Category Archives: Transhuman News

While legally this topic shares much with other forms of censorship, internet censorship specifically deals with the restriction of online content. The largest point of interest is the reach of the internet regardless of what policies one country creates concerning allowable content, providers in other countries can post whatever is allowed under their respective legal systems. While countries have made attempts to restrict what is obtainable, such as Google and China striking a deal over filtering its search engine, the ease of accessibility remains the largest obstacle to being able to control what people can find online.

Wikipedia Definition & Overview Internet CensorshipInternet censorship is the control or suppression of the publishing of, or access to information on the Internet. It may be carried out by governments or by private organizations at the behest of government, regulators, or on their own initiative.

American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) webpage on Internet CensorshipThe ACLUs vision of an uncensored Internet was clearly shared by the U.S. Supreme Court when it declared, in Reno v. ACLU, the Internet to be a free speech zone, deserving at least as much First Amendment protection as that afforded to books, newspapers and magazines.

Amnesty International Internet CensorshipAmnesty International portal with news, blogs and issues on Internet Censorship.

Google Battles With China Over Internet CensorshipThis article shows Googles battle with internet censorship in many countries like China and at least 40 other countries in the world.

Googles Fallout With ChinaThis article describes the stringiest internet censorship in China and its recent fallout with Google.

How Internet Censorship WorksAn explanation of the methods of restricting online content.

Internet Censorship and ControlA collection of peer reviewed papers on the topics of Internet Censorship and Control.

Internet Censorship by CountryInternet censorship by country provides information on the types and levels of Internet censorship or filtering that is occurring in countries around the world. Includes map.

Internet Censorship Huffington PostRecent posts that relate Internet censorship.

Internet Censorship Mashable WebsiteRecent stories and news about Internet censorship.

Internet censorship in China and IranThis newspaper article illustrates for the need to stop internet censorship in countries like Iran and China to promote wider internet access to the public.

Internet Censorship in China New York TimesNews about Internet Censorship in China

Internet Censorship News ABC News

Internet Censorship World MapThis world map shows that what countries are affected by censorship around the world.

Internet Freedom Index WebsiteRecent news that relate Internet freedom.

OpenNet InitiativeA group involved with monitoring and reporting on internet censorship/surveillance.

Promoting free expression on the internetGoogles stance on the freedom of expression on the internet.

Pros and Cons of CensorshipThis article discusses the pros and cons of internet censorship.

PsiphonA software service that bypasses online filtering of content by acting as a web proxy.

Reporters Without Borders Internet enemies campaignReporters Without Borders has information on the freedom levels in all countries, including information specifically on internet freedom. They also have rankings for the countries with the worst current conditions for internet freedom.

TED Talk: A look behind the Great Firewall of ChinaJournalist Michael Anti gives a unique look beyond the Great Firewall of China in a recent TED Talk. Watch below.

TED Video: Rebecca MacKinnon Lets take back the Internet!In this powerful talk from TEDGlobal, Rebecca MacKinnon describes the expanding struggle for freedom and control in cyberspace, and asks: How do we design the next phase of the Internet with accountability and freedom at its core, rather than control?

Telecommunications Act of 1996 & Reno v. ACLUThe Telecommunications Act of 1996, with Title V featuring preliminary restrictions surrounding pornographic material on the internet. Additionally, it maintained that ISPs are not liable for the actions of users of their services. However, in 1997, the Supreme Court upheld the 1996 case Reno v. ACLU, citing an infringement on free speech.

The Trend of Internet CensorshipThis article describes the ongoing and rising trend of internet censorship in many countries.

Top 10 Internet-censored CountriesUSA Today releases news about top 10 Internet-censored countries around the world.

Video YouTubeFaceblocked: Internet Censorship in China. (05/26/10)

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Internet Censorship - George Mason University

Alisa Cromer | for Editor & Publisher

Ask any journalist what makes their blood pressure go up on deadline. It is being routed to a public affairs office without getting the interview, missing a deadline, or just getting a pre-screened department-organized message. Theres no opportunity for follow-up questions or even an off-the-record conversation.

Lately, the public and even local reporters who have not covered a Washington, D.C. beat are unaware of how restricted access has become at the federal level.

District journalists are no longer allowed into federal buildings without an escort and appointment. It is assumed that every interview will be coordinated through public affairs representatives, who are political appointees. If the public information officer (PIO) is not interested in a story or the reporter, they ignore their inquiries or slow-roll it so that the reporter misses the deadline. Its now common practice for PIOs to join calls and monitor live interviews.

And then there are the gag orders, implied or by memo, so federal government employees cannot talk directly to the press without imperiling their career.

These practices are now deeply embedded into government culture and getting worse every year, leaders of the Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) told E&P during a recent vodcast on the topic. SPJ, a group with 6,000 members, calls it censorship by PIO. Its such a bane that the association created an entire web page dedicated to the issue.

In July 2021, SPJ and 24 more journalists' associations wrote a letter to the White House with specific demands: To be allowed direct contact with sources, access to federal buildings, and that requests for interviews be granted.

At the local level, access to officials and information is less controlled; however, dozens of police departments and state agencies have explicit and implicit gag orders preventing employees from talking to the press, according to new research by the Brechner Center.

Science reporting has also been at the heart of the national controversy, Matthew T. Hall, opinion editor at The San Diego Union-Tribune., told E&P. This was especially true during the Trump administration, when the pandemic surged and the CDC was late with information. Last year, The Washington Post decried its gag order to prevent employees from talking, surfaced by a Freedom of Information Act request after a lawsuit.

The Biden administration promised openness, but by July 2021, after just six months in office, the EPA faced its first stress test and folded. When whistleblowers reported a rubber-stamping of toxic chemicals, the chief of staff in the Office of Pollution Prevention and Toxics, Allison Pierce, sent a memo reminding employees not to talk to the media without going through public affairs.

Tim Wheeler, chair of the Society of Environmental Journalists Freedom of Information Task Forcechair of the and an editor at the Chesapeake Bay Journal, says none of this is shocking nor new.

An army of PIOs is managing the information, he said. You are getting your information filtered as often as not, or they dont get back to you at all.

March 2021 Let the Sunshine In webinar

Just after the Biden administration settled in, Wheeler hosted a webinar with the pithy title, Let the Sunshine In. Will EPA reopen its doors to the press? for SEJ members to meet the new office of public affairs at the Environmental Protection Agency.

He started by talking about Bidens promised openness and the executive order to restore scientific transparency. How do you intend to restore transparency? Does that include the ability for reporters to interview staff and get a timely start on answers to questions?

Lyndsay Hamilton, enthusiastic, whip-smart and just two months on the job as associate administrator for the office, took the lead. Nick Conger, the EPAs press secretary, was playing back-up.

Hamilton said her goal is a positive, transparent relationship. She views media relations as a service we provide ... We are committed to sharing timely, accurate information to the best of our ability ... it is your job to always ask for more. If we cant (get you what you need), dont be afraid to ask about the why.

Conger started with, Can we just say happy Sunshine Week? He talked about empowering regional executives to answer media questions but still coordinated with public affairs.

Next question.

Wheeler asked, There was a time when reporters did not have to go through a PIO for permission or have minders present at the interview. Can we go back to that, and if not, why not?

Hamilton responded, Im not going to debate the word minders with you, and explained that staffers sit in on interviews to be helpful. She said the role of media relations is to make sure journalists are connected to the right source, that sources are comfortable talking to media, to let conversations play out, and to follow up on items we need to do. Accuracy is another issue.

Besides, she has allowed interviews without a staffer listening in. They are not on every call.

Wheeler had brought some messages from environmental journalists who could not attend. One wrote that she was so excited about getting a thorough response by email from a scientist that she was giddy. Three more said that they never got their requested interview. Two were regional reporters, but a district reporter said he had not had an on-the-record interview with someone at the EPA since the Obama administration.

Hamilton responded that the new EPA would strive to do better. She gave out her and Congors emails as go-tos in case of a problem, noting that theirs is still a small team of political appointees.

There may be other reasons for no response. For example, scientists may not want to talk, and We dont require them to. We are certainly straining to do our best We might miss an email here and there.

Wheeler had another question, The two scientists recently talked to me on the record without coordinating (with your office). Did they violate EPA policy?

Well, Im not going to track them down unless you want me to, Hamilton answered. We do ask (them) to coordinate with public affairs, but Im glad you got the information.

What if a scientist is speaking at a scientific conference, and I approach them afterward, during a break. Are they allowed to talk to me? he asked.

Hamilton stuttered a bit. Sure, I mean. Absolutely. Sure. I mean, they are in a public forum already. Yeah, absolutely.

Well, Wheeler noted, Ive seen a PR official swoop into the conversation in some instances ... Just so you know.

Hamilton added that she does this, too. As the PR person on site, I do sometimes join a conversation to know who the reporter is, where they are from We do like to know what people are saying about the agency.

What about the Executive Order that Biden signed 24 hours into his presidency, directing agencies to review scientific integrity practices and identify more effective ways of interacting with the media.

Did he mean going through a spokesperson? asked Wheeler.

Not sure we have a full answer, Hamilton said. We will soon.

Todays censorship

Censorship by PIO is so insidious in part because the media have quietly gone along. No reporters have faced arrest for pushing back. Stories get published. Even if the information is managed, the job gets done.

We are not printing blank pages, but part of the story is missing, explains Kathryn Foxhall, who covered the medical and science beat, including the CDC, for decades.

It will be correct; probably it will be interesting. It will suffice, but there will be all kinds of things that are not mentioned, like budget, political pressures, differences of opinion within the agency, she said.

Foxhall, who has referred to PIOs as censors, minders, controllers and spies in articles and speaking engagements, was one of the earliest and still one of the fiercest proponents for press access. In September, she was awarded SPJs Wells Memorial Key award for her efforts.

To give an example of how covering Washington changed during her career, she likes to tell a story from the Reagan era, when she could talk to a source unsupervised. She was interviewing a high-level source at the CDC about recent budget cuts just as the AIDS epidemic unfolded.

He was saying, Well make do and blah blah blah, Foxhall recalled. I was trying to get off the phone, when I asked what he would say if he were off the record. He reversed course and absolutely exploded. The story I wrote massively changed, and those changes could have saved lives.

Today, these confidential conversations have been largely eliminated. We now have over 4 million pandemic dead, she said.

For over two decades, public health agencies, including the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Food and Drug Administration, have controlled public scrutiny of themselves.

So how did this happen?

Foxhall says she first noticed sources redirecting her to official channels in the early 1990s. The newsroom talked about these blocks and what to do about it. There was some eyeball rolling. but you could still get around it with some people skills, she said. Over the years, it got tighter and tighter.

Another reason is the way governments are organized. Department heads are political appointees, while the staff, scientists and lower-level public affairs officers are career employees and subject matter experts.

Over time, each presidential administration inserted a growing layer of political appointees of PIOs on top of the careerist departments and started pulling strings, steering coordinating all speech to reporters.

Ironically, Obama was more of a micromanager of information released by lower-profile federal agencies than Trump. Despite his rhetoric, Trump was primarily interested in controlling departments involved in high-profile news stories and essentially left the lower-profile departments alone, sources say.

With Biden, micro-management has returned. PIOs, who are political appointees, have started to weigh in on every piece of information and interview that goes out, including which reporters and news outlets get access, and rewriting press releases with political messages in mind.

It hasnt helped that the news media shed thousands of journalists who migrated over to these expanded public affairs offices.

Wheeler does not blame these former journalists. It is not always the PIO, but the president and governors and people they appoint who control dissent and contraindications, Wheeler said, adding, Some of my best friends are PIOs.

And there are other factors. After 9/11, access to federal buildings was restricted, so credentialed reporters could no longer enter without an appointment and escort. COVID-19 shut down most public meetings and other events that provided face-to-face opportunities for journalists to meet public officials without a chaperone.

To report this story, we contacted eight government PIOs by email. One went off the record, on deep background. One was afraid to talk because she was new. Finally, one said she would get back to me with a time but missed the deadline.

The other PIOs at the CDC, EPA, the Department of Interior, the National Association of Government Communicators, and Health and Human Services had not responded by deadline.

A case to battle restricted access

If the media is going to challenge the culture of restricted access, the battle will probably be fought in the courts.

Frank LoMonte, the First Amendment attorney at the Brechner Center, who has written a white paper on case law as a roadmap for news media to use in the future, feels the courts have favored employees talking about their jobs despite blanket gag orders.

The reality is that the employee always wins. We have dug back as far as we can, and the judges say the gag orders are too broad every time. These are 24 cases and all kinds of judges, he said. The bottom line is that (legally) you cannot enforce a gag order preventing an employee from discussing their work with the news media, he said.

The most important Supreme Court case, United States v. National Treasury Employees Union, circa 1995, only confirmed the legal status on which the lower courts have always agreed.

We know (blanket gag orders) exist. We know they are pervasive across all levels of government. But Im here to tell you its a dead man walking. They are all illegal; they are just waiting for someone to sue, LoMonte said.

Whats missing is the perfect case.

Most plaintiffs in existing case law have been government employees, such as schoolteachers and police officers. However, with the decline of labor unions who supplied the money and the lawyers, these cases dried up.

So today, LoMonte is setting the stage for a media organization to file suit eventually. It just must be the right case to avoid creating a legal precedent that could worsen things.

So what would the perfect case look like?

According to LoMonte, the media should look for a government agency with a blanket gag order policy that is clear and in writing. An employee handbook is better than a mass email. A mass email is better than a series of single ones, and any email is better than a verbal rebuke. The CDC emails, though explosive at the time, he said, did not make the cut.

Asked if hes worried that governments wont just vague up their cultural policies after reading this article thinking here of the EPAs broad guidelines to please coordinate he said not to worry. Plenty of government agencies at the state and local level outline exactly what employees cant say.

His new research has already turned up a couple of dozen illegal policies at police departments, including the NYPD, despite the fact it has already been sued once on the issue and lost. Sixteen state agencies in Georgia also have explicit gag order policies.

His advice to journalists is to start documenting.

Ask the (sources) who were gagged, Did you see a memo? Run it to the ground and document it, he told SPJ attendees on the stage with Foxhall. Get the agency on the record. Where did it come from, who made it?

Another culprit in Censorship by PIO is the media itself.

The press acquiesced, Foxhall contended. Why isnt the news industry fighting the controls? One of the top reasons, in my opinion, is that we need their stuff. Its easier and inexpensive to quote an official source. If the press parrots (an official source), it takes about an hour to write it up. (But) we dont want to discredit our own story by saying how little we know.

She suggested that journalists need to start consistently writing about their access and make it part of the story. Lose the embarrassment that journalists are supposed to know everything, and therefore we cant admit that these people are successfully blocking our newsgathering.

The San Diego chapter of SPJ gives Brick and Window awards once a year to highlight the access issue.

We need to call attention, Matthew T. Hall said. Im hoping someone at the Biden administration watches when this is published and picks up the phone.

Alisa Cromer is the editor of LocalMediaInsider, an online trade journal covering the media industry. She grew up in Washington, D.C.

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Censorship by PIO - Editor And Publisher Magazine

Amnesty International has released a report documenting how the pandemic affected freedom of expression and the impact of misinformation.

According to its findings, some countries have used censorship and punishment to reduce the quality and quantity of information reaching the public domain, thus damaging people's ability to understand how to deal with COVID-19.

Speaking to Euronews, Amnesty International researcher on human rights defenders Lisa Maracani said COVID-19 only aggravated a problem that had existed for years.

"We know that there is a shrinking civic space all around the world. This has been going on for years. But I think the pandemic precipitated this process," Maracani said.

She urged lawmakers to do more to regulate social media, pointing to their responsibility in spreading misinformation.

"We need digital regulations on them, and this can be done by looking at how they operate and their business model and how that algorithm functions because they are driving a certain type of information that is damaging," she told Euronews.

Maracani believes governments have enacted free speech restrictions that were unnecessary.

"We want states to stop going after people sharing information, going after journalists, going after human rights defenders. They really need to step back from that sort of censorship," the researcher said.

Watch the full interview in the video player above

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Amnesty report reveals use of censorship to reduce quality of public information - Euronews

Viennas museums are putting their works on view in a place where few world-class institutions have ever shown their art: OnlyFans. On that site, visitors can now see an account set up by the citys tourism board where suggestive works from Viennese institutions like the Albertina and the Leopold Museum are being posted.

The Viennese are very open-minded, Helena Hartlauer, head of media relations at the Vienna Tourist Board, said of the unusual move.

OnlyFans is an app where viewers can pay a subscription fee to access exclusiveand often eroticcontent from a creator. Now, for $4.99 a month, people can view painted nudes and risqu statues culled from the collections of Viennas finest museums, which maintain that these artworks are not necessarily sexual in nature. The citys tourism board said the move to post artworks on the platform came after repeated censorship on other social media platforms.

In July, the Albertinas TikTok account was suspended and then blocked for displaying the art of Nobuyoshi Araki, whose photographs often feature sexually explicit images of nude women. Then in September, when the Leopold Museum promoted its 20th anniversary by posting a work by Art Nouveau illustrator Koloman Moser, the campaign was flagged as potentially pornographic by Facebooks algorithms. To avoid any repercussions, the museum switched out that image for a less objectionable work. That warning recalled Faceboooks deletionof a post by the Natural History Museum of Vienna showing the Venus of Willendorf, an ancient fertility talisman depicting a naked woman with enlarged breasts.

In migrating these offerings to OnlyFans, Hartlauer claimed that Viennas museums were enacting more than just a publicity stuntthey were also aiming to start a conversation about the necessity of social media and the problems associated with it. According to Hartlauer, while some might argue that these museums could use other pieces to promote themselves, the matter is not quite so simple, given that it is growing harder and harder to tell what will be labeled explicit. These platforms arent transparent at all, Hartlauer said.

Museums, of course, arent alone in this frustrating struggle with social media platformsartists have also voiced concerns about the guidelines for social media like Instagram. In a recent op-ed for ARTnews, artist Clarity Haynes described repeatedly trying to post nude self-portraits by photographer Laura Aguilar, only to have them deleted each time. This kind of censorship does not exist in a digital vacuum, Haynes wrote, describing the deletions as homophobic, racist, fatphobic, and misogynistic.

The Viennese museums new OnlyFans recalls another attempt at launching a platform for sexually suggestive art. This past summer, Pornhub started the Classic Nudes guide, an app that allowed users to find images of nudes in the worlds most renowned art institutions. Museums didnt respond well to that initiative. The Louvre in Paris, the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, and the Museo Nacional del Prado in Madrid all threatened to suePornhub for its recreations of famous paintings in their holdings, among them Titians Venus of Urbino (1538), which is held by the Uffizi.

By contrast, Viennas tourism board said it was making no pretensions about the sexuality and nudity of artworks in its collection. We also wanted to do this to show solidarity with artists who are censored, Hartlauer said. If you cant show your artwork on social media this can really be an obstacle to your communications efforts, and even to your career.

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Following Social Media Censorship, Viennese Museums Take Their Art to OnlyFans - ARTnews

The autumn edition of the Index on Censorship will be published in Great Britain today, Tuesday. Before the 26th UN Climate Change Conference in Glasgow she is dealing with a very special climate, the climate of fear, which is spread wherever climate and environmental activists oppose overexploitation. For the time of this issue, lawyer Steven Donziger, known for his fight against chevron activities in Ecuador, will participate virtually. He appears virtually because he has been under strict house arrest in the United States for 800 days.

Ignored by the US press, Steven Donziger is an example of the people his first namesake Stephen Spender wanted to give a voice to: on October 15, 1971, his appeal With Concern For Those Not Free appeared in the Times. It led to the establishment of the Index on Censorship.

In this section we always present astonishing, impressive, informative and funny figures from the fields of IT, science, art, economics, politics and of course mathematics on Tuesdays.

All articles on Pay, please!

Anyone who thinks of an index in the context of occidental history and not in the sense of database IT thinks of the first List of Prohibited Books, with which the Catholic Church banned numerous thinkers and their books. Writings by Galileo Galilei or by Johannes Kepler landed on this index. In modern times Immanuel Kant caught the Critique of Pure Reason, in very recent times it was the writings of the author couple Jean-Paul-Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. In 1968 it was a letter from the young Soviet Russian Alexander Daniel to the British writer Graham Greene, referring to the situation of his father July Daniel drew attention. Along with Andrei Sinjawski he was sentenced to hard camp work in a show trial. The trial showed that the Soviet leadership, after the thaw, took a tougher pace again because everything was fermenting in their entire sphere of influence.

In Great Britain a group of supporters was formed which, after Amnesty International, called itself Writers and Scholars International (WSI). On October 15, 1971, the Times published its founding manifesto With Concern For Those Not Free, written by the poet Stephen Spender. Spender announced the publication of a magazine called Index, which should make all persecuted writers, poets and artists in East and West heard. Critical voices were not only suppressed in the Soviet Union, dictators were also in power in Greece, Spain and Portugal, not to mention Latin America.

Fifteen British and American artists joined the call, including the poet WH Auden, the musician Yehudi Menuhin, the composer Igor Stravinsky and the sculptor Henry Moore. When the magazine first appeared in 1972 under the slightly crooked title Index on Censorship. A Voice for the Persecuted, it contained pieces by Alexander Solzhenitsyn, an account of the crackdown on student protests in Prague, and a text by Giorgios Mangakis on the Torture in Greek prisons.

In the 50 years of its existence the quarterly index published numerous important documents such as the translation of Charter 77, the Solzhenitsyn Nobel Prize speech, the story of the disappeared in Argentina, the declaration of hunger strike by the students from Tianmen Square, the declaration of supporters of Salman Rushdie and the reports by Anna Politkovskaya about the wars in Chechnya. The summer edition of 2021 was the Whistleblowern Dedicated to this world, with a focus on the case of Reality Winner, who is not allowed to speak publicly after serving her prison sentence.

Now appears under the sign of Glasgow Climate Change Conference the autumn edition Climate of Fear. The silencing of the planets indigenous peoples, which deals with the protest of indigenous peoples that is being stifled by governments and corporations around the world.

There is a small one to appear Online celebrationwho the lawyer Steven Donziger is switched on. He has been under house arrest in New York for 800 days and is being prosecuted by US judges for his lawsuits against the Chevron oil company. For example, they demand the surrender of all electronic devices belonging to the lawyer. Similar to the case of Julian Assange, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights has found that the proceedings against Donziger violate current US law.

(mho)

Disclaimer: This article is generated from the feed and not edited by our team.

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Pay please! No end to speaking bans - 50 years of the censorship index - Market Research Telecast