Censorship – The Huffington Post

We have been critical of Wikipedia's approach to censorship in the Middle Kingdom. In a recent piece, I lamented the loss of Wikipedia in China. The encyclopedia's founder, Jimmy Wales, reached out to us and agreed to publish our unedited exchange on the difficult nature of dealing with censorship in China.

With every passing day, we're being moved further down the road towards a totalitarian society characterized by government censorship, violence, corruption, hypocrisy and intolerance, all packaged for our supposed benefit in the Orwellian doublespeak of national security, tolerance and so-called "government speech."

John W. Whitehead

Attorney, President of The Rutherford Institute, and author of 'Battlefield America'

Positing the blame solely on a vocal, but still small group of individuals who voice these concerns, calling this a "movement" in order to fan the flames of reaction, and slapping them with a dismissive label only makes matters worse.

College should indeed be a safe space, but not in the sense of being safe from upsetting images or ideas. College should be a place where it is safe to explain what you believe and to disagree with others.

Student journalists at East Lansing High School will now have editorial control of the school newspaper, Portrait, after last year's policy of prior administrative review that students said led to censorship.

The article likens free speech advocates (like me, I assume) to "gun nuts," claims that campus speech codes have mostly been repealed (which is completely false), then bizarrely questions if people can believe in a diversity of belief. Those of us who are big fans of the concept of pluralism found the latter particularly mystifying.

Greg Lukianoff

President, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education

Education is not about being taught more and more reasons about why we alone are right and everyone else is wrong. Rather, it is a process of being given more and more air, a wider perspective that affords us a grander, more Olympian sweep of everything.

This kind of crime deeply saddens us, but, what's worse, it spreads fear. As ordinary Mexicans, we deserve better. We deserve to see justice delivered. We are not going to be left blinded, silent and in the dark.

Four years after the Arab Spring, is it still possible to imagine that an ultra-repressive regime is the best defense against instability? Must we turn a blind eye to this regime's human rights violations because of its "secular" nature?

The issue of censorship is one that we as Americans often associate with images of backwards political bodies in third world nations, mass protests dripping with the sweat of revolution and the historical burning of books, magazines and other literary works during the early 20th century.

Neel Swamy

Student and editor-at-large, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

In the real world people face their accusers in court. This might be a little Beach Boys of me, but wouldn't it be nice if Facebook was like that? Instead of anonymous accusations and handed-down judgments, make someone reporting "offensive content" own up to their action.

If Kasich makes it onto the ticket, the election will take place two weeks shy of the 10th anniversary of his guest host interview on "The O'Reilly Factor" in which he did the bidding of an ex U.S. Attorney I criticized in my HarperCollins investigative book "Triple Cross."

Peter Lance

Peter Lance is a five-time Emmy winning former correspondent for ABC News now writing books for HarperCollins website http://www.peterlance.com

When speaking out means sacrificing privacy, we lose points of view, and the quality of our democracy suffers. That should give all of us something to truly fear.

Brynne O'Neal

Brynne O'Neal is a Research and Program Associate at the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law.

When LinkedIn decided to create a China-hosted version of its website in February, 2014, it made a decision to compromise the company's values in the pursuit of the dollar.

If the display or broadcasting of creative works were reliant on a virtue rubric, then our museum walls would be nearly empty, our radio waves and streaming would run rather silent, our bookshelves would be quite bare....or chock full of posted disclaimers....?

At the heart of the Muzzles is a simple but powerful idea: "Congress" -- and all levels of government, thanks to the 14th Amendment -- "shall make no law ... abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."

Dan Kennedy

Associate professor, School of Journalism, Northeastern University; author, 'The Wired City'

See original here:
Censorship - The Huffington Post