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MONTGOMERYAlabama Attorney General Steve Marshall and Louisiana Attorney General Jeff Landry Tuesday launched an initiative aimed at addressing censorship on social media platforms. As part of the initiative, the official website of each attorney general now provides a Social Media Censorship Complaint Form for the public to report abuses by Big Tech.

Attorney General Marshall and Attorney General Landry are encouraging the public to enlist in the fight against Big Tech censorship, calling on all persons who have been censored online to file a formal complaint. The information provided in these complaints will be kept confidential, in accordance with each states laws, and will be actively reviewed and thoroughly analyzed to determine whether the reported conduct by social media companies constitutes a violation of federal or state law.

Big Tech is not the Ministry of Truth. It should concern us all when platforms that hold such tremendous power and influence over information wield that power in contradiction ofand with undisguised disdain forthe foundational American principles of free speech and freedom of the press, said Attorney General Marshall. The censorship campaign currently being waged by giant corporate oligarchs like Facebook and Twitter is, in a word, un-American.

I encourage anyone and everyone who has been censored on social media to file a formal complaint with my office, Attorney General Marshall continued. The process is simple and straightforwardand will provide us with important information to fight the growing menace of censorship by the great malefactors of tech.

From political speech to healthcare research to economic activity, Big Tech has censored content to fit their ideological bentsviolating users rights to silence opposition. Social media platforms have altered and deleted content, blocked and restricted access, removed and banned accounts, and more, said Attorney General Landry. I encourage all who have been impacted to file a complaint, and I hope this initiative will expose just how far-reaching the suppression has been.

Complaints can be filed with the Alabama Attorney Generals Office using the Social Media Censorship Complaint Form on its website at AlabamaAG.gov/Censored.

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Alabama AG teams up to launch initiative to address social media censorship - The Madison Record - themadisonrecord.com

Its an attack on the teaching of Black history, womens history, and history around being impoverished in this country anything that will challenge the current status quo.

Dr. Karsonya Wise Whitehead, associate professor of women and gender studies at Loyola University and president of the National Womens Studies Association

In late 2020, the Idaho Freedom Foundation released two reports condemning college administrators and faculty at the University of Idaho and Boise State for promoting social justice ideology in higher education.

Using red, yellow and green color-coding, the reports labeled academic departments as indoctrination majors, social justice in training majors, and the foundations preferred professional majors depending on how much they emphasized social justice. The list of indoctrination majors included womens, gender and sexuality studies (WGSS), Africana Studies and Latin American Studies.

Not long after, Idaho enacted a ban on teaching critical race theory (CRT) in public schools and universities in the state.

CRT is a legal framework developed in the 1970s and 1980s to examine the ongoing effects of slavery and how racism has shaped U.S. laws and institutions. But Idaho lawmakers used the phrase to refer to discussions of racism, sexism and social justice issues in the classroom. After the Idaho legislature passed the ban on CRT, the lieutenant governor created a task force to review university programs and faculty syllabi for banned content.

Its a pretty intimidating environment for teaching, said Leontina Hormel, a sociology professor and former director of the WGSS program at the University of Idaho. Theyve really created a hostile environment for open thinking.

The current WGSS co-director and English professor Alexandra Teague told Ms., Ive heard a lot of conversations among faculty who are concerned about whether there will be ramifications for their teaching or whether they need to rethink what classes are titled in order to reduce scrutiny on them.

The Idaho ban is part of a conservative wave of bans on discussing social justice issues in American schools and workplaces.

Shortly after condemning CRT on Twitter in September of 2020, Donald Trump signed an executive order prohibiting diversity and inclusion training for federal workers and contractors.

NAACP Legal Defense Fund challenged the equity gag order, describing it as having a chilling effect on free speech and the dissemination of truthful information about systemic and structural inequalities, which undermines workplace equality for people of color, women, and LGBTQ individuals.

On his first day in office, Biden revoked Trumps order, but U.S. Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas) and Rep. Burgess Owens (R-Utah) have introduced in Congress a billcalled the END CRT Actto reinstate the ban.

Meanwhile, conservative states are banning CRT in public schools and universities. In the first six months of 2021, 26 states have tried to limit how teachers can discuss racism and sexism in their classrooms, according to an Education Week analysis. These bills often use the exact language of the Trump executive order.

Nine states so far have enacted these bans. Rhode Island, for example, banned teaching of divisive concepts that might make students feel uncomfortable based on their race or sex, and a new Ohio law bans teaching about unconscious bias. A North Carolina law prohibits public schools from teaching Nikole Hannah-Jones 1619 Project, a New York Times series about the ongoing impact of slavery and racism on American society.

At the federal level, Senator Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) has introduced the Saving American History Act to ban federally funded schools from teaching the 1619 Project. These anti-CRT laws restrict how educators can teach social justice issues.

According to Media Matters, Fox News mentioned the phrase critical race theory nearly 1,300 times between February and May of 2021. This coverage characterized CRT as an unpatriotic and divisive form of indoctrination that perpetuates racism against white people.

Smith College professor Loretta Ross argues that while conservative commentators and lawmakers bemoan cancel culture and the supposed liberal threats to free speech on campus, they are at the same time trying to shut down discussions about inequality and injustice in American society.

The Republicans falsely claim that the purpose of critical race theory is to teach people of color to hate white people. They believe that white people are the real victims of reverse racism, said Ross. The attack on critical race theory says we should only teach patriotic education. In other words, only white history should be taught.

Dr. Karsonya Wise Whitehead, associate professor of WGSS at Loyola University and president of the National Womens Studies Association, says CRT has become a catchphrase for any discussion of how race, class and gender function in society.

I think people confuse critical race theory with culturally responsive teaching. Both of them are CRTs, said Whitehead.

A lot of teachers are being penalizedlosing their jobs or experiencing other punitive action for these types of dialogues, said Jalaya Liles-Dunn, director of learning for justice at the Southern Poverty Law Center. The center has received multiple reports of teachers punished for teaching their students about racial injustice, says Liles-Dunn.

Even before the Florida State Board of Education banned critical race theory in public schools state officials were scrutinizing teachers who addressed race in their classrooms. In May, the Florida Department of Education Commissioner Richard Corcoran fired Duval County teacher Any Donofrio for discussing Black Lives Matter in her classes. In early June, the Sullivan County Board of Education in Florida voted to dismiss social studies teacher Matthew Hawn after he led a class discussion on white privilege.

This is censorship, said Liles-Dunn. Its no different than any other dictatorship that is trying to censor a population from knowing the truth so that they can maintain power.

While some anti-CRT laws apply only to K-12 schools, several apply to public universities as well, including in Idaho, Oklahoma and Iowa. In Oklahoma, after politicians passed a law in May banning teachers from making students feel discomfort, guilt, anguish or any other form of psychological distress on account of his or her race or sex, Oklahoma City Community College canceled Professor Melissa Smiths fully-enrolled course on race and ethnicity because of concerns the class ran afoul of the law.

Our history of the United States is uncomfortable and it should make us uncomfortable and we should grow from that, Smith told the Washington Post. And I tell my kids all the time, get comfortable being uncomfortable. And if I dont make you uncomfortable in class, then Im not doing my job.

Whitehead is concerned about the impact of anti-CRT laws on the ability of educators to teach students to think critically about the world.

This attack on critical race theory has gone beyond a black and white issue with the law. They brought gender into this, and now they are also bringing in poverty, said Whitehead. Its really an attack on the teaching of Black history, womens history, and history around being impoverished in this country. They dont want us to critically engage with anything that will challenge the current status quo.

Another impact of anti-CRT laws is they can further encourage harassment experienced by faculty who teach racial and gender justice courses.

I have two people who stalk my email, said Professor Katie Blevins, a WGSS co-director at the University of Idaho. I have never met these people. They send me deeply disturbing messages a couple of times a weekyou know, incredibly graphic emails. Its disconcerting as a junior female faculty member.

Whitehead worries that anti-CRT laws will negatively impact WGSS departments, where teaching about racial and gender justice is central to the curriculum.

It is a concern because we talk about the way in which women are abused in this countryphysically abused, emotionally and mentally abused, financially abused, said Whitehead. We talk about the wage gap and the subservient position of women.

Many WGSS programs teach the work of Kimberl Crenshaw, a founder of critical race theory who also coined the term intersectionality for analyzing how race and gender intersect in the lives of Black women. Laws banning CRT could put WGSS faculty and programs in the crosshairs of government officials seeking to enforce them, says Whitehead.

CRT-bans in K-12 schools have prompted teacher protests across the nation. The American Federation of Teachers and the National Education Association have pledged to resist the bans. They passed several measures that explicitly support the use of CRT in curricula, and allocated tens of thousands of dollars to those efforts.

Culture warriors are labeling any discussion of race, racism or discrimination as CRT to try to make it toxic. They are bullying teachers and trying to stop us from teaching students accurate history, said American Federation of Teachers president Randi Weingarten. The backlash [to teaching about race] that you see in these radicalized circles is going to hurt kids.

The African American Policy Forum, BLM at Schools and Zinn Education Project has issued a national call to educators to hold eventsAugust 26-28th to pledge to teach the truth. They have developed a toolkit and are organizing to prepare educators in the impacted states for civil disobedience on October 14thGeorge Floyds Birthday.

University professors are also speaking out against laws limiting discussions of racism and sexism, arguing that these laws infringe academic freedom and open inquiry on university campuses. In June, over 135 scholarly associations issued a joint statement condemning state laws that seek to substitute political mandates for the considered judgment of professional educators, hindering students ability to learn and engage in critical thinking.

Despite efforts to shut down discussions of racism and sexism, Teague says students are more eager than ever to have these discussions.

The students Ive talked to are the most impassioned about the value of having very open discussions, about the value of critical thinking, about the value of the humanities, said Teague. At the end of the semester, her students told her how much it mattered to them to hear voices that were not like their own, how much they were learning about themselves and others, and how crucial that was in a world that so often gets reduced to sound-bite thinking and binaries.

Just at the point when confederate monuments are finally coming down, conservative politicians are trying to erect barriers to students learning accurate and inclusive history of the United States to the detriment of young people, says Liles-Dunn. Education should not be the battlefield for political issues and political agendas. We are using our most vulnerable and our most precious as bait in this fight and its not okay.

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Critical Race Theory Bans Target Feminist Professors: "This Is Censorship" - Ms. Magazine

"Ban video sadism now!" screamed the cover of the Daily Mail in July 1983, at the height of the furor over so-called "video nasties". With home video in its early days, not subject to any official control, enterprising independent labels coined it in distributing low-budget horror films using the twin draws of gruesome gore and lurid cover art.

The ensuing moral panic saw a total of 72 films at one time or another deemed liable to contravene the Obscene Publications Act, and placed on a list by the Director of Public Prosecutions, putting them at risk of seizure by the police. In 1984, legislation was passed requiring all videos to be officially certified.

Censor takes place the following year, when the British Board of Film Classification became responsible for awarding those certificates. It centers on one of the examiners tasked with the job: Enid (Niamh Algar), whose tragic backstory makes her especially concerned about the possible effects of screen violence. The initial spark for first-time director/ co-writer Prano Bailey-Bond related to horror of an earlier era, though.

"I was reading this article about Hammer horror," Bailey-Bond tells SFX. "It said that during that period, censors would cut images of blood on the breasts of a woman because they believed it would make men likely to commit rape. I was like, Im sure there were lots of male film censors. If this actually is what these images do to us, what protects the film censor from losing control of themselves?

"It was quite a childish thought, and it grew from there, really. I quickly placed the film in the video nasty era, because what was going on in the UK during that period spoke to this idea perfectly," she adds.

Though Bailey-Bond always had a full-length feature in mind, she tested out the idea first in 2015s Nasty, a 15-minute short about a 12-year-old boy whose nasties-watching father has mysteriously vanished. "That allowed me to create the world of the film: this idea of taking a character from grey, bleak, suburban 80s Britain into this colorful, vibrant, gory world of video nasties. I was trying out a lot of the ideas I was exploring for Censor. But also there were ideas from Nasty where I went, Oh, this works like the idea of a family member going missing."

In Censor, Enid is haunted by her sisters childhood disappearance, and gradually becomes obsessively convinced that its connected to the trashy oeuvre of horror director Frederick North.

Bailey-Bond did her homework when it came to Enids job, beginning by speaking to current examiners with a knowledge of the period, and booking out BBFC files on the nasties. "Anybody can do that: you can book to go and read the file for The Texas Chain Saw Massacre and see what they were saying, which is a lot of fun! Even just being in the BBFC helped. The fact that lots of their offices are in the basement, and theyre pokey little rooms that dont have windows, all fed into the creative wanting to make this space feel quite claustrophobic."

Bailey-Bond also tracked down a couple of examiners from the 80s and interviewed them about their former occupation. "One said it felt very seedy sometimes, sitting in these dark rooms watching essentially soft porn. Shed leave work feeling a bit grubby.

"Other examiners told me that they had to watch these films both with a subjective brain and an objective brain. So youre watching things in duality; youre trying to recognize how its making you feel, but also how it might make this person feel, which is a strange way to watch a film."

Horror fans who lived through the 80s or the following decade, when the nasties debacle was still casting a long shadow may still hold a negative view of the BBFC, an organization personified for some in the figure of James Ferman. It was Ferman, BBFC Director from 1975-1999, who made sure The Exorcist wasnt given a home video certificate, arguing (with paternalistic logic) that it might find its way into the hands of impressionable girls. Enid, however, is portrayed in a sympathetic way and Bailey-Bond has sympathy for her real-life counterparts.

"I know people who work as film censors who love horror," she says, "and I think its more complex than someone just sitting in a room cutting. It was definitely more complex than that during this period, and they disagreed on things a lot of the time as well. Then youd have to come to a group decision on whats right and whats wrong, and its all very subjective, ultimately. I think its important for us all to try and understand the person who maybe is on the other side of what we agree with, she adds. That happens less and less now, doesnt it?"

Bailey-Bond also went square-eyed watching the nasties themselves. The results of this accumulated research were then channeled to Niamh Algar, at the time working in Cape Town shooting the Ridley Scott series Raised By Wolves.

"I was sending her lots of films and saying, Watch this!; sending her essays on censorship, and people losing family members, Bailey-Bond says. "Then introducing her to the film examiners that Id spoken to, so she could get more of a sense of the role that Enid had. We had quite a few months before we shot the film where Niamh and I would just jump on Skype, about once a week. It was about making sure that we were both on the same page, working through the script psychologically, and then pouring more ideas into it.

"We talked a lot about Enids physicality," she continues, providing one example of this collaborative process. "In my head, Id always imagined her being very controlled at the front of the film; then, as the film goes on, shes unraveling both in her head and physically/ visually. So we worked together with a movement director, and we talked about different things. Niamhs idea was this picking of the fingernail [as a nervous habit]. I really loved that. So I included that in the script and my shot lists."

The heroines mental unraveling means that were presented not only with sequences from films by the fictional Frederick North, but with Enids nasties-inflected dreams, awash with the kind of red/blue lighting popular in Italian horror of the time. Bailey-Bond had great fun with both, drawing on the films shed watched for inspiration.

"For Dont Go In The Church, I was looking at Lisa, Lisa, or Axe its got two titles. Blood On Satans Claw was another really useful one those kinds of folk horror-esque, eerie British films of the 70s. Then for Asunder, Lucio Fulci was a big influence I love Fulci, his aesthetic is wonderful. The House By The Cemetery and The Beyond were things I was showing my director of photography. Then the dreams were a little bit more Dario Argento-inspired."

When it came to the wider world of 80s Britain, Bailey-Bonds search for a suitable location took in Wales and London, and eventually led north. "We were looking for somewhere that could pass for the 80s, and we found some really great places in Leeds. So we all moved up and lived there for about three months when we were shooting."

Bailey-Bond also took pains to ensure this wasnt some artificial, day-glo world of deely-boppers and legwarmers. "I was looking more at [documentary photographer] Paul Graham stuff that was a bit more like tired Thatchers Britain, and the grey-blue palettes of that world. And when I was talking to my production designer and costume person we always thought about period as: not everything comes from the 80s. My house now isnt full of stuff that I just bought yesterday.

"So youre always looking at clothes and things in the space that are more 70s or 60s. Its a challenge, on a low budget. You cant just chuck any old thing in, because youre thinking, Well, did they have Biros like that in 1985? Youre questioning everything! But I love that, because you can design everything."

But the bigger challenge, she says, was the initial one of making the case that the mid80s setting was absolutely fundamental. "In development, I had to really justify to the execs why the films set during this period. People would say, Well, its about censorship. Why cant you just make it about now?. But for me its so interesting to be able to look at this in hindsight somehow you can be more objective about it.

"Also, this is a period of particular hysteria around this stuff within the UK, thatbirthed the horror community that we know now, and inspired so many filmmakers, and I think shifted horror slightly because of the birth of VHS."

Its a period youll shortly be able to immerse yourself in and without having to ask the bloke at the video rental shop to slip you some of the hard stuff , inside a big-box case, concealed in a brown paper bag. As the tagline of The Last House On The Left put it, keep repeating: its only a movie, only a movie, only a movie...

This article originally appeared in SFX Magazine the issue with The Tomorrow War on the cover. Order through that link, or subscribe here and never miss another exclusive feature.

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Censor: The return of the video nasty - GamesRadar+