Tag: Censorship

Australian Media

Quixotic Regulation: Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Capitulates – » The Australian Independent Media Network

X Corp’s erratic, truculent CEO thought differently about this overly generous extension of Australia’s Online Safety Act. Elon Musk found Inman Grant’s demand insensible, calling her a “censorship commissar” in her insistence on global content bans. While he was happy to acquiesce to restricting access to the video in Australia, the world was quite something else.

When an entity such as News Corp gives advice on what should or should not be accessible to the broader citizenry of any country, the bells should be going off. The Big Tech behemoths have much to answer for – the destruction of privacy, the ruthless monetisation of user data, behavioural modification and hypnotic seduction. But governments of all hues always cling to the same logic: the public is a dangerous beast best fed morsels of information rather than the whole buffet. Ignorance breeds manageable docility.

Source: Quixotic Regulation: Australia’s eSafety Commissioner Capitulates – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Israel

Israeli Government Seizes AP’s Media Equipment in Latest Act of Censorship – ScheerPost

The Israeli government seized media equipment from the Associated Press after the news outlet refused to quit broadcasting a live shot of northern Gaza.

Source: Israeli Government Seizes AP’s Media Equipment in Latest Act of Censorship – ScheerPost

Uncategorized

Book Banning and The Seven Pillars Mandate – » The Australian Independent Media Network

A book on same sex parenting is banned. The ban only applies to a few libraries in NSW, in a local council area where the faith-based decision was made, the debate led by a man who admits to not having read the book and claiming a two-year-old saw the book and was asking questions and stating that children should not be sexualised.

Source: Book Banning and The Seven Pillars Mandate – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Informed Comment

War of censorship escalates as Elon Musk fires shots at Australia

The age of the internet and the world wide web is something to admire and loathe. Surveillance capitalism is very much of the loathsome, sinister variety. But ASIO, the Australian Federal Police, the Australian Government and other agencies do not give a fig about that.

Source: War of censorship escalates as Elon Musk fires shots at Australia

Australia's Shame

Censors Celebrated: Misinformation and Disinformation Down Under – » The Australian Independent Media Network

The proposed bill on assessing, parcelling and dictating information (mis-, dis-, mal-) is a nasty little experiment in censoring communication and discussion. When the state decides, through its agencies, to tell readers what is appropriate to read and what can be accessed, the sirens should be going off.

Source: Censors Celebrated: Misinformation and Disinformation Down Under – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Israel

Meta’s Nick Clegg assures EU that Palestinians are being censored | The Electronic Intifada

Nick Clegg learned long ago that pleasing Israel is mandatory to have a successful career in politics or business. (UK National Archives/Wikimedia Commons)

Former British politician has conveniently forgotten his call to stop arming Israel.

The argument for why politicians should never be trusted can be summed up in two words: Nick Clegg.

Fifteen years ago this week, Israel launched Operation Cast Lead – the first in a series of major attacks on Gaza.

Nick Clegg was leader of the Liberal Democrats, a British political party, at the time. He responded to the attack by urging a ban on weapons exports to Israel.

From 2010 to 2015, Clegg was in a position to insist that such a ban be introduced. He was deputy prime minister in a coalition government with the Conservatives.

Far from banning weapons exports to Israel, that government kept on authorizing them.

Britain granted licenses worth millions of dollars for deliveries of arms and their components to Israel during the six months before the 2014 war against Gaza. The Liberal Democrats were similarly treacherous on domestic issues, famously breaking a pledge not to increase students’ tuition fees.

Today, Nick Clegg is a senior figure in Meta, the corporation which owns Facebook and Instagram.

Both of these social media platforms have been actively censoring Palestinians. Clegg is directly involved in assuring the authorities that the censorship is far-reaching.

Source: Meta’s Nick Clegg assures EU that Palestinians are being censored | The Electronic Intifada

Media

Gaza Hospital Bombing Photos Censored by Instagram, Facebook

groups monitoring regional social media activity say censorship of Palestinian users is at a level not seen since May 2021, when violence flared between Israel and Gaza following Israeli police incursions into Muslim holy sites in Jerusalem.

Two years ago, Meta blamed the abrupt deletion of Instagram posts about Israeli military violence on a technical glitch. On October 15, Meta spokesperson Andy Stone again attributed claims of wartime censorship on a “bug” affecting Instagram. (Meta could not be immediately reached for comment.)

Source: Gaza Hospital Bombing Photos Censored by Instagram, Facebook

ALP Government,

Australia keeps escalating its censorship and propaganda campaign – Pearls and Irritations

Australia flag, Media

Propaganda and censorship are the two most important tools of imperial narrative control, and it’s very telling that Australia is ramping them both up as the nation is being transformed into a weapon for the US empire to use against China. Steps are being taken to ensure that the Australian populace will be on board with whatever agendas the empire has planned for us in the coming years, and judging from what we’re seeing right now, it isn’t going to be pretty.

Source: Australia keeps escalating its censorship and propaganda campaign – Pearls and Irritations

Ukraine

Ukraine Blocks Journalists From Front Lines With Escalating Censorship

Journalists and residents stand as smoke rises after an attack by Russian army in Odessa, on April 3, 2022. - Air strikes rocked Ukraine's strategic Black Sea port Odessa early Sunday morning, according to an interior ministry official, after Kyiv had warned that Russia was trying to consolidate its troops in the south. (Photo by BULENT KILIC / AFP) (Photo by BULENT KILIC/AFP via Getty Images)

Democracy and War are incompatible

“Ideas like, there’s a civil war, or there are people who are pro-Russian … these are very touchy issues,” he said. “If a reporter either knowingly or unknowingly starts using these kinds of talking points in their report, it’s going to be something that Ukrainian authorities look at.”

Source: Ukraine Blocks Journalists From Front Lines With Escalating Censorship

Free Speech

Twitter Censored Post for “Abusive Behaviour” Toward Queen

The exterior of the Twitter headquarters in San Francisco, CA May 28, 2020.(Photo by Winni Wintermeyer for the Washington Post)

Twitter, the platform was quickly dominated by a global outpouring of both grief and glee, a heated mixture of paeans to the queen’s 70-year tenure and angry denunciations of the British monarchy’s legacy of colonial violence and exploitation. Among the latter was Carnegie Mellon’s Uju Anya, an associate professor of second language acquisition. “I heard the chief monarch of a thieving raping genocidal empire is finally dying. May her pain be excruciating,” Anya tweeted.

Source: Twitter Censored Post for “Abusive Behaviour” Toward Queen

Israel

IDF censorship hits an 11-year low

Border Police officers force a Palestinian cameraman to leave the area during the Palestinian olive harvest, near an illegal outpost close to the village of Burka, West Bank, October 16, 2020. (Oren Ziv)

Israel doesn’t just kill, and incarcerate journalists, poets and authors but applies a censorship regimen to all information, and news disseminated in the State. It tries to control it outside its borders as well.

In 2021, the Israeli military censor barred the publication of 129 articles in the media, and interfered with the content of another 1,313, according to data provided by the censor at the request of +972 Magazine and the Movement for Freedom of Information in Israel. This marks the third year in a row that there has been a decline in the military censor’s activity, which is now at an 11-year low (the entire period for which we have data).

All media outlets in Israel, as well as authors and publishers, are required to submit articles relating to security and foreign relations to the IDF chief military censor for review prior to publication, in line with the “emergency regulations” enacted following Israel’s founding, and which remain in place. These regulations allow the censor to fully or partially redact articles submitted to it, as well as those already published without its review. Media outlets are barred from indicating in any way whether the censor has altered a story. 

The decline in the censor’s work is a small consolation when considering that it regularly interferes in the news we read without our knowledge.

Source: IDF censorship hits an 11-year low

Scott Morrison

ScuMo’s censorship & cowardice

https://fb.watch/bGyenmWM3j/

Facebook

Facebook’s Tamil Censorship Highlights Risks to Everyone

According to Jillian York, director for international freedom of expression at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the rigidity of Facebook’s DIO roster risks causing what she described as “cultural and historical erasure,” a status quo under which one can’t publicly and freely discuss a group designated as an enemy by the U.S., even after that enemy ceases to exist. “We’ve seen this with some groups in Latin America that are still on the U.S. [terror] list, like FARC,” the Colombian guerrilla army that dissolved in 2017 but remains banned from free discussion under Facebook policy. “At some point, you have to be able to talk about these things.”

Source: Facebook’s Tamil Censorship Highlights Risks to Everyone

Media

Sanitising Censorship: The Twitter-AP-Reuters News Partnership – » The Australian Independent Media Network

The battle against misinformation can very often become a battle against information you do not particularly like or want people to access. The line on this is not always clear, though hope springs eternal that the marketplace of ideas, to use that increasingly empty expression, can sort the wheat from the chaff. Twitter’s calculating pivot towards this new information landscape shows a new strategy to anchor itself in an ecosystem already marginalising independent journalism. In doing so, it is courting the high priests who determine what counts as news and what doesn’t. Soon, a sanitised platform will simply be code for a censored one.

Source: Sanitising Censorship: The Twitter-AP-Reuters News Partnership – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Trumpland, Uncategorized

Will Censorship Prevail over the First Amendment?, by Paul Craig Roberts – The Unz Review

Martin filed Monday a federal free-speech lawsuit against the University System of Georgia.

Why would 28 states legislate against the US Constitution? One explanation is that the state governments were bought by the Israel Lobby with money under the table, by promises of political campaign donations, or by threats of financing rival candidates. How else do we explain 28 state governments imposing censorship in behalf of a foreign country?

Abby Martin is one person who will not stand for it. She has brought a lawsuit that—if the US Supreme Court is still a protector of the First Amendment—will result in the 28 state laws and Trump’s executive order being overturned. The protection of Israel against boycotts parallels state laws passed in the 1950s that prevented Martin Luther King’s movement from boycotting businesses that practiced racial segregation. These laws were overturned by the Supreme Court.

The outcome of Abby Martin’s suit will tell us whether the US Constitution is still a living document.

via Will Censorship Prevail over the First Amendment?, by Paul Craig Roberts – The Unz Review

Media, Uncategorized

Media Censors the Opinions of 37% of Americans. And Now They’re Gloating About It. | The Smirking Chimp

Thirty-seven percent of American citizens are socialist or communist. That’s far more people than voted for either Hillary Clinton (28% of eligible voters) or Donald Trump (27%) in 2016.

The majority is voiceless. A privileged minority rules. The United States is a political apartheid state.

If the Left were allowed on the ballot in this fake democracy, given space in newspapers and on television, invited to join political debates, and if it wasn’t brutally suppressed by the police and FBI, the Left wouldn’t need to wage a revolution in order to take over the country. Leftists could easily win at the ballot box if America were a real democracy.

via Media Censors the Opinions of 37% of Americans. And Now They’re Gloating About It. | The Smirking Chimp

Israel

A spike in censorship: Israel censored on average one news piece a day in 2018 | +972 Magazine

An Israeli soldier attempts to block the view of a photographer as soldiers body search Palestinian men in the West Bank city of Hebron on June 22, 2017. (Wisam Hashlamoun/Flash90)

The IDF Censor prohibited the publication of more news reports last year than in almost any other year this decade. While fewer articles were submitted for review than in previous years, the percentage of stories that were partially or fully censored was significantly higher.

Beyond the direct harm to freedom of the press – with 22,371 stories over the past eight years that were disqualified entirely or in part – it is likely to assume that the mere existence of a censor creates a chilling effect. Israeli journalists know what issues they cannot report on, and often simply avoid them to begin with.

via A spike in censorship: Israel censored on average one news piece a day in 2018 | +972 Magazine

Racism

The Serena cartoon debate: calling out racism is not ‘censorship’ | Gary Younge | Opinion | The Guardian

Illustration: Eleanor Shakespeare

The depiction of the tennis star in an Australian newspaper recycled centuries-old racial stereotypes. Publishing it showed an extraordinary lack of judgment

via The Serena cartoon debate: calling out racism is not ‘censorship’ | Gary Younge | Opinion | The Guardian

Israel

Israel’s war on open discourse: State censorship now reaches into international news sources and social media – Salon.com

Israel’s attempts to restrict online discourse are futile and counterproductive

Source: Israel’s war on open discourse: State censorship now reaches into international news sources and social media – Salon.com

Israel

How Israel is trying to enforce gag orders beyond its borders | Andrew Bolt’s silence

At Israel’s request, Twitter is blocking Israelis from viewing certain tweets published overseas. Similar take-down notices have been sent to other international online platforms, the Justice Ministry confirms. Israeli authorities are taking steps to block their own citizens from reading materials published online in other countries, including the United States. The Israeli State Attorney’s Office Cyber Division has sent numerous take-down requests to Twitter and other media platforms in recent months, demanding that they remove certain content, or block Israeli users from viewing it. [tmwinpost] In an email viewed by +972, dated August 2, 2016, Twitter’s legal department notified American blogger Richard Silverstein that the Israeli…

Source: How Israel is trying to enforce gag orders beyond its borders | +972 Magazine

Media

Hypocrisy and Censorship from the Right – » The Australian Independent Media Network

By Christian Marx Right-wing regimes have a history of censorship and obfuscating the truth. From Mussolini to Hitler to Pinochet, one of the first actions of Fascists is to totally control the media. All dissenting progressive views are silenced. The media becomes merely a propaganda and disinformation unit to brainwash and divide the populace. It…

Source: Hypocrisy and Censorship from the Right – » The Australian Independent Media Network

Israel

Israel disqualifies novel on Arab-Jewish love – Your Middle East

The education ministry said Thursday that Israeli author Dorit Rabinyan’s “Gader Haya” (translated as “Borderlife” in English) had been rejected for inclusion in s

Source: Israel disqualifies novel on Arab-Jewish love – Your Middle East

Israel

In Israel, Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ an enduring taboo – Your Middle East

Hitler’s anti-Semitic rant, which he wrote from prison in the early 1920s, loses its copyright in Germany on Friday, and the country’s first release of it since 19

Source: In Israel, Hitler’s ‘Mein Kampf’ an enduring taboo – Your Middle East