Category Archives: Transhuman News

If Elon Musk truly intends to make Twitter a free-speech platform, hes clearly got a fight on his hands. That was made abundantly clear by the collective meltdown among media and political elites that greeted the billionaires shock takeover of the platform last month. The vested interests in keeping Twitter a sanitised, censorious place are apparently considerable. And not only will Musk have the great and good, his own employees, our own Nadine Dorries and Joe Bidens new disinformation tsar to contend with, but potentially Twitters advertisers, too.

CNN reportsthat giant American brands, including Coca-Cola and Disney, are coming under pressure to boycott Twitter if Elon Musk makes good on his promises to roll back content-moderation policies and bring speech standards on the platform more or less in line with what the law allows. Twenty-six civil-society organisations have signed an open letter, calling on big brands to pressure Musk to at least maintain Twitters existing censorship regime which would include keeping banned bogeymen like Donald Trump off the platform and continuing to limit what is deemed hate speech and misinformation. As top advertisers on Twitter, your brand risks association with a platform amplifying hate, extremism, health misinformation, and conspiracy theorists, the letter warns.

What is blithely skated over here, of course, is that hate speech and misinformation are notoriously difficult to define. And that platforms like Twitter have censored all kinds of material in recent years that, by most peoples standards, is neither hateful nor untrue. Twitter, for instance, currently censorspeople for misgendering which led to feminist Meghan Murphy reportedly being banned for life when she misgendered an activist who at the time was suing beauticians for refusing to wax his bits. Twitter along with Facebook also suppressed the New York Posts infamous Hunter Biden laptop expos in the run up to the 2020 election, locking the New York Post out of its Twitter account and stopping people from sharing the story. This tale of Biden juniors dealings in Ukraine was dismissed as misinformation by experts, who warned that the laptop could be ofRussian origin. But the story turned out to be true. Former Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey later admittedthat censoring the story was a total mistake.

Here we see that content moderation and talk of tackling misinformation are now just polite euphemisms for censorship aimed primarily at those who do not align with the views of the not-so-liberal elite. Clearly, there are plenty of activists who are terrified that Twitter under Elon Musk will no longer clamp down on their opponents. We also see that many of those supposedly horrified at the prospect of unelected billionaires controlling the flow of information are complete hypocrites. They didnt mind the tech oligarchs nearly as much when they were all broadly onside. And as this call for a big-brand ad boycott shows, various groups are more than happy to weaponise other multibillion-dollar companies to the end of limiting what the rest us can say and read online.

Weve seen this all before. In 2020, more than a thousand organisations and advertisers, including Unilever, Coca-Cola and Pfizer, took part in a temporary boycott of Facebook urging it to do more to censor hate. This was sparked by some of President Trumps more incendiary posts about the Black Lives Matter riots posts which Facebook had stubbornly refused to fact-check or censor. That campaign was similarly spearheaded by a group of civil-society organisations. Prince Harry and Meghan Markle were also reportedly involved.

Those calling for a boycott against Musk have a point when they say that the flow of information should not be controlled by the rich and powerful. I would rather the state of online freedom didnt depend on the political leanings of billionaires. But the forces of big business are clearly on the side of censorship, or are at least willing to give in to histrionic campaigners. Musk a self-professed free-speech absolutist is very much the outlier here. His critics arent worried about billionaires setting the bounds of acceptable thought and speech. They would just rather a different set of billionaires were doing it, those who agree with them that allowing ordinary people to say and read what they like puts us on a fast track to authoritarianism.

Musk may well fail in his attempt to make the digital public square a moderately freer place. Its unclear whether hes in this for the long haul and for the right reasons. But with the woke establishment lining up against him, the least we can say is that his cause is the right one.

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The fight is on to censor Elon Musk's Twitter - The Spectator

Sunday marked the fourth day that artist Peter Cloughs new solo show at Haul Gallery in Brooklyn was open to the public, and possibly the last. A powerful and engrossing exhibition of new videos filmed during a residency in the spacean unfinished basement beneath a beauty salon accessed from the sidewalk via a steep staircaseExaltation of the Porous Body continues Cloughs explorations of power, submission, architecture and embodiment. Its centrepiece is a 14-minute video calmly, hypnotically narrated by Clough in which he appears completely naked save a few accessories (including a leather hood) and confined in a dog cage.

Given the content, gallery co-directors Erin Davis and Max C. Lee had posted a content warning on the sign at the gallerys entrance, but that may be what ultimately drew the attention of a man claiming to be a representative of the buildings owner, who visited the space on Sunday (1 May).

I was told that they sent a photo of our signs warning viewers that there is sexual content to the landlord, and that the landlord was upset by that, Lee says. The next thing I know, theres a different guy and about seven [Fire Department of New York] crew members entering the basement and citing fire code violations. He continues, I explained that we can address those, and then the representative of the landlord was like, You are trespassing, Im calling the police.

Whether or not the New York Police Department was also summoned to the gallery is unclear, but after a conversation via FaceTime with a man said to be the buildings landlord, Lee, along with Davis and Clough, decided to close early. The gallery has remained closed to the public since.

This alleged act of censorship by a landlord operating through intimidation is complicated by the gallery's rental arrangement, the building owners anonymity and the lack of protections for commercial tenants in New York City. The building in Downtown Brooklyn where the gallery is located, 368 Livingston Street, is owned by Livingston Street Realty Associates, an entity registered as a limited partnership that thereby has minimal public reporting requirements and is very difficult to trace back to any specific individuals.

Nevertheless, Livingston Street Realty Associates and their lawyers are quite active in court. The company is currently suing three of its tenants in the building for at least $192,000 in unpaid rent, much of it accumulated since the onset of the pandemic. (While residential tenants in New York were, until recently, afforded some protections by way of Covid-19 relief, protections for small businesses started being rolled back in March 2021.)

Weve always been interested in showing in unconventional spaces, Davis says, noting that the gallery had signed a one-year agreement to sublet the basement space from another tenant in the building in February and that Livingston Street Realty Associates was aware that the gallery was operating out of the space. Were not lawyers, but were learning quickly.

"The basement cannot be used for commercial use and it violates the Certificate of Occupancy," says Jeremy J. Krantz, a lawyer at Smith & Krantz, who represents Livingston Street Realty Associates. He provided a copy of the fire department summons from the 1 May visit, addressed to the business owner who sublet the basement to Haul Gallery, which states that in order to remedy the situation it must "immediately cease any commercial use of [the] basement".

The gallerists and Clough believe the actions of the landlord and their representatives were entirely motivated by the content of the current exhibition, not any concerns about the fire code. Prior to the gallery moving in, a tattoo parlour operated out of the space without issue. But the precarity of the gallerys rental arrangement has left it in a vulnerable position with little recourse.

The selective enforcement of rules means spaces like this can operate at the margins, but also means they can easily be shut down or pushed out, says Clough, whose previous exhibition at Haul Gallery, HEAD in 2019, was similarly staged in an unconventional, unfinished basement space and was also very explicit (though differently so) but did not provoke censorship. For now, he, Davis and Lee are exploring ways to show the present exhibition and continue Hauls programming in a new location.

We were told to our faces that this shutdown is happening because of the content of the show, Lee says, and it was made clear to us that the landlord is not interested in negotiating or us staying there at all, so were moving forward.

The gallery's very identity was formed, in a sense, by a previous legal dispute. In 2019 the gallery, then known as Uhaul Gallery, changed its name to Haul Gallery after the truck rental company U-Haul threatened legal action.

The rest is here:
New York gallerists say landlord shut down their space to censor exhibition - Art Newspaper

While conditions for the press vary across the Caucasus, many of the dangers are ubiquitous. OCMedia spoke with journalists from Armenia, Azerbaijan, Daghestan, and Georgia about some of the challenges they must overcome to report the news.

World Press Freedom Day on 3May is a chance to highlight the importance of independent media as a blueprint of pluralistic democracy.

It is also an opportunity to look back at recent developments that have affected and shaped media's work in the Caucasus region, including restraints, attacks on, and demonisation of the free press.

In the Russian North Caucasus, a journalist from Chernovik attested to how an already repressive media environment has come under unprecedented new strain due to Russias invasion of Ukraine.

In Armenia, a journalist from CivilNet described how they were also still grappling with the governments censorship during the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War, and their own efforts not to self-censor.

Last year, Georgia witnessed unprecedented attacks on journalists, including one from TV Formula who reflected on the continuous demonisation of independent media.

Meanwhile, in Azerbaijan, a journalist who served years in prison for his reporting spoke to OCMedia about how the levels of press freedom continued to reach new lows.

Chernovik, a Daghestani newspaper and website, stands as one of only a handful of independent news sources still standing in the North Caucasus, where repression of the press has outpaced that of other regions of Russia.

One employee of the paper who asked to remain anonymous for fears over their safety told OCMedia the situation had only become worse since Russias invasion of Ukraine.

The authorities current approach to journalism during the hostilities is the destruction of independent journalism and freedom of speech, especially in the regions, they said.

Chernovik is no stranger to pressure from the government pickets are still ongoing in support of journalist Adbulmunin Gadzhiyev, who was accused of financing terrorism in 2019.

For the authorities and security forces, the laws introduced on fake news and military censorship give them carte blanch. In such a situation, they can find fault with any word, or even if they do not find a fault, they can use illegal methods to get rid of one or another independent publication or journalist.

For Chernovik, the pressure ramped up a week after Russias full-scale invasion of Ukraine, when, according to the employee, internet providers blocked access to their website following an unofficial request by the Daghestani authorities. This lasted only a week due to its illegality.

But the obstacles did not end there the printing press that has printed Chernovik for many years then refused to publish the paper.

According to the employee, a high-ranking official warned the printing press that their director could be imprisoned if they continued to publish the newspaper.

The publication has already filed a lawsuit against the printing house for breach of contract and has resumed publication thanks to the Makhachkala printing house, the only place to agree to publish it.

Threats that journalists could be imprisoned under the new war censorship laws have also been forthcoming.

Telegram channels associated with the Ministry of Internal Affairs and the FSB of Daghestan began to disseminate information in March that fake news was being published in the Chernovik telegram channel, the employee said.

At the same time, not a single example of such fake news was given. And until now, the security forces have not been able to find a single piece of fake news, as every week, only a list of the Daghestanis who died in the war in Ukraine is published in the newspaper, they said.

They said this had irritated the republics authorities and security forces, who have continued to pressure them using various methods, such as closing down their offices for fire safety violations.

The employee said they feared the authorities might next take economic measures to pile on the pressure, and that the postal service and private traders may start to refuse to distribute Chernovik or advertisers will be banned from taking out ads.

If this were to happen, the paper may have to temporarily close, they said.

For Gevorg Tosunyan, an experienced journalist from Yerevan-based CivilNet, war censorship, including self-censorship by journalists also proved to be a challenge to the role of an independent media.

Tosunyan covered the Second Nagorno-Karabakh War from the day it broke out, facing probably the most strict state censorship in Armenian since independence.

During the war, releasing any information contradicting the governments official line was prohibited, and dozens of organisations and individuals were forced to delete posts on social media or pay fines for violating martial law.

I personally have been receiving information from the borders that was simply the opposite of what the state was saying, he said, but his own self-censorship stopped him from publishing the information.

He said that it was natural that people, including journalists, did not wish to harm their country during a time of war, and that not telling the truth was something that most journalists had to do and later regret.

Tosunyan said that CivilNet complied with the censorship laws while trying to use the interviews and in-field reporting to show how different the reality was.

These were emotional times for everyone, Tosunyan said. For us at CivilNet, it was also hard to find a common ground on what our policy on dealing with the censorship should be.

In their case, the state was not able to directly force them to delete the published articles, because they were cautious, he said, yet dealing with the public perception of the war, and relaying the real scale of the losses was hard.

The attitude, he said, originated from Armenias victory in the first Nagorno-Karabakh War. The idea of Armenias strength and invincibility is rooted in society, making them intolerant towards those even hinting about the opposite.

The governments censorship and the propaganda just acted to deepen these ideas.

He said society was ready to pressure the media, and direct them, even without the state. It was impossible to defeat the public mood at that time, Tosunyan said.

For him, as for many others, the questions and regrets rose after the end of the war.

The media, and my personal approach too, was significantly changed.

Now, Tosunyan said he was not bound by inner barriers when filming the borders and showing Armenias military positions and the infrastructure on the borders.

Since then, we also started taking official information with a grain of salt, he added.

I hope Im wrong, but I expect a dangerous policy from the current government if theres martial law again.

New policies and restrictions introduced since the war are already limiting the work of the media, adding new offences and worsening access to information, but the government doesnt seem to be willing to change.

Were not beaten up in the streets like we were in the 2016 uprising. But that doesnt mean our rights are not being violated, he said.

On the background of lingering restrictions to public information during the pandemic, several journalists in Georgia also faced attacks while covering the parliamentary elections in the autumn of 2020.

However, this all paled in comparison to the mass violence against reporters on 5July 2021 in Tbilisi. Homophobic mobs mobilised by the Georgian Orthodox Church but predominantly led by far-right extremist group Alt Info chased down and attacked reporters who were only doing their job.

Rati Tsverava, a reporter for Georgian TV channel Formula, was among over 50 journalists injured that day.

He was chased for several hundred metres from the Parliament building in Tbilisi, long before police officers eventually showed up to help.

According to Tsverava, no one was properly punished for attacking him or others, including TV channel Pirvelis camera operator Aleksandre Lashkarava, who died days after the attack.

Ten people were hitting me, and only one was detained, and he will be free in three months The authorities have been telling me for almost a year now that they cannot identify the others. This is nonsense; theres just no will to prosecute, Tsverava told OC Media. He was attacked on camera.

Tsverava said the aggression towards journalists from people encouraged by the authorities began before July 2021 like on the 9 May event that year, during a rally led by conservative media personality Gia Gachechiladze, also known as Utsnobi.

5July was only a culmination of the aggression against the media that had been cobbling together slowly, Tsverava said.

He said the situation had not improved since 5July, and that government figures have the same rhetoric as before, if not worse.

When we go to interview them, they start lashing out at us by calling us disinformers the same tone that eventually provokes the violence, he said. This aggression continues and obviously, it has affected my work. While previously I could boldly go anywhere, now I know that I must avoid cerain situations.

[Read more on OC Media: Georgian Dream's anti-media crusade continues]

Since the July violence, Alt Info has been successful in obtaining a national broadcasting license for their TV channel, which they have used extensively to propagate hate against the liberal media.

Mehman Huseynov, the editor-in-chief of SANCAQ, a socio-political magazine, documents corruption and human rights violations in Azerbaijan.

One of the victims of the governments media policy for years, Huseynov told OCMedia that freedom of the press was only deteriorating further in Azerbaijan.

For comparison, the situation with freedom of speech in Azerbaijan is now more critical than at any time in the last 10 years, he said.

The situation for independent media is clearly under the control of the government with the new media law, he said,

The law, signed by President Aliyev in February, imposes broad restrictions on journalists ability to report, requiring they provide only objective information, with objectivity defined at the authorities discretion.

It also requires journalists to register themselves with the government, with future journalists to face a government-run test to prove themselves.

I consider 2014 a breaking point for the Azerbaijani media, Huseynov said. Since then, the government has become more anti-media. It has begun to show an aggressive attitude.

In March 2017, he himself was sentenced to two years in prison on defamation charges after accusing the police of abducting and torturing him. On 2 March 2019, he was released.

The main priority of the Azerbaijani government against the media was to eradicate investigative journalism. As high levels of corruption in Azerbaijan are the main area of research for free journalism, the government first attacked investigative journalists and civil society and continues to do so. As it continues, investigative journalism will expand, and this expansion will lead to more pressure and arrests in the future.

Huseynov also decried the lack of freedom of information in Azerbaijan, especially from the Central Elections Commission.

They hide or change the addresses of individuals and officials. They call it a state secret or refer to state security". The closure of the database is designed to cover up corruption. There are almost no open resources for journalism in Azerbaijan.

For example, when preparing a study on the State Oil Company of Azerbaijan, I couldnt find access to any source. So I used open sources in neighbouring Georgia, where SOCAR also operates. On the basis of this information, I uncovered an example of SOCAR's corruption and presented it to the public.

Being an independent journalist in Azerbaijan is risky and it is dangerous. When corruption and crime are high in a country, the government moves to eliminate journalists and researchers who reveal these facts, Huseynov said.

And its becoming more and more dangerous. it's getting harder.

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Censorship and violence: the challenges to press freedom in the Caucasus in 2022 - OC Media

The Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free, by Joel Simon and Robert Mahoney, Columbia Global Reports, 192 pages, $16

"We're not just fighting an epidemic," Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus, director-general of the World Health Organization, declared at the Munich Security Conference on February 15, 2020. "We're fighting an infodemic. Fake news spreads faster and more easily than this virus and is just as dangerous."

Joel Simon and Robert Mahoney expand on that concept inThe Infodemic: How Censorship and Lies Made the World Sicker and Less Free. Since Simon is a former executive director of the Committee to Protect Journalists, where Mahoney currently serves as executive director, it is not surprising that they see state efforts to suppress inconvenient information as part of the problem that Tedros described.

That makes sense, since authoritarian governments in countries such as China and Russia contributed to the "infodemic" by censoring, discrediting, and intimidating journalists and other observers who tried to tell the truth about COVID-19. Meanwhile, these governments promoted their own version of reality, in which the pandemic's impact was less serious and the political response to it was more effective.

But folding censorship into the "infodemic" creates an inescapable tension, since democrats as well as autocrats were frequently tempted to address "fake news" about the pandemic through state pressure, if not outright coercion. The Biden administration, for instance, demanded that social media platforms suppress COVID-19 "misinformation," which it defined to include statements that it deemed "misleading" even if they were arguably or verifiably true.

The problem of defining misinformation is evident from the debate about face masks as a safeguard against COVID-19. After initially dismissing the value of general masking, the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) decided it was "the most important, powerful public health tool we have." More recently, the CDC has acknowledged that commonly used cloth masks provide little protection, largely agreeing with critics whose statements on the subject had previously triggered banishment from platforms such as YouTube.

Simon and Mahoney make it clear that they do not favor state speech controls. But their concerns about the ways governments used the pandemic as an excuse to expand their powers are curiously limited. While they view censorship as beyond the pale, they are inclined to see other restrictions on freedomeven sweeping impositions such as stay-at-home orders and mass business closuresas justified by the public health emergency.

The authors try to reconcile this apparent contradiction by invoking Isaiah Berlin's distinction between "negative" liberty (freedom from government restraint) and "positive" liberty (self-realization or self-determination). Simon and Mahoney define positive liberty as "the ability to shape the destiny of [one's] own society and live by its laws," which is simultaneously narrower than Berlin's concept, more explicitly collectivist, and more clearly at odds with negative liberty. As they see it, your "ability" to obey democratically enacted laws advances positive liberty even when you view those laws as oppressive.

"The legitimacy of a government's efforts to restrict negative liberty is derived from the existence of positive liberty, as expressed through the consent of the governed," Simon and Mahoney say. "The right to speak, to listen, to express and exchange ideas, to communicate closely held beliefs, to criticize authorities, to demand accountability: these are the broad range of activities enabled by positive liberty."

That's a confusing way to describe freedom of expression, which at bottom is a kind of negative liberty: freedom from prior restraint and from punishment for reporting information or expressing opinions that the government views as dangerous. For example, Simon and Mahoney describe the experience of the independent Chinese journalist Chen Qiushi, who was arrested because of his reporting from Wuhana classic violation of negative liberty.

Restrictions on negative liberty, "even severe ones such as lockdowns, are legitimized through the existence of positive liberty," Simon and Mahoney write, because "the people impacted are able to express their views" and "ultimately if they so wish to compel the government to change course." In other words, as long as citizens have an opportunity to choose, criticize, and change their leaders, it is not inherently problematic to force them to follow public health edicts they view as unnecessary, unscientific, or draconian.

If you oppose censorship as a violation of negative liberty, by contrast, you do not value freedom of expression merely because it is useful around election time or when people are trying to decide what safeguards make sense in response to an airborne virus. And while you probably will agree that such a situation can justify government intervention, since disease carriers pose a potentially deadly threat to others, you may still object to specific policies on the grounds that they unjustifiably restrict other rights, such as freedom of movement, freedom of religion, or freedom to earn a living.

Simon and Mahoney suggest that such rights can be vindicated through the democratic process. But that solution is plainly inadequate, since a majority may support policies that oppress a minority. In any case, COVID-19 control measures in democratic countries were not necessarily supported by popular majorities. For the most part, they were not even imposed by legislative majorities; they were instead the work of executive-branch officials such as governors, presidents, and prime ministers.

Voters might eventually have a chance to express their displeasure at such decrees. In New Jersey, for example, Democratic Gov. Phil Murphy was dismayed by his surprisingly narrow reelection victory last fall, which motivated him to relax his pandemic-related restrictions. Republican Glenn Youngkin's upset victory in Virginia's gubernatorial election likewise was seen partly as an expression of frustration with COVID-19 policiesin particular, a statewide mandate forcing students in K12 schools to wear masks.

But between elections, citizens outraged by such edicts have little recourse unless they can persuade legislators to assert control, as happened in states such as Michigan and Pennsylvania, or obtain relief from the courts, as happened with pandemic-inspired restrictions on abortion and religious gatherings. Those interventions acknowledged the threat that government officials pose to civil liberties when they claim the authority to exercise extraordinary powers in response to open-ended emergencies they themselves declare.

Simon and Mahoney seem mostly blind to that danger, except when it comes to censorship and especially invasive kinds of COVID-related surveillance. They note the "untold hardship" caused by India's lockdown, which left migrant workers stranded without any means to support themselves or their families. But they think the main problem was that the policy was implemented too suddenly, not that it went too far.

"The nationwide lockdown was an unprecedented restriction on the liberty that Indian citizens enjoy in a democracy," Simon and Mahoney concede. "But it had a public health rationale, and many citizens, including health experts, believed it was warranted."

While they give Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi a pass on his most dramatic and consequential response to the pandemic, Simon and Mahoney fault him for his "harsh reprisals" against journalists who questioned his policies. In addition to direct intimidation, Modi "relied on an army of online trolls who amplified his criticism of individual journalists, attacking them in the most personal and vile ways." In that respect, Simon and Mahoney say, Modi resembled Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro and U.S. President Donald Trump, "democratic populists" who minimized the seriousness of the pandemic, promoted misinformation, and viewed criticism as an intolerable affront.

In Trump's case, portraying "online trolls" as minions taking their orders from him is misleading, since he often seemed to take his cues from them instead. Trump's reluctance to promote vaccination while he was in office can be explained by his fear that it would anger his supportersa realistic worry, given the hostile reaction he later received when he bragged about the vaccines his administration had expedited. And Trump initially supported lockdowns before declaring, presumably based on his reading of his base, that it was time to lift them.

If we imagine a polity where anti-vaxxers are in the majority, the already problematic idea that pandemic responses are validated by the democratic process becomes even harder to defend. And if the "infodemic" is mostly a spontaneous phenomenon, demands that governments do more to address it invite repressive responses similar to the ones that Simon and Mahoney rightly decry. The alternativecorrecting misinformation by citing the evidence that contradicts itis hardly a magic bullet. But at least it offers an opportunity to persuade people, which is how arguments are supposed to be resolved in a free society.

Read more:
Was Censorship the Greatest COVID Threat to Freedom? - Reason