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Instagram is approaching updated censorship guidelines for all accounts. The update will blur out content that could be considered objectionable, letting the user choose if they would like to view the content.

In the past, Instagram has been accused of deleting sensitive content, which many users deemed unreasonable. The censorship update will allow users to decide what kind of content they wish to see.

The update is an approach to foster a safer, kinder community for the 500 million active users of the social outlet. Instagram will soon be censoring content such as animal testing, famine, humanitarian crises and nudity.

The blurring of certain content may affect a variety of users including brands, bloggers, photojournalists and photographers. Much of what popularly followed users share could be censored if found offensive by others.

Soon you may notice a screen over sensitive photos and videos when you scroll through your feed or visit a profile. While these posts dont violate our guidelines, someone in the community has reported them and our review team has confirmed they are sensitive. This change means you are less likely to have surprising or unwanted experiences in the app, Kevin Systrom, co-founder and CEO of Instagram, wrote in a company blog post.

Instagram will also be adding a new security feature, enabling a two-factor authentication that will require a code every time a user logs in.

Anchorage-based photographer Jovell Rennie does not doubt that the new guidelines will cause backlash, but thinks that many users wont necessarily be affected. Rennie is best known for a variety of local camera work, sharing Alaska and boudoir photography.

I cant imagine many photographers liking the fact that their images are blurred. I think it comes down to your motivations for using the platform. If you use it primarily for commercial exposure, reaching out to prospective clients, etc., then you might be pretty peeved about the blurring. If you use it for artistic expression, you might not feel as bothered, Rennie said.

Shayne Nuesca, UAA student and photojournalist, feels that Instagrams guidelines will result in feeds that are too curated.

I dont like the idea that I could be censored if I do decide to make a photograph about a more sensitive issue. When I see a photo thats blurred, I automatically think that the photo might be distasteful. But most of the time, it isnt and it actually adds a story to a larger narrative. I would hate to see organizations and photojournalists be labeled as distasteful because their photos are censored. Its really not fair, Nuesca said.

To Nuesca, expressing yourself safely is more suppressive than expressive.

Whether Instagrams new approach is successful or hurts a fraction of their users, letting consumers have the authority to choose what kind of content they wish to see could be a reasonable solution.

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Instagram to alter censorship guidelines - UAA Northern Light

The news that Ayaan Hirsi Ali has cancelled her speaking tour of Australia due to security concerns should concernanyone who believes in freedom. It is a dark day when a woman who fled to the West to escape the Islamist suffocations of Somalia, and precisely so that she might think and speak freely, feels she cannot say certain things in certain places. That even a Western, liberal, democratic nation like Australia cannot guarantee Hirsi Ali the freedom to speak her mind without suffering censorship or harm is deeply worrying. It points to the mainstreaming of intolerance, to the adoption by certain people in the West of the illiberalism that makes up the very Islamist outlook that Hirsi Ali and others have sought to escape.

Hirsi Alis Oz tour, Hero of Heresy, had been due to kick off this Thursday. She would have visited Brisbane, Sydney and Melbourne, hosted by Think Inc., an organisation devoted to the promotion of intellectual discourse. But today, citing, among other things, security concerns, Think Inc. announced the tour was off.

This isnt the first time Hirsi Ali has effectively been hounded out of even tolerant nations, made to feel unwelcome in the West because of her strong, critical take on Islam and its treatment of women. She had to leave her adopted home of Holland after receiving death threats for her involvement in the 2004 Islam-critical film Submission (the films director, Theo van Gogh, was stabbed to death by an Islamist). She still has heavy security whenever she speaks in public. Certain campuses in the US have made it clear she isnt welcome, because shes Islamophobic. That is, she criticises Islam, which today is treated as a species of mental illness. How perverse that even a woman who has suffered under extreme forms of Islam can be treated as dangerous for daring to ridicule that religion.

Hirsi Alis troubles in Australia are striking because they point to a really worrying interplay between the polite intolerance of Islamophobia and the more violent urge in certain sections of society to punish and maybe even kill critics of Islam.

So before this mornings reports of a security threat to Hirsi Ali, there had been a respectable campaign to keep her out of Oz. Four hundred Muslim women and other concerned citizens, including academics, a museum director and, hilariously, human-rights activists, signed a petition saying Hirsi Alis rhetoric poses a threat to social peace and the safety of Muslims Down Under. Against a backdrop of increasing global Islamophobia, Hirsi Alis divisive rhetoric simply serves to increase hostility and hatred towards women, the petition says. In short, her words are inflammatory, violent even, and they directly harm Muslims. So shut them down, shut her up, keep her out. Australia deserves better than this, the petition said.

In a video watched and shared tens of thousands of times by both Islamic and so-called liberal activists, Muslim women are shown denouncing Hirsi Ali, accusing her of repeat[ing] the language of our oppressors. The video says Hirsi Ali uses the same Islam-critical rhetoric that has been used in recent years to justify wars, invasion and genocide. So her words are warlike, evil, destructive. It also says she uses the language of patriarchy. This is perverse. Its patriarchal to criticise the Islamist repression of women? And, by extension, is it anti-patriarchal to defend the Islamist ideology from a womans divisive criticism?

Then came some kind of security threat, some promise of violence that caused her to cancel her tour. Its time we realised that these things are intimately related; that respectable societys creeping intolerance of critical thought fuels other, more extreme peoples conviction that such thought must be punished harshly, if necessary.

The more people depict certain ideas as unfit for public life, the more they send out a signal that the people who hold those ideas are dangerous and wicked, and possibly fair game for violence. They branded Hirsi Ali an enemy of public order and decency, no doubt making it easier for others to fantasise about punishing her. They said she would harm Australia and its Muslims, no doubt giving others the idea that she should therefore be kept out of Australia by any means necessary.

Where somewant to crush the likes of Hirsi Ali or Charlie Hebdo with laws and bans, others want to crush them with violence. Different means, yes; but these two sections of society, the chin-strokers and the gun-strokers, share the same aim: to silence people whose ideas they dislike. The bookish censor lends moral authority to the violent censor. From thefailure to stand up for Salman Rushdie to the No Platforming of the likes of Hirsi Ali today, too many thinkers in the supposedly tolerant West unwittingly give a nod of approval to efforts to shut down dangerous people.The signal we should be sending to society is not that some ideas are too dangerous for public life, but that no ideas, even ridicule of Islam, will ever be silenced or punished; that it is unacceptable ever to harm someone simply for what they think and say.

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The short path from censorship to violence - Spectator.co.uk (blog)

When documentary filmmaker Kacey Cox heard that Anastasia Lin, an actress hed previously worked with, had won Miss World Canada based on a platform for human rightsand would have to enter China to compete in the finalshe knew he had to film her journey.

You couldnt have written a better story, Cox said.

Miss World is a U.K.-based pageant with the motto beauty with a purpose, and Lin brought a message of religious freedom to the stage. She was outspoken about human rights atrocities in China, like the persecution of practitioners of various faiths, and the Chinese regimes harvesting of organs from prisoners of conscience.

The ruling Chinese Communist Party (CCP) is not known for taking criticismthere have been many cases of foreign citizens being arrested in the country for speaking out about issues like Lin has. She was admittedly nervous when she first got the newsof where the finals would be held.

Cox and Lin met briefly soon after Lin won Miss World Canada, and Lin mentioned the finals venue had been moved from Australia to China. At first, the implications didnt register with Cox. He congratulated her, and they parted ways.

Then as he was walking away, it clickedLin was going to be walking into the lions mouth. He chased after her, all the way down to the parking lot, and told her they had to make a film about it.

The result was the documentary Anastasia Lin: The Crown, currently screening at film festivals internationally and soon to be shown at the Manhattan Film Festival, on April 25.

The film reveals a side of China that is still little known, one governed by a covert body that effectively silences dissent.

As every major media reported in the aftermath of the 2015 Miss World pageant, Lin was barred from entry by Chinese officials and received little assistance from the Miss World pageant organizers. In making the film, Cox followed Lin as she made multiple attempts to get answers and gain entry to the country. The film also succinctly illustrates her personal story.

At one point, Lin sheds light on why she became such a passionate advocate for human rights. She confesses that as a young child in China, she was considered a good student because she was the class organizer who made sure all the other students studied the CCPs propaganda and viewed the Partys enemies as their enemies. It wasnt until she left the country that she realized how misled people inside China still are. The realization led her to dig into the lies the Party asked others to repeat.

As Lin continued speaking out about human rights abuses while in the international spotlight as a beauty queen, she started getting pushback.

Inside China, articles about Lin were either blocked or completely altered to the point where they seemed to be written about another person entirely. Her name and her photo were changed to show another Chinese woman.

Then Lins father, who lives in China, started receiving threats. He called to advise her to back down, admonishing her for criticizing the Party. Then, as Cox documented while traveling with her, Lin started receiving threatening phone calls herself.

Cox filmed Lin as she took a flight from Canada to Hong Kong with plans to enter Sanya City, a resort town in China that has unique rules that dont require entrants to have visas until after they arrive.

The trip was an incredibly tense. It was the shortest 16-hour flight Ive ever been on, Cox said.

Chinadeclared Lin persona non grataan unwelcome person, or someone not allowed into the countryand when she landed, she was crowded by media. Interviews and media appearances continued on for the next eight days; Cox observed as Lin stayed up until 3 a.m. to give interviews to overseas media outlets. Her opportunity to competewas over, but her human rights platform and calls to hold China accountable were more relevant than ever.

I felt that a documentary could amplify her message, which is one of ending the persecution of groups like [the spiritual practice] Falun Gong in China, and religious freedom for people around the world, Cox said. Human rights and religious freedom are issues Cox has always also felt strongly about, and he felt personally invested in the story from the beginning.

While following Lin on this journey, he felt he was really seeing beauty with a purpose in action. On a trip to Geneva, Switzerland, where Lin spoke at a U.N. forum about human rights, young fans approached her and told her about how shed changed their perception of beauty queens.

Its a persons purpose that makes them beautiful, Cox said. The film doesnt talk much about pageant perceptions, but this message colored his making of the documentary. He made a film that he hoped would clearly explain Lins cause and purpose, and hopefully inspire others to act with similar conviction.

Anastasia Lin: The Crown will screen in New York at the Manhattan Film Festival on April 25 at 5 p.m.

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Documentary Follows Beauty Queen Who Fought Censorship - The Epoch Times

UNH Women's Studies Program Faculty and Staff April 3, 2017 Filed under Opinions

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The Womens Studies Program strongly condemns the universitys recent censorship of the anti-sexual harassment exhibit posted in the MUB.

We stand in support of the students who worked with the Sexual Harassment and Rape Prevention Program (SHARPP) to stage this creative and brave response to sexual violence on university campuses. The students solicited actual epithets that have been hurled at members of our campus community, and replicated these on the wall outside the MUBs main offices. Within only hours of the exhibits appearance on March 17, the university took it down.

The administration justifies its decision by citing the MUB policy manual (section 8.03): Any poster with hate speech as defined in the Students Rights, Rules and Responsibilities will not be posted. Any poster/flyer containing profane/vulgar language is prohibited. But this was not a poster, it was an exhibit. And the language it contained is, indeed, much more than profane and vulgar: it is real, and it is violent.

By invoking, interpreting and enforcing the MUB policy manual in this way, the university has shut this conversation down, and has done great damage to student and staff attempts to address campus sexual harassment and violence. The university has invested a great deal of resources on public relations campaigns to present itself as taking action on this problem. It would do well to let the people who understand the issue bestSHARPP, and the students who live with and experience the harassment and violenceto have a voice.

The Faculty and Staff of the UNH Womens Studies Program

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Women's Studies program condemns censorship - The New Hampshire