of Mississippi, Lindsey Graham of South Carolina and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee introduced a bill in the Senate that calls for nearly identical modifications to Section 230 rules for online services. At the top of their list is the unsubstantiated charge that right-wing political views are being singled out by the tech monopolies for persistent online censorship.

In moving the bill, Senator Wicker said, For too long, social media platforms have hidden behind Section 230 protections to censor content that deviates from their beliefs. These practices should not receive special protections in our society where freedom of speech is at the core of our nations values. Our legislation would restore power to consumers by promoting full and fair discourse online.

On October 1, the Senate Commerce Committee, which includes 14 Republicans and 12 Democrats, voted unanimously to subpoena the top executives of Facebook, Twitter and Google to appear at a hearing on Section 230 on October 28. After initial opposition to the subpoenas from Democratic Senator Maria Cantwell, the Republicans agreed to add the topics of privacy and misinformation to be discussed along with censorship issues.

Meanwhile, the House Judiciary Committee released a 449-page report on Tuesday on the results of its antitrust investigation into Apple, Amazon, Google and Facebook which condemns big techs monopoly power and calls for the companies to be broken up and restructured.

The coming together of the White House and Democrats and Republicans in Congress over a raft of regulations and attempt to assert government control over the Silicon Valley tech giants raises to a new level contradictions embedded within the capitalist system, not least of which is that these firms are the most valued properties on Wall Street worth trillions of dollars and a primary source of the massive fortunes being made by the financial oligarchy that controls both parties and the entire US political establishment.

Behind the frenzied efforts to reign in the powerful technologies of these firms is a growing awareness that the utilization of these systems by billions of people amid expanding class struggle internationally presents the ruling elite with a problem of revolutionary proportions.

While the ruling establishment is roiled by intense conflicts in the run-up to the November 3 electionswith Trump asserting that he intends to stay in office regardless of the outcome the Democrats and Republicans are unified in their drive to clamp down on information technologies. Their central aim is to prevent the working class from using these technologies to organize their struggles, including across national boundaries, and above all to stop the program of revolutionary socialism represented by the World Socialist Web Site from reaching the working class and youth.

See the original post here:
Trump intensifies conflict with big tech over Section 230 protections following censorship moves by Facebook and Twitter - WSWS

The decision by four major art museums in the UK and US to postpone for four years Philip Guston Now, a long-planned retrospective of one of postwar Americas most significant artists, is a cowardly act of censorship.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Tate Modern in London, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and Museum of Fine Arts, Houston claimed in a September 21 statement that Gustons obviously hostile and darkly satirical images of Ku Klux Klansmen and others could not be exhibited until a time at which we think that the powerful message of social and racial justice that is at the center of Philip Gustons work can be more clearly interpreted.

The museums directors said they needed more time to properly prepare the public to understand Gustons message through outreach and programming. This is evasive and duplicitous. No honest opponent of racism and anti-Semitism would object to Gustons attack on the KKK and other reactionary features of American society. Those who object to the artists supposed appropriation of African American suffering are cultural-nationalist elements who insist that race is the category that defines human beings.

The directors may share this foul view or simply feel the need to accommodate themselves to the current atmosphere. In either case, they have helped deliver a blow to artistic freedom.

In the face of a deluge of criticism, the directors of the National Gallery and the Tate have tried to defend themselves. National Gallery Director Kaywin Feldman told Hyperallergic this week that in todays Americabecause Guston appropriated images of Black traumathe show needs to be about more than Guston. She went on, Also, related, an exhibition with such strong commentary on race cannot be done by all-white curators. Everybody involved in this project is white. ... We definitely need some curators of color working on the project with us. I think all four museums agree with that statement.

This is simply disgusting, a craven giving in to racialist thinking of the most sinister type, which historically has been associated with the far right. Along those lines, those who object or might object to the Guston exhibition are now generally vociferous in their calls for censorship. These are the same political forces who in 2017 protested against the exhibitionat the Whitney Museum in New Yorkof Dana Shutzs Open Casket, a painting based on a photograph of 15-year-old Emmett Till, a black youth murdered and mutilated in 1955. Some of the protesters, in fact, went so far as to demand the painting be burned!

To paraphrase what we said in 2017, the subject matter, the activities of the Klan, does not belong to African American artists or anyone else. It is the common property and responsibility of those who oppose, in Lenins phrase, all cases of tyranny, oppression, violence, and abuse. These petty-bourgeois nationalist elements are not genuinely concerned with the history of African American suffering or anyone elses. If they were, they would want it to be exposed and denounced as widely as possible. They are objecting to anyone else, as they see it, gaining some advantage from the franchise.

These are selfish, careerist elements who want to monopolize a field for their own prestige and profit. At the same time, the extreme racialism serves the political purpose, pursued by the New York Times and the Democratic Party milieu, of attempting to confuse the population and divide it along racial and ethnic lines, diverting from the struggle against social inequality, war and the threat of dictatorship.

In the past three years, the situation has only become more noxious and the racialists activities more provocative.

The museum directors announcement of the postponement was met with dismay by art critics who objected to the overt act of censorship, especially against an artist deeply committed to the struggle against racism, although most seemed resigned to the delay. The artists daughter, Musa Mayer, commented, Its sad. This should be a time of reckoning, of dialogue. These paintings meet the moment we are in today. The danger is not in looking at Philip Gustons work but in looking away.

A forceful demand that the show be reinstated was issued in an open letter signed by 100 artists, curators, art dealers and writers published last Wednesday in the Brooklyn Rail, which has since garnered hundreds more signatures. Signed by Matthew Barney, Nicole Eisenman, Joan Jonas, Martin Puryear, Lorna Simpson and Henry Taylor among others, the list reads like a whos who of todays most prominent artists, black and white.

The open letter begins by noting that the undersigned artists were shocked and disappointed by the four-year postponement. The letter cites the comment by Musa Mayer that Guston had dared to unveil [the] racist terror that he had witnessed since boyhood, when the Klan marched openly by the thousands in the streets of Los Angeles. As poor Jewish immigrants, his family fled extermination in the Ukraine. He understood what hatred was. It was the subject of his earliest works.

The open letter and the principled opposition of many artists to the museums censorship are welcome and objectively significant, although the signatories weaken their own position by giving in too much to the notion of white culpability and other nostrums of identity politics.

The open letter is strongest in denouncing the notion that hiding Gustons art will somehow improve matters. The people who run our great institutions do not want trouble, it argues. They fear controversy. They lack faith in the intelligence of their audience. If museum officials feel that the current social eruptions will blow over in four years, the letter asserts, they are mistaken. The tremors shaking us all will never end until justice and equity are installed. Hiding away images of the KKK will not serve that end. Quite the opposite. And Gustons paintings insist that justice has never yet been achieved.

The artists letter demands the exhibition be restored to the museums schedules, and that their staffs prepare themselves to engage with a public that might well be curious about why a painterever self-critical and a standard-bearer for freedomwas compelled to use such imagery.

Guston (1913-1980) was born in Montreal to Ukrainian-Jewish parents but grew up in California and attended high school in Los Angeles with fellow future painter Jackson Pollock. Moving to New York, according to ArtNet, Guston was enrolled in the Works Progress Administration during the 1930s [like Pollock], where he produced works inspired by the Mexican Muralists and Italian Renaissance paintings.

Guston became associated with Abstract Expressionism, the loose gestural painting style also known as the New York School that was the dominant artistic school of the Cold War period of the 1950s. Other Abstract Expressionists were Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning and, of course, Pollock.

After playing a leading role in the development of abstract art, however, Guston came to reject its approach as too rarefied and confining as a means of responding artistically and politically to the upheavals of the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s. What kind of man am I, he once asked, sitting at home, reading magazines, going into a frustrated fury about everythingand then going into my studio to adjust a red to a blue?

Guston became widely known for his blunt, almost cartoonish images suggesting the thuggish brutality and political corruption of official American society. He developed a distinctive figurative style populated with oversized heads, hands, bricks, shoes and other bizarre objects. The artists highly personal iconography also included hooded Klansmen, who began appearing in his work as early as the 1930s. These buffoonish figures often appear crammed into cars like the Three Stooges, if anything more menacing because they seem so omnipresent and ordinary.

Attracted as a teenager to left-wing politics, Guston (then Goldstein) had joined one of the John Reed clubs sponsored by the Communist Party. While the role of the Stalinists was already a negative one, these clubs still attracted artists seeking to fight poverty and inequality. He and his friend Reuben Kadish painted a mural and joined a rally in Los Angeles to raise money for the defense of the Scottsboro Boys, the nine African American teenagers falsely accused of raping two white women in Alabama.

After the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) backed off the case over fears of repercussions, the youths defense was taken up by the Communist Party. This won the CP broad support among radicalized white and black workers, as well as artists and young people like Guston. The painter, like many artists of his generation, eventually left the Stalinist orbit of the CP in favor of left-liberal politics. However, his commitment to fighting racism and anti-Semitism retained a genuine, democratic character at odds with the current racialist trends.

Often cloaked in left-sounding rhetoric by groups of political activist/artistic collectives who call for increasing the number of BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, People of Color) on museum staffs, boards and among the artists whose work is acquired and promoted, the identity politics campaigns against the systemic racism of cultural institutions have nothing progressive about them.

In response, the various institutions have endlessly adapted themselves to and retreated before their racialist critics. In mid-September, the Brooklyn Museumno doubt in straitened circumstances because of the pandemic-induced closureannounced it would auction 12 works from its collection to raise funds for the care of its collection.

While culling work by 16th-19th century European painters Cranach the Elder, Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot, the Brooklyn Museum has said that it would not sell any of its work by living, presumably more ethnically diverse artists. The Baltimore Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for their part recently made a point of selling work to acquire more art by women and artists of color.

In another manifestation of the logic of segregation to which this sort of outlook leads, the blue-chip Chelsea gallery and art dealer David Zwirner recently announced it was hiring Ebony L. Haynes as a new gallery director to realize her vision for a kunsthalle with an all-Black staff, which would offer exhibits of and internships to exclusively Black youth. There arent enough places of accessespecially in commercial galleriesfor Black staff and for people of color to gain experience, she said.

But what would access on this backward, racially exclusive basis amount to? What sort of art will come out of such a process?

The rotten character of this resurgence of racial-ethnic thinking finds expression in the censorship of the Guston exhibition itself. A show dedicated to the work of an artist who fiercely pursued equality and an end to oppression of all types has run afoul of a privileged, upper middle class crowd whose outlook and activity operate in a very different direction: toward racial-ethnic exclusivism, selfishness and the striving for privilege.

Original post:
Blatant censorship: Retrospective of American painter Philip Guston delayed four years - WSWS

Rob Fahey

Contributing Editor

Friday 9th October 2020

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On the scale of grand industry scandals, a few short phrases being censored in the in-game chat client of a free-to-play RPG seems like it ought to be in real "storm in a teacup" territory.

Indeed, it's deeply unlikely that very many of the millions of players of Genshin Impact -- a Breath of the Wild inspired RPG for PC, PS4 and mobile, which is quickly shaping up to be one of the most internationally successful titles to have been developed in mainland China thus far -- will ever really notice that the game does the text equivalent of bleeping them out should they choose to mention places like Taiwan or Hong Kong, or a number of other phrases, some of them surprisingly innocuous. Even among those who do notice, the vast majority will shrug it off; it's not a major imposition for most, and it's not like developer miHoYo seemingly had a choice in the matter given China's censorship rules.

For the specifics of those rules and why this has happened at all, Niko Partners' Daniel Ahmad wrote a succinct thread on Twitter (cited in this previous GamesIndustry.biz story) that's worth reading. Taken in isolation, this is explanation enough -- and will certainly be more than enough to sate the curiosity of almost any gamer who wonders enough about the censored terms to try googling about the whole affair.

What we're seeing here is the thin end of a wedge that's going to become a very serious headache for a lot of games companies in the coming years

However, it's worth stepping back from this single instance of China's censorship creeping into the media and communications of people beyond its borders, and considering the broader context -- because this isn't the first time this kind of issue has popped up, and there's a strong possibility that what we're seeing here is the thin end of a wedge that's going to become a very serious headache for a lot of games companies in the coming years.

Unless you follow developments in Chinese politics and geopolitics relatively closely, the first time something like this appeared on your radar was probably last October -- when Blizzard banned a pro Hearthstone player, Hong Kong resident Ng Wai "blitzchung" Chung, and fired two presenters who had interviewed him on a post-game livestream during which he made remarks supporting democracy in Hong Kong. Blizzard's knee-jerk kowtow to China's censors (jerking your knees and kowtowing at the same time being the gutless executive's version of the childhood challenge of rubbing your belly and patting your head at the same time) earned it an unusually bipartisan rap on the knuckles from the US Senate and House of Representatives, not to mention some noisy protests from the company's own consumers. Tellingly, however, Blizzard only walked back its decision a few steps at best, almost visibly scrambling to find some convoluted form of words that would appease critics outside China without actually annoying China's authorities.

China's authorities seem to have decided that censorship pools once restricted to its own population can be applied internationally

The lesson anyone in authority in China would have taken away from that affair -- and several other individually minor run-ins with western media and gaming companies over various kinds of content or censorship -- is that the size of the Chinese market and the extent of the nation's stakeholdings in overseas firms means that it's now open season on discussions or statements it doesn't like, even outside its borders. Within China, of course, censorship of users' discussions on digital platforms has been standard for years; the government's control, however, mostly stopped at its borders.

As the country's economic and geopolitical conflict with the United States has expanded, however, so too has its desire to control or suppress narratives and discussions overseas. This has resulted in the removal or hiding of statements or symbols with which China's authorities take issue, often from platforms owned or controlled within China (such as WeChat and TikTok, and games like Genshin Impact) but also on platforms which aren't China-based but rely on keeping the authorities there happy for a major part of their revenue and potential growth -- from Activision Blizzard's games through YouTube and Microsoft Bing, all the way up to major international organisations like the WHO.

Genshin Impact is a relatively minor case of Chinese censorship, but the number of examples is steadily growing

A good example of this kind of censorship creeping out beyond China's borders can be found in games, in fact. As Daniel Ahmad noted in his thread on this topic, many Chinese game operators used to run two versions of their games, disabling censorship filters in the one aimed at overseas players. This practice appears to be in decline, with Genshin Impact being just one high-profile example; generally speaking, China's authorities seem to have decided that censorship pools once restricted to its own population are quite handy to apply internationally as well, especially now that some of its major tech companies are doing so well overseas.

As the strain between China and the US increases -- something that's likely to happen regardless of who wins next month's US Presidential election, although a change at the top may at least make the process more predictable -- companies which operate tech or media platforms, like games, in both China and abroad, or which have welcomed large investments from Chinese firms, are going to increasingly find themselves dragged into this fight. Asked to police the speech of their users (and employees) in ways that are going to play increasingly poorly to consumers and governments elsewhere, the value of China's market and investment is going to have to be constantly balanced against the power of the backlash elsewhere.

There's a very real degree of commercial and political pressure being brought slowly to bear on game companies

Absent a pretty major shift in approach from consumers or governments, that's a balance that's not often going to favour anything other than capitulation to China's demands most of the time. The country's authorities have plenty of leverage left in the tank and haven't experienced any real pushback to these moves thus far. Protests against companies complying with censorious demands have been small-scale and relatively muted, and overseas governments certainly haven't shown any stomach for waving around big sticks on this kind of issue.

There has even been a small but vocal counter-backlash movement in some instances, largely based on taking Blizzard's conspicuously awful "we just want people to stop talking about politics and focus on the games" excuse and turning it up to 11. In these people's reality, Chinese censorship is actually good, you see, because it stops terrible people from ruining games by mentioning political things -- when as any fool knows, "games" and "politics" are the opposite of one another and should never be put together.

Of course, games have never existed in a vacuum away from geopolitics and some forms of censorship have been a reality all along. It would be pretty intellectually dishonest to condemn China's growing pernicious influence on in-game content and communications without acknowledging that the whole world has spent decades with its games being quietly tuned and, yes, censored in such a way as to minimise the pearl-clutching of middle America. There's a reason games continue to be vastly more comfortable with an exploding skull than with an exposed nipple, or that anything that lies along America's cultural faultlines -- like the existence of LGBT people, or any kind of nuanced discussion of racism -- is generally avoided or pushed to the fringes of the medium.

But holding up this kind of commercially-driven self-censorship to match the whims of the US market alongside government-ordered filtering of media and communications is a false equivalence. We cannot and should not pretend that "if we don't make this regressive creative decision, we'll risk selling poorly in America" is remotely the same thing, morally, as "if we don't follow this censorship order, we'll probably have our Chinese joint venture shut down".

So yes, the Genshin Impact scandal really is a storm in a teacup. Something as (arguably) minor and (certainly) dumb as Taiwan and Hong Kong being added to a game's naughty word filter isn't really anything game consumers are going to worry about in the long term, given that it doesn't impact the game, is easily circumvented, and well, why are you discussing politics in a game chat channel anyway -- or so the logic will go. Put enough stormy tea-cups together, though, and a pattern starts to swirl out of them.

This wedge is still thin, but it's been sliding in for a long time, and far away from the ground reality of a censored game chat channel there's a very real degree of commercial and political pressure being brought slowly to bear on game companies and other firms with influence over culture and media around the world. I'm not sure we'll ever see Genshin Impact's chat censorship as a watershed, but be certain that it's a little taste of a sour flavour we're all going to get very used to in the coming years.

Read the original:
Gaming will be a frontline in China's censorship drive | Opinion - GamesIndustry.biz

10/09/2020 China (International Christian Concern) The China Christian Council (CCC) and Three-Self Patriotic Movement, commonly known as the lianghui (two organizations) in China, govern all things for state-sanctioned churches. However, some Christians recently discovered that the word Christ has been removed from all of the publications available for sales on its online bookstore.

According to Ying Fuk-tsang, director of the divinity school at The Chinese University of Hong Kong, he was notified by Chinese Christians that the Christian books on sales at Tianfeng Bookstore on WeChat platform, have their covers altered. The word jidu (Christ) on all the books has been covered with stars or replaced with English letters JD (abbreviated from jidu).

While it is possible that the bookstore owned by lianghui did this in order to avoid censorship from WeChat, since anything religious is becoming increasingly sensitive in cyberspace, this shows that both freedom of speech and religious freedom are deteriorating with each passing day under Xis regime.For interviews, please contact Olivia Miller, Communications Coordinator:press@persecution.org.

See more here:
TSPM Online Book Store Self-censors and Avoids Using the Word Christ - International Christian Concern

The social media giants Facebook and Twitter on Tuesday censored President Trump's post and tweet, comparing COVID-19 and the flu.

Facebook removed Trump's post in which he claimed COVID-19 is less deadly "in most populations" than the flu.

The President wrote on Twitter: "Flu season is coming up! Many people every year, sometimes over 100,000, and despite the Vaccine, die from the Flu. Are we going to close down our Country? No, we have learned to live with it, just like we are learning to live with Covid, in most populations far less lethal!!!"

Twitter left the President's tweet in place, but added the following disclaimer:

"This Tweet violated the Twitter Rules about spreading misleading and potentially harmful information related to COVID-19. However, Twitter has determined that it may be in the public's interest for the Tweet to remain accessible," the disclaimer read.

Axios reports Facebook has been criticized for not removing posts that violate community guidelines in a timely manner, yet the company took swift action when Trump posted information about the virus that "could contribute to imminent physical harm." Twitter took action about 30 minutes later.

A Facebook spokesperson told Axios, "We remove incorrect information about the severity of COVID-19, and have now removed this post."

A Twitter spokesman also told the website: "We placed a public interest notice on this Tweet for violating our COVID-19 Misleading Information Policy by making misleading health claims about COVID-19. As is standard with this public interest notice, engagements with the Tweet will be significantly limited."

The President's social media posts came after he tested positive for COVID-19 and spent three days at the Walter Reed Medical Center. While reportedly still contagious, he will continue his recovery at the White House, where he will be cared for 24/7 by a team of doctors and nurses.

Out of 7.4 million cases in the US, COVID-19 has killed almost 210,000 Americans this year, according to the CDC. For comparison, the CDC's website estimates 24,000 to 62,000 have died during the most recent flu season, out of 39 million to 56 million people who were sick from it.

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Facebook, Twitter Censor Trump Post Comparing COVID with the Flu - CBN News